Peripheral Cosmopolitans: Caribbeanness as Transnational Utopia?
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If the genre’s inaugurating moment was the nation state as a singularly modern formation, utopia has recently turned transnational. The epistemology of cartographic space figures prominently in those recent emanations of the utopian spirit. Exile, migration and the diaspora are identified with the figuration of something new that is coming into being and that displaces the cartographic domination of physical space. Yet space may have become an overdiscussed critical topos. In some instances the privilege of space as a conceptual metaphor may sponsor an unhelpful confluence of celebratory or dystopian descriptions of (inevitable and naturalized) global inter-connectivity, political analysis and the formulation of ethical and aesthetic positions. In order to dynamize what some critics describe as a tendency towards ossification, I feel it is necessary to retain a generic and historical perspective. Caribbeanness, I will argue, presents a particularly pervasive case in point. The concept has come to some prominence in recent times, not least as a sponsor of the booming field of Black Atlantic studies, while embeddedness in debates of French anti-colonial struggle, above all pan-Africanism and Martinician independence, is virtually eroded. Read consequently through the lens of utopian thinking, Caribbeanness does not justify the present almost mandatory relegation of the utopian imagination to a transnational topography. Instead, the case may indeed be taken to highlight the perseverance of the Orwellian moment in recent figurations of social and political space.