ABSTRACT
In a 2006 film interview 1 Stuart Hall speaks of the inescapability of a cosmopolitan outlook for someone who comes from the Caribbean. Can you be a cosmopolitan ‘at home’? anthropologist Pnina Werbner asks him, or are you ‘locked into a nationalist vision’? Hall replies:
That is a difficult question to answer because the Caribbean is by definition cosmopolitan. The original people don’t exist; everybody who is there came from somewhere else – the English, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Africans – Everybody comes from somewhere else. OK, so you’re sort of a natural cosmopolitan… and the very distinctiveness of Caribbean creole culture, what is indigenously Caribbean, is itself ‘the mix’ – that is what is peculiar about it.
This candid response from the eminent cultural theorist summons a long history of Caribbean philosophy – from Marcus Garvey, through C.L.R. James and Aimé Césaire – that connects the grandscale historical ‘mix’ of Caribbean creole culture with muted nationalist sensibility but heightened political internationalism. Indeed, for many, as the iconic site of creolisation, as a place typified by varied pulses of human movement, struggles for emancipation and modes of cultural creativity, the Caribbean has suggested an optimistic metaphor for general cosmopolitan potentials that act to keep the planet’s ‘local futures uncertain and open’ in the face of dangerous demands for global orthodoxy and cultural monologic (Clifford 1988: 15; Hannerz 1989).