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INTRODUCTION

IN NOVEMBER 1963, Vintage paperbacks published a new edition of The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James’s celebrated history of the Haitian Revolution. The book had first appeared in London in 1938, where James had arrived by transatlantic steamer from his native West Indies a few years before to launch a literary career. A quarter century later, The Black Jacobins—though already a touchstone for black intellectuals worldwide—had fallen out of favor and out of print. Its itinerant author had moved from England to the United States shortly before World War II, then had returned to Europe after being expelled from the U.S. as a subversive in 1953. Finally, in 1958, he returned to his home island in the southern Caribbean for the first time since he’d left his life there as a colonial schoolteacher.

Born in British-owned Trinidad in 1901, C. L. R. James was the son of a schoolmaster and a cultured mother whose bookcase of Victorian novels and Elizabethan drama occupied him when cricket didn’t. He grew into a radical whose passion for dramatic narrative always equaled his yen for discourse on historical materialism. (“[Thackeray’s] ‘Vanity Fair’ holds more for me than Capital,” he said.)¹ Drawn to the classics and hugely ambitious, James sought to place the history of the Caribbean within the larger telos of not only modernity and capitalism but also humanity’s struggle for democracy, reaching back to the Greeks. Perhaps more distinctively, he sought always to understand the cultures of his own day—cricket matches and calypso songs, Hollywood films and radio serials—within that larger story.

James Baldwin wrote, “I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare.”² For C. L. R. James, growing up in Trinidad, this seems never to have been an issue. The grandson of slaves, he claimed from childhood not only Shakespeare but Virgil and Thackeray as his own. He embraced—and embodied in his black frame—ideas and principles customarily opposed. A passionate anticolonial who believed in something called “Western Civilization,” he was a devotee of Aeschylus who also loved pulp novels; an intellectual who also played cricket; a Marxist materialist not immune to the charms of the bourgeois stage. A thinker whose “interdisciplinary” approach to history anticipated recent academic trends by decades, his peripatetic life and political engagements embody the core dramas of a century that “he sought to embrace in its dialectical whole,” as the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris put it.³

James’s return to the Caribbean was prompted by the promise of self-rule in Trinidad and the triumph of the Cuban revolution. And it was these same momentous developments that prompted his decision to publish a revised edition of his history of the epochal slave revolt, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, through which “West Indians”—and not only Haitians—“first became aware of themselves as a people.”⁴

James left the main text of The Black Jacobins unchanged, except for the addition of several lambent lines about Toussaint’s sad demise. More substantively, James included a postscript “appendix” in which he offered a new interpretation of the Haitian Revolution’s significance. This new afterword’s thrust was conveyed in its title: “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” Rather than signifying “a merely convenient or journalistic demarcation of historical time,” Toussaint and Fidel were joined because each man had led revolutions that were “peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history,” no matter that they occurred 150 years apart and on different islands.⁵ The Caribbean was a region whose “peculiar history,” according to James, had not only produced a common culture on its islands but given them a special role to play on the world stage.

He sought, in his new afterword to The Black Jacobins, to explain why. “The history of the West Indies is governed by two factors, the sugar plantation and Negro slavery,” he began.

Wherever the sugar plantation and slavery existed, they imposed a pattern. It is an original pattern, not European, not African, not a part of the American main, not native in any conceivable sense of that word, but West Indian, sui generis, with no parallel anywhere else.⁶

The plantation and racial slavery had been present elsewhere in the Americas. But the Caribbean, James argued, was unique. Firstly because of sheer numbers: from the early 1500s through to the end of the Triangle Trade, three centuries later, the region’s islands received some six million African slaves to their shores (England’s North American colonies that became the United States, during that time, received scarcely 400,000). And secondly, the region stood out for the particular nature of the lives its slaves lived. Those slaves, as builders of island societies made for the express purpose of providing sugar for distant tables, had from the sixteenth century on “lived a life that was in its essence a modern life.”⁷ They had moved vast distances to toil at industry, and helped forge a new world economy. They had “lived together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time,” learned Europe’s languages, and belonged to societies where “even the cloth [they] wore and the food they ate was imported”—in places both made for, and sustained by, international communication and trade from the start.⁸

For James, these facts were far from mere historical trivia; they were crucial to understanding the role that the Caribbean’s people were fated to play in world history—and in the world-historical development that would define the postwar era: the dismantling of Europe’s colonial empires across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and the emergence of its old colonies’ people as full-fledged members of the world comity of nations. It was not by accident, James argued, that West Indians had formed the vanguard of black thinkers driven to end colonialism worldwide—as evidenced, for example, by figures like Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born founder of the United Negro Improvement Association, and by Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born author of The Wretched of the Earth (to say nothing of James himself). And it was not by accident, either, that the islands wherein the world’s “first truly modern revolution”⁹ took place (in Haiti) had also just witnessed a triumph for socialism and guerrilla tactics, in Cuba, that freedom’s lovers everywhere were touting at the time as the model for how the earth’s wretched should right history’s wrongs.

James’s arguments were driven by politics: an ardent leftist, he was also writing at a time when he, like many West Indian intellectuals, was still hoping the Caribbean’s islands might confederate into a single regional nation. But what was at stake for him in arguing that the Caribbean’s diverse territories shared a common history and culture was not merely that such an understanding was necessary for the Caribbean’s “self-realization.” It was what that self-realization might entail for the world at large. “Of all formerly colonial coloured peoples,” James wrote, there in his new afterword to The Black Jacobins, “the West Indian masses are the most highly experienced in the ways of Western civilisation and most receptive to its requirements in the twentieth century.”¹⁰ The Caribbean and its diasporas were destined, in other words, to play a special role in the development of world culture at large in the twentieth century.

Mention the Caribbean today and most people think of beaches and poverty, not of the historical anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s description of these islands, echoing James, as “modern before modernity”¹¹—as places where phenomena we think of as belonging to our own age—mass migration and mass industry and transcontinental trade—have been facts of life for centuries. Many of the million-plus revelers attending London’s annual Notting Hill carnival, like dancers at salsa clubs from Lima to Harlem, may have a vague sense of their parties’ Caribbean roots. But few credit how essential the Caribbean has been to how we think about identity and difference, in the decades since Marcus Garvey seized on applying the Jewish concept of “diaspora” to black people, too. It’s only over the past couple of decades, fully two centuries after the Haitian Revolution, that a critical mass of historians has caught up to James’s argument that what happened in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue wasn’t merely central to the rise of global capitalism but birthed a question that’s still at the core of our politics now: How universal, really, are universal rights?

* * *

THE CARIBBEAN, as much as it is a place, is also an idea. In this, the Caribbean is not unique. Any good geographer will tell you that. The ways that we humans develop our sense for place—the ways in which we vest location with meaning—have to do always, in some sense, with experience and memory. Especially so, and in a direct way, if the place in question is a hometown or spot in which you’ve spent time. But even with towns or regions we know well, our conception of a place is also always shaped by the stories we hear or tell about it. The images or ills that attach themselves to the name of New York or New England or the Wild West, via songs and films and books, lodge in our minds. And such stories, more than merely informing how we imagine, say, Bruce Springsteen’s New Jersey or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq can both reflect and shape them. From ad campaigns to attract tourists to propaganda that shapes governments’ decisions about whether to protect or aid or bomb places foreign or domestic—the ways in which a place is imagined, especially by those with power to act on it, matters. And if stories matter with regard to single places, they especially matter for those collections of places we know as regions: assemblages of towns or states that may or may not share anything beyond their proximity, but that some party or group of people has joined together, for better or worse, in a common story.

This is certainly the case with “Caribbean,” a moniker in which lie many of the torturous turns that made its islands as they now exist. The sea that gives the region its name was, for the first two or three centuries after Columbus’s arrival, basically nameless, registered by the Spanish as an undifferentiated part of the Mar del Norte (as they termed all parts of the western Atlantic), and known to English navigators as the Spanish Main (the term, confusingly, that they also used for the South American littoral to the sea’s south—what the Spanish called Tierra Firme). When exactly the Caribbean Sea—a body of water more or less discrete, ringed by the Antilles and the Central and South American coasts, saltier than the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean it abuts—first began to be called the Caribbean is unknown. But in 1773, the British cartographer Thomas Jefferys published The West-India Atlas, in whose introduction he wrote, “It has been sometimes called the Caribbean Sea, which name it would be better to adopt, than to leave this space quite anonymous.”¹² He did so on his maps. “Caribbean” referred to the indigenous group once predominant on the Lesser Antilles, the Carib, who according to Spanish lore were distinguished from the more peaceable Arawak, whom the Carib had driven from the islands in pre-colonial days, by their practice of cannibalism. Evidence of any Carib actually eating people is scant. But the phonetic resemblance of the word “Caribbean” to “cannibal” was noted by writers from Shakespeare on; it seemed a fitting tag for this savage sea of pirates and slaves far from civilization’s mores. The name stuck.

While, to be sure, today the Caribbean may no longer be associated with cannibalism, the region was defined by fantasy and myth from the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa Maria’s deck at what he mistook for an island off of India, and wrote in his journal of “the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen.”¹³ Islands quickly shorn of their native peoples, societies built to enrich Old Europe, the Caribbean—and its literature—were for many centuries tied to imperial endeavor. From the diaries and strivings of conquistadors seeking El Dorado, straight through the fierce panoply of glossy websites and guidebooks depicting the islands as unchanging places of smiling natives and eternal sun—the Caribbean has long figured as a place to be consumed, like the sugar it brutally produced, as commodity.

The Caribbean isn’t the only world region shaped by its colonizers to exist, in Old Europe’s mind, as “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”¹⁴ But unlike the Orient of legend described by Edward Said in Orientalism, the Caribbean has also long been full of something else. C. L. R. James is anything but the first or last person from these islands to have made a vocation of describing the region’s attributes, and its “Caribbean-ness,” for himself.

As a white kid who’d grown up in snowy New England, my early ties to the islands themselves were strictly long-distance. By the early 1990s, ten years after Bob Marley’s martyrdom from cancer in 1981, the dreadlocked singer whose posters I stuck to my bedroom wall had long since become a symbol of mellow moods and mellow music, extra well suited to the countercultural hills of northern Vermont, where as a teenager I shared my obsession with others of my generation. As an icon of racial justice and wry romance, Bob Marley caught my teenage aims and ideals through lovely melodies, from “Get Up, Stand Up,” to “No Woman, No Cry.” More important, though, he translated deep subjects like the Triangle Trade (“I remember on the slave ship / how they brutalize our very souls”)¹⁵ into great pop—and, in so doing, sent me less to smoke up than to read every book I could find on Jamaica and its music and the history of the region.

When I moved south to college in New Haven, Connecticut, I brought my Marley posters with me to hang first in a dorm room and then in the off-campus apartment in a town where my quotidian life also included—from the Puerto Rican bodega owners from whom I bought my Cheerios, to the Jamaican promoters who brought the island’s top dancehall acts to Toad’s Place, behind the Yale library—no small imprimatur of the Caribbean. I had by then developed an inchoate sense that would soon become a conviction: that it was in the Caribbean that many of the salient characteristics of the Americas at large—traumatic histories of colonialism and genocide and slavery; migration and creolization as facts of life; the persistent sense of cosmopolitan possibility and newness inherent to a New World—were brought into starkest relief.

Which is when and how I began on a course of study and exploration of the Caribbean. I spent most of the next four years immersed in a tradition of storytelling and intellection that went from José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban patriot who argued that the Caribbean’s creole cultures would be a source of native strength for all of the Americas; through the Dominican poet Pedro Mir’s “Countersong to Walt Whitman” (1945) (“I / a son of the Caribbean / Antillean to be exact. / The raw product of a simple / Puerto Rican girl / and a Cuban worker, / born precisely, and poor, / on Quisqueyan soil. / Overflowing with voices, / full of eyes / wide open throughout the islands”)¹⁶; to all the island thinkers, with surnames like Brathwaite and Brodber and Césaire and Walcott, who, in the decades after James released his revised version of The Black Jacobins, have described what was “sui generis” about the Antilles, and what, if anything, unites them. I was lucky to get to study under some of the leading scholars in the field, and in a new Yale program that became my major, in “Ethnicity, Race, and Migration,” I studied the writings of Edouard Glissant, the great poet and thinker from Martinique who described the Antilles as informed by a “poetics of relation,” and of Stuart Hall, the Jamaica-born doyen of British cultural studies, who wrote that the Caribbean was the “home of hybridity.”¹⁷ I wrote papers on great Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s idea of the “marvelous real” and on Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.¹⁸ I thrilled to the essays that Sylvia Wynter, the Cuban-Jamaican dancer-cum-novelist-cum-brilliant-cultural-theorist, wrote after the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, contending that since the Caribbean was the place where all the planet’s peoples were joined in a single world history, for better or worse, it was also the place where a “re-enchantment of humanism” could occur.¹⁹

In Trinidad, I spent happy days in the library at the University of the West Indies, where C. L. R. James’s papers are housed just down the traffic-choked road from where he grew up. The village of Tunapuna is now a dusty stop along the highway between Trinidad’s airport and its capital, Port of Spain. But in the cool back room of the concrete library where much of Tunapuna’s favorite son’s archive now lives, I sat at a wooden table near a portrait of the great man, unmistakable with snowy barnet and in his scarecrow suit. I looked through folders of his correspondence and notes, laid on by friendly librarians; I read his letters to understand the circumstance of his falling out with Eric Williams in 1960 (“Trinidad is like some Italian city state in Renaissance times,” one said; “characters being assassinated, intrigues bubbling, informers informing”).²⁰ I was also interested to find, in a sheaf of letters to the publisher who agreed to reissue The Black Jacobins in New York, that same year, his first note describing “an essay I should like to append to the book, linking what took place in the Caribbean in the 18th century with what is taking place there today.”²¹

This ambition was infectious. I decided to trace James’s thinking in that era as a way to then explore the work and stories of some Caribbean artists and events that spoke to them. I delved, in Jamaica, into the audio archive of the great folklorist Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett, from whom Harry Belafonte got much of his source material for Calypso in 1956. I looked, in Brooklyn and Barbados, into the form and source of the exemplary Bajan American writer Paule Marshall’s pathbreaking immigrant novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones. I researched an intriguing “cultural congress” in Havana, in 1968, when Cuba welcomed a bevy of leading Caribbean intellectuals from across the region, including James, to discuss “The Integral Growth of Man.” I examined the old and lasting question of how and why Bob Marley, with the help of the impresario Chris Blackwell and within the unique context of the stag-flationary 1970s, not only became “the first Third World superstar,” but also enjoys a posthumous stature as arguably the most pervasive musical and political icon on earth.

My investigations fulfilled certain scholarly needs. They happily allowed me, while traveling frequently between California and the Caribbean, to earn a degree. But they also convinced me, as I began also to work as a journalist reporting on many of the islands’ travails and triumphs, that the way I most wanted to contend with James’s ideas, and with the world that made him, was by writing in a more than incidental way about something I’d found to be true throughout the Antilles. In seeking out the friends or kin of the outsized global figures all the islands seem to produce in such abundance—the writers, the sprinters, the revolutionaries, and reggae stars—I was struck by it again and again: on small islands, these figures were rendered domestic. To Marley’s cousins in St. Ann Parish, in Jamaica, the reggae king was a familiar “Bob.” To the rum-drunks by the cricket oval in Trinidad, C. L. R. James wasn’t the Black Plato but rather a nerdy guy in a coat who used big words but was no more nor less deserving of respect or ridicule than anyone, in this New World Place where everyone was making it up as they went along.

In this there was something of what one finds when visiting the homeplaces of any famous person who has grown bigger than where she’s from. But there was, in the islands, something else. Not only were the larger-than-life figures made familiar; the people who comprised the familiar—the rum-drunks by the cricket oval; the attitudinal woman selling corn soup down the way—had a way of growing outsized, too, in their presentation of self, and in ways that went beyond the mere perceptions of an outsider. Derek Walcott once wrote, “All Port of Spain is a 12:30 show.”²² I suspected he was right, and that there was something to be gained from placing that fact at the center of what the great British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor described, after a swing through the Antilles just after World War II, as “the perceptible texture of [these islands’] existence.”²³

From that trip Leigh Fermor produced a book that’s endured as a classic portrait of the West Indies at the start of their modern age. His The Traveller’s Tree (1952) was pitched neither strictly at scholars nor at holiday makers; it’s joined, on a brief list of such serious literary portraits, by V. S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage (1962). Those books, by two of the last century’s most stylishly incisive writers, comprise essential entries in the Antilles bibliography. But read today, they also serve as key lenses through which to view how the islands of the Caribbean—and how one must write about them—have changed. Which isn’t to say that Leigh Fermor and Naipaul are wholly similar figures. They are in fact very different—the one a curious voyager of a Hellenist mind, whose Traveller’s Tree renders warm visions of a magical world he’s seeing for the first time; the other, an ambitious Anglophile from the colonies whose distaste for his own childhood, in Trinidad, suffuses each line of The Middle Passage (no matter that Naipaul was commissioned to write that book by Dr. Eric Williams, Trinidad’s first prime minister). But both their books couldn’t help but betray their era’s sense that these islands, whatever their maladies or charms, were thoroughly marginal to the larger story of Western civilization. “History is built around achievement and creation,” Naipaul went so far as to say in his, “and nothing was created in the West Indies.”²⁴

One should never read statements like that, from Naipaul, without appreciating the underlying spirit of what, in his home island’s oral culture, is known as picong—an utterance meant, in its overstatement or wrath, to cut or provoke. But that doesn’t change the obligation one feels, in writing about the Caribbean now, to show how deeply Naipaul’s provocation has been buried by history. When Leigh Fermor wandered the Jamaican ghetto of Trench Town, he emerged with a quizzical account of the ropy-haired eccentrics he met there. His was a portrait of obscure cultists whose ideas were unknown beyond their island, but a half century later few culture mavens can’t recognize the iconography (and grooming practices) of a Rasta faith that Trench Town’s reggae stars made world famous—just as few followers of world literature don’t now know the name of the young writer who, forty years after penning The Middle Passage, won the Nobel Prize. The Caribbean today may in many ways remain “marginal” indeed; its fragile economies are dependent, in the main, on the fickle funds of tourists. But to visit these islands now also means meeting other travelers, or returning émigrés, who are more than aware of how the islands have crucially shaped the sounds and feel of major world cities like New York and London and thus of modern cultures everywhere.

* * *

THIS BOOK PONDERS NOT MERELY what the Caribbean is but where it is as well. On that by-no-means-simple point, scholars and politicians all seem at least to agree that the Greater and Lesser Antilles are Caribbean: Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico line the sea’s northern edge; the Lesser Antilles, tailing off in a curving string of islands reaching from Anguilla toward Trinidad and the old Spanish Main, also qualify. But depending on who (or which tourist agency) you talk with, “the Caribbean” may also include the Bahamas and the coastal cays of Venezuela and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula; nearby nations that don’t touch the Caribbean Sea but share its colonial past (like Guyana, Surinam, Bermuda); and even Faulkner’s Mississippi or the “Caribbean city” of New Orleans—a place that certainly feels, especially at carnival time, like a kissing cousin of Trinidad and Haiti. The influential geographer Carl Sauer, for his part, termed the Caribbean “a natural region, though fuzzy around the edges,” whose territories included both the islands and “the rim of land around a Mediterranean Sea.”²⁵

This book, though, centers on the islands. This fact doesn’t come without regret: to glean the Caribbean’s claim on its South American littoral, one need look no further than to Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude isn’t set in the Andes but rather in a place—Colombia’s Caribbean shore—replete with magic and slaves and monocrop agriculture and gypsies washed up from afar. And the concept of the “marvelous real” was invented by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban obsessed with the Haitian Revolution. But, alas: Macondo is beyond my scope here, and so are Cartagena, Costa Rica, Bluefields, Nicaragua, and a hundred other places I’d have loved to skip through with James at hand. But in a project that’s as much a journey through an idea as a portrait of this region, my focus on the Antilles has also proceeded from an understanding of the Caribbean as an archipelago: as a “sea of islands” whose status as such has acted as both a crucial shaper of the region’s history and a key aspect of the Caribbean’s grip on the world’s imagination.

In his preface to The Traveller’s Tree, Leigh Fermor described the difficulty of forging his own experience of the Antilles into a cogent book: “Short of writing a thesis in many volumes, only a haphazard, almost a picaresque approach can suggest the peculiar mood and tempo of the Caribbean and the turbulent past from which they spring.”²⁶ I agree. But in baking my own Caribbean picaresque into a narrative, my aim has been to collate years of study with more years of Antillean expeditions, to explore if not explain how and why these islands’ peoples and cultures have only seemed more determined in recent decades, as one Cuban writer put it, to “expand beyond their own sea with a vengeance.”²⁷

In the years after World War II, most of the Antilles passed from under the rule of Old Europe. They took their place beneath the “soft” umbrella of a new hegemon whose imperial sway was perhaps felt less in new military bases, as Leigh Fermor wrote in 1952, than in the creep of “Coca-Cola advertisements, frigidaires, wireless sets and motor-cars.”²⁸ The Cuban revolution forcibly removed both Coca-Cola ads and the CIA from the region’s largest island. But the United States grew only more determined, after that event, to maintain the Caribbean as an “American lake.” In 1983, Ronald Reagan went so far as to send the Marines to Grenada to prevent the emergence, on that tiny island, of “another Cuba.” But geopolitics aside, postwar Caribbean culture has been most crucially shaped by its people confronting all that their new nations lack: stable populations, shared ancestral tongues, “stable” cultures with ancient roots—all the qualities, in other words, that “nations” are traditionally supposed to have.

But the more time one spends in those nations, the more one realizes that these perceived lacks have often been the source of their cultures’ riches. For people whose ancestors were brought to work strange islands in chains, the question of how to best salve history’s wounds was key long before the challenges of modern “nation building.” In the Caribbean, two features often invoked as uniquely modern in their effects on identity—the mixing of cultures and peoples from different continents, and migration and displacement as facts of life—have been plainly evident for centuries. The deep question those facts prompt, which has in many ways defined its arts, was posed by one of Kingston’s great vocal groups, the Melodians, on their contribution to the soundtrack of the classic reggae film The Harder They Come:

By the rivers of Babylon / where we sat down

Ye-eah we wept / when we remembered Zion

The wicked carried us away in captivity / required from us a song

Now how shall we sing a song of joy / in a strange land?²⁹

The search for “roots,” and their figuring in culture, is, of course, not a theme unique to the Caribbean: all people are seekers after “that which binds, and with which one can relate,” as Simone Weil put it.³⁰ But in an era of mass migration and the World Wide Web and globalization, when cultures everywhere are contending with “rootlessness,” perhaps it makes sense that a region so versed in those challenges has found its season. In 1972, The Harder They Come introduced Jamaican music to the world. A few years later, reggae’s biggest star supplied a potent answer to the Melodians’ query. “We know where we’re going / we know where we’re from,” sang Bob Marley on Exodus, the record that cemented his global fame. “We’re leaving Babylon / we’re going to our Father’s Land.”³¹ The universality of human desire to feel that way, and the success with which the Caribbean’s finest voices have translated it into the idiom of pop, are key reasons why, one suspects, their work has gained the global resonance it has.

A sense of place, as Marley suggested in those lines about heading for Zion, matters to humans. It’s only in and through place—the places that we call home, or the ones to which we want to go—that we figure out who we are. And it’s through place, too, that we route our lives and our hopes: the places we live and the ones we recall; the places we imagine; the places we want to be.

It’s perhaps not hard to understand, given those truths, the fierce hold that islands have long seemed to exert on our imaginations. They’re at once “places apart” and connected to everywhere by the sea. They have figured in our literature, from Homer on, as sites of desire and fear; as the loci of prisons or paradise; as places on which to be marooned, reborn, or transformed. “Western culture not only thinks about islands,” observed the historian John Gillis, “but thinks with them” as well.³² Islands are potent places, and for five hundred years this exemplary sea of islands in the imagination has proved irresistible to adventurers and poets and protestors and hedonists alike. As the place where “globalization” began, and the region, too, where the West’s still-ongoing conversation about universal human rights began, the Caribbean has been anything but marginal to the making of our modern world.