Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies 200-B: ST: Caribbean Modernity

The Caribbean has had a turbulent and divisive experience with modernity. Contests have been waged with Enlightenment discourse at all levels. The Caribbean was constructed at the center of a new philosophical and economic order. It was the theater where a new dispensation took shape and first matured. The Caribbean slave plantation complex generated wealth and created financial institutions for the modern world economic order; and for this reason, it becomes necessary to look at the cultural role of race and color within contemporary market economies. In this course, we will examine how modernity, properly understood, should be viewed from the Caribbean with ambivalence. Much of the discussion that is taking place in the Caribbean today about cultural identity, race, sovereignty and the fragmented processes of nation-building is part of this legacy. Distribution area: Cultural Pluralism.