Caribbean Philosophy's Dialogue with Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theory as an academic field crystallized primarily around the 1978 publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, which analyzed the discursive construction of "the Orient" in Western scholarship, art, and colonial administration as a system of representation inseparable from imperial power, and around the subsequent work of the "Holy Trinity" of postcolonial studies — Said, the Indian literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha — whose primary archives and case studies were drawn mainly from South Asian and Middle Eastern colonial history rather than the Caribbean or Atlantic slave trade. Caribbean thinkers, however, had already been developing closely related anticolonial and antiracist theoretical frameworks decades earlier, from James's The Black Jacobins (1938) through Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (1950) and Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a genealogy that positions Caribbean thought as an important, if sometimes insufficiently credited, precursor to and ongoing interlocutor of the later, more institutionally consolidated field of postcolonial studies centered in Anglo-American literature departments.