Shalini Puri

Beyond Resistance: Notes Toward a New Caribbean Cultural Studies

The noted anthropologist Peter Wilson, in his 1973 book Crab Antics,1 observed in Caribbean societies a fundamental and structuring tension between “respectability” and what he called “reputation.” “Respectability” is oriented toward bourgeois valuations of the centripetal, toward standard English, home, family, hierarchy, decorum, stability, honesty, economy, delayed returns, and transcendence. In contrast, “reputation” is oriented toward the centrifugal, toward carnival, toward Creole, the street, autonomy, mobility, trickery, display, and transience.2 As with any schematic opposition, the respectability/reputation dualism is not all-encompassing, yet it is useful in making visible two related and confl icting sets of cultural desires, practices, and allegiances that are elaborated to an unusual degree in the Caribbean. Th e schema is also particularly pertinent as a measure of the allegiances of cultural criticism, which are what I propose to study here.

Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area Studies, and the Forms of Engagement

Reflecting on the methodology for the authors forthcoming book, The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory, this essay argues for the importance of fieldwork in Caribbean literary and cultural studies and contributes to the development of a shared public discourse about fieldwork by articulating and refining the untheorized practices of fieldwork in the humanities. It situates literary fieldwork in relation to practices of literature, area studies, anthropology, and trauma studies.

Base Impulses: Sex Work and the Military in Trinidadian Literature on World War Two

This essay explores sexual culture and its legacies around the American military base at Chaguaramas, Trinidad, a base that brought 25,000 US soldiers to a country of half a million people during World War Two. It illuminates the resources and constraints of literary memory of gender and sexuality in that period as represented in texts written in the last 25 years. Against the backdrop of calypsos like “Rum and Coca Cola” and “Jean and Dinah,” and De Boissiere’s novel Rum and Coca-Cola, the essay focuses on texts by J.L.F. Waldron, Robert Antoni, David Chariandy, and Tony Hall. It explores how calypso, theater, and fiction (including realism, detective fiction, the carnivalesque, myths of female vampires, and anti-romance) shape and shift the terms of memory, reassessing previous narratives of gender, erotics, family, nation, and empire.

Introduction: Subjects of Militarization

The introduction argues that militarization has been a defining feature of modernity in the Greater Caribbean. It frames the case-studies presented in the volume by placing them in relation to a wider and longer history of Caribbean military encounters that includes but is not confined to US interventions, revealing commonalities in Caribbean experiences of militarization that are obscured by studies that focus on only one language area of the Caribbean. The introduction lays out the volume’s humanities-driven emphasis on everyday life, subjectivity, and culture as they interact with systemic forces. It recognizes the massive imposition of power through violence and extremes of inequality, and massive resistance to it, while also noting how ordinary people from positions of subordination negotiated, appropriated, and strategically manipulated whatever limited opportunities relationships with militaries afforded.

Introduction: Conjectures on Undisciplined Research

This introduction explores what happens to fieldwork when it shifts discipline, shifts form, shifts audience, shifts medium, shifts end point, and shifts traditions of interaction: in short, when information gleaned from the field is routed back into an undisciplining form of inquiry. It situates the project of fieldwork in the humanities in relation to the histories of cultural studies, anthropology, area studies, and postcolonial studies. In contrast with these areas of study, fieldwork in the humanities often involves disciplinary isolation and professional incomprehension. We argue for the value of combining textual study with lived experience in transforming our scholarly practices, opening the conversation without asking that these fieldwork-inspired practices become standardized, prescriptive, or paradigmatic.