On the Question of Caribbean Studies

Abstract

I I want to open a parenthesis here and to imagine the discursive space within it as the space of an invitation to think together—in the essays that follow—the contemporary question of Caribbean studies. Note that I do not say the contemporary question of the " Caribbean " as such (whatever, wherever, that might be) but the contemporary question of the study of the Caribbean, here con-ceived as a geopolitical area of the intellectual imagination, an object of intellectual history. I put it this way because I want to keep in view the ideological formation of the reflexive languages of representation, the languages we use to figure our preoccupations and the constitution of our intel-lectual objects—in this instance, the Caribbean. And note, too, the emphasis on question and the sense it evokes of an uncertainty of the " answer, " of an uncertainty of any simple transparency, of any presumed self-evidence, of the Caribbean as an object of our imaginations. I mean to press the idea, in other words, that to think something like " Caribbean studies " is already to be inside, to be in a conversation with, one dimension or another of the archive of thinking about what the Carib-bean supposedly is, supposedly was. And consequently I mean to urge that quite apart from the substantive details of our research preoccupations (however much these are, understandably, what we often speak through) there remains the matter of how this work thinks and rethinks the domain of Caribbean studies as a conceptual, ideological, political, and moral question. My parenthesis, therefore, is meant to function not as a grammatical mode of either quarantine or digression (or, yet, of reification) but as a way of facilitating an approach to questions such as the following: What