Empire in the Present: Exploring the Indies through the Cultural Geography of the Commonwealth

Abstract

This paper examines the East and West Indies within the broader context of the Commonwealth as a culture area defined by the colonising legacy of the British Empire. I argue that the Commonwealth is a supranational geography, both structural and imaginary, which shapes contemporary culture and lived experience in important ways (including state politics, educational policy, sports, language and expressive culture). Ethnographically, the paper focuses on the cultural space of colonial and post‐colonial Trinidad, with its ‘East’ and ‘West’ Indian populations. While recent critiques of area studies and colonialism have rightly emphasised the shaping of culture across colony and metropole, I show how colony‐to‐colony relations were crucial to the power and stability of empire. This historicised transregional approach has an impact on critical concepts of nation, metropole/periphery and diaspora, while suggesting important directions for research currently obfuscated by the scholarly limitations of area studies.

Keywords:

• British Colonialism
• Space
• Cultural Politics
• Caribbean
• Indian Diaspora

Notes

1. There is an extensive scholarly literature on the impact of slavery on the culture of African people in the New World, which ranges from significant cultural retention and survivals (Herskovits 1958) to social death (Patterson 1982). Boellstorff's paper (this issue) discusses the importance of reframing the ‘cultural retention vs. cultural obliteration’ debate elaborated in the work of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (1976). Crucially, the Introduction discusses how the impact of regional cultural analysis has created conceptual categories in anthropology, often deployed within the binary logic of syncretic/dynamic/transnational versus distinct/traditional/discrete. As my paper demonstrates, this dualistic understanding of culture circulates in broader politically volatile debate over identity in the Caribbean.

2. ‘African’, ‘Indian’ and ‘mixed’ are commonly employed identity terms in Trinidad. Population figures are based on 2000 census data ( Pocket digest 2002 ).

3. Interview with Steve Mahatoo, long‐time member of the Mellobugz (a prominent chutney soca band in Trinidad), 8 January 2005.