Characteristic Features of

Caribbean Communication and Culture

—Issues of “Self” and “Identity
Nova Gordon –Bell, Ph.D.
Themes and Issues in Caribbean Culture and Society

• Colonialism/“Trailer Societies”
• Social and Economic Inequality/Division
• Economic Exploitation
• Language and Class/Culture
• Poverty
• Family
• Survival
How Do These Themes and Issues in Caribbean Culture and Society
Influence Human “Communication”
• Colonialism/“Trailer Societies”
• Social and Economic Inequality/Division
• Economic Exploitation
• Language and Class/Culture
• Poverty
• Family
• Survival

12:04-17:24
37:19-40
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall

• Issues of identity are part of the process

of economic development, political
mobilization and cultural development
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall

• Issues of identity constitutes one of the

most serious global problems
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall

• What is myth?
A rationalization (Malinowski (1944)
p.160)
• Myths are maintained as long as specific
group needs exist
• We create identity from a “rationalization”
about ourselves
Myth & Discourse

• Myth: the story that provides rationalization

• Discourse provides the rules for communicating
the myth/story. Discourse provides the language
Founding “Fathers”
JAMAICAN

AFRICAN
MYTH/DISCOURSE

BLACK

WHITE?

Bi-Racial
Identity and “Origin”—The Dilemma

WEST INDIAN
INDIAN CRICKET CRICKET TEAM
TEAM

AFRO-INDIAN TRINIDADIAN
What factors drive Caribbean identity?
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall

• Problem of Caribbean identity

Discourse of identity in the west tends
to involve a search for origins
Original peoples of most of the islands
no longer exist or are not
distinguishable
Everybody in the Caribbean comes
from somewhere else.
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

Problem of Caribbean identity

 The Caribbean is the first, the
original and the purest diaspora (p.
6).
 Some “origins” are given more
value “respect” than others
 Identity and the Caribbean—Issues with origin

White
Chinese
“Indian”

Jamaican
What makes Miss Lou Jamaican and not “African”? Lebanese
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

Problem of Caribbean identity

 Children born in England/US/Canada
etc of Caribbean parents may be
considered “twice diasporized”. (p. 6)
 Diasporic experience—living in a place
where the centre is always
somewhere else.
Identity and the Caribbean Context

•Identity as shared culture

•Identity as difference

Hall, S. (2000)
 Identity and the Caribbean Dilemma
• Identity as shared culture

• We are all Caribbean Hall, S. (2000)

People
• We are all Barbadians
• We are all Jamaicans
• We are all Kittitian..
Identity and the Caribbean Context
• Identity as difference

Chinese- “Native” Chinese

Jamaican
 Indian Diaspora
in the Caribbean
African Diaspora in the
Caribbean
 Indian Diaspora in the
Caribbean
African Diaspora in the Caribbean
• Some cases of
• Violent rupture from originating traumatic
cultural sources transportation
• Trauma of transportation
African Diaspora in the Caribbean Indian Diaspora
• Break up of linguistic groups in the Caribbean
• Break up of ethnic and familial groups • Insertion into hostile
colonial culture where
• Insertion into hostile and dehumanizing the centre is elsewhere
culture of the colonizing plantation in Europe
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

Every cultural characteristic and trait had a

class, colour and racial inscription which had
meaning and consequence in Caribbean
colonial society.
Each culture, and group was ranked in an order
of cultural power.
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

Caribbean society/culture cannot be

understood without engaging with
the question of power.
Caribbean society is continually
inscribed by questions of power
(p.7).
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

• Characteristics of diasporic
societies
 Complicated processes of
negotiation and transculturation
 Complicated processes of resistance
and adaptation/assimilation
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

RESISTANCE ASSIMILATION
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

ASSIMILATION
o Effort to make the culture in the
colonies imitative of the European
“master” culture.
o “When one talks about assimilation in
the Caribbean, one always feels
Caribbean people constantly leaning
forward, almost about to tip over,
striving to reach somewhere else”(p.
8).
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

ASSIMILATION
o Caribbean people are always
negotiating the complexities of
who we are among the complicated
sets of stories our society/history
provides.
o We see ourselves as an enigma, a
problem to be resolved.
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

ASSIMILATION
o Colonization and slavery have left
an internal trauma of identity
o The internal discourse within us
individually … “colluding with an
objectification of oneself which is a
profound misrecognition of one’s
own identity.”
What factors drive Caribbean identity/
Negotiating Caribbean Identities—Stuart Hall (1995)

RENEGOTIATIONS WITH AFRICA

o African diaspora in the region have been unable to
redefine themselves without a symbolic “return”
to Africa.
• Intellectual movements that sought to revalorize
blackness: Fanon, Césaire,
• Cultural movements: Writers of the Harlem
Renaissance, Rastafarianism
• Political/Nationalist movements: Garvey
Economic Legacies—Drivers of subordination
Sankatsing, G. (2003). The Caribbean between envelopment and
development. Retrieved from Caribbean reality Studies Center website:
http://www.crscenter.com/The_Caribbean_between_Envelopment_and_De
velopment.pdf

• Caribbean societies emerged and were shaped

from outside as artefacts of a foreign venture
(p. 1-2).
• Natural historical processes of evolution,
development and self-realisation were denied
these societies
• Europe “globalized” its experience making other
societies “trailer societies”.
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
All through the history, among the many self-proclaimed
rights of power, power has always arrogated the right, as an
intrinsic condition of its very being, to paint the portrait of
those who have no power. And the picture the powerful paint
of the powerless, to be incarnated by them, obviously will
reinforce the power of those who have power, by reason of
which they do their portrait painting...Generally speaking, the
powerless...accept the sketch the powerful draw of them.
They have no other picture of themselves than the one
imposed on them (Freire, 1999, p.153).
Representation and identity
Rasta as predator in media
In the Si-Fi classic, Predator,
images Arnold Schwarzenegger
starring as Dutch goes into the
Central American Jungle with a
team of commandos to perform
a search and rescue only to
encounter a deadly other-
worldly Predator. This creature’s
“scariness is reinforced through
subtle racial manipulation of its
humanoid features” and the
Rastaman stereotype is
maintained with its dreadlocked
hair, ultimately representing a
kind of Rastafari solider
(Batson-Savage, 2010; Frank,
Rasta as criminal Likewise, in the movie Marked
For Death, Steven Seagal as
John Hatcher has a showdown
with his supposed enemy
Screwface, an “evil Jamaican
drug lord” … (Batson-Savage,
2010; Frank, 2007, p. 57). During
the pivotal scene of the movie,
Screwface reveals his “secret
weapon: two heads and four
eyes” and Hatcher proceeds to
behead and rid the world of this
evil monster (Frank, 2007, p. 58).
In Disney’s Pirates of the
Caribbean: The Curse of the
Black Pearl (pp. 58-59), the
famous Jack “Sparrow and other
European pirates are given
weaves of dreadlock extensions
marking them automatically as
deviants at best, demonic at
worst”. Sparrow specifically
utilizes “red, gold, and green
among the colors of beads on
one of his locks” as his “hair
alludes to Rastafarianism”
(Frank, 2007, p. 60).
DreamWorks’ Shark’s
Tale, jellyfish Ernie and
Bernie utilize their
tentacle dreadlocks as
“Rastafarian mob
enforcers” on the
citizens that live in the
movie’s tropical reef
metropolis (Batson-
Savage, 2010, p. 51).
• Caribbean society formed in a context where we learned to
see ourselves through a lens provided by our former colonial
masters
• While we have political independence, we still rely on those
dominant cultures for our rationalization of self
We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of
power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it
‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power
produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects
and rituals of truth (Foucault, 1979, p.97).
Hegemony and “domains of truth”

Hegemony refers to “myths”, stories, explanations that have

become dominant and shape how we make sense of the
world, ourselves and others and how we communicate …
References
Batson-Savage, T. (2010). Through the Eyes of Hollywood: Reading Representations of Jamaicans in American
Cinema. Small Axe, 14(2 32), 42-55.

Brown, A. (1978). Colour, Class and Politics in Jamaica. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punishment. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Frank, K. (2007). “Whether Beast or Human”: The Cultural Legacies of Dread, Locks, and Dystopia. Small Axe: A
Caribbean Journal of Criticism(23), 46-62.
Freire, P.(1999). Pedgagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum.

Gordon-Bell, N. (2009). Representation or Reality: Ideological analysis of Jamaican television news broadcasts.
(Unpublished Doctoral dissertation.)

Hall, S. (2000). Culture, identity and diaspora. In N. Mirzoeff (Ed.) Diaspora and visual culture: Representing Africans and Jews
(pp.21—33). NY: Routledge

Hall, S. (1995). Negotiating Caribbean identities. New left review (209 ) pp . 3–14

Halpern, M. (1969). A redefinition of the revolutionary situation. Journal of International Affairs,23(1), 54—75. Columbia
University, School of International Affairs

Khor, M. (2000). Globalization and the South: Some critical issues. United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development, No, 147. Paper circulated at the South Summit. Havana, Cuba.

Malinowski, B. (1944). FREEDOM AND CIVILIZATION. New York, Roy. p. 160.