CASTA/CENSUS
“an ‘oceanic identity [that] transcend[s] insularity’…cannot be interpreted without addressing territorial claims from the land.” Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Fabricated in the European imagination, colonial era classifications, constructs, naming, and ordering of the Caribbean carved bodies in the same manner they carved land.
In the Caribbean, it is important to speak and look at ourselves oceanically, through the boundlessness of a language that reflects our worldviews. The divisions, borders, mapping, and boundaries inflicted on the Caribbean are both imposed and arbitrary; demonstrating colonial legacies of the ways the West “reaches toward [the Caribbean] with a consuming appetite for both land and labour” (Elizabeth DeLoughrey). These land-centered, racialized (in a botanical, anthropological, biological, and environmental sense) hierarchies have materially and ideologically benefitted Europe through the carving of island topographies and bodies, and consumption of both as resources.
This excessive categorization demonstrates the strong obsession to impose order and structure (domination) on a region of continuous flux that cannot be totalized: “The Caribbean is the realm of the unspeakable” (Édouard Glissant).
