Blogging the Caribbean
“For the Caribbean, my favorite blog is Norman Girvan’s Caribbean Political Economy. I was always a fan of Girvan’s writing on the political economy of development and underdevelopment in the Caribbean, and the impact and role that transnational corporations have had on Caribbean political sovereignty and economic integrity. Girvan’s Corporate Imperialism, Conflict, and Expropriation: Essays in Transnational Corporations and Economic Nationalism in the Third World (1976) and his Aspects of the Political Economy of Race in the Caribbean and in the Americas (1975) are, in my mind, classics of political economy and, of course, his theoretical work with the New World Group in the 1960s is inspirational — I wish more people were reading both the New World anthology Readings in the Political Economy of the Caribbean, which Girvan edited in 1971, as well as the recent collection that Girvan edited with Brian Meeks,The Thought of New World, The Quest for Decolonisation. All of these texts provide important ways of understanding the contemporary global economic crisis.
Girvan’s Caribbean Political Economy blog offers an important extension of this work, providing an accessible entrance into many of the questions of economy and politics facing the contemporary Caribbean, and while it displays the depth of knowledge of a policy wonk, it is written with the clarity and language of a journalist.
I’m a huge fan of many of the better-known literary and cultural sites on the Caribbean — sx salon, The Caribbean Review of Books, La Jiribilla, and Repeating Islands — and also the African Diaspora, but I think we need more work on political economy. Girvan is sending us in the right direction. There is also a fantastic blog on Dominican thought and culture called Cielo Naranja, and I’m also a regular reader of Pambazuka.
I also want to mention two digital history sites that I regularly frequent, and whose online archives have led to posts on The Public Archive. The first is the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) — an online archive run by a cooperative of partners and administered by Florida International University and the University of the Virgin Islands. While they have a specialised Haiti collection, they also have documents, periodicals and newspapers, maps and photographs, letters and documents from throughout the region. The second is the Centre International de Documentation et d’Information Haïtienne, Caribéenne et Afro-Canadienne — or CIDIHCA — based in Montreal. CIDIHCA do not have the slickest website out there, but as a highly specialised, well-curated independent archive, they offer a model of possibility for other similar institutions and organisations looking to create online archives. They have uploaded back issues of the Montreal-based Haitian journals Nouvelle Optique and Collectif Paroles, as well as collections on the Haitian Left and Haitian numismatics. Both the Digital Library of the Caribbean and CIDIHCA are well worth a browse.”
- From Nicholas Laughlin’s interview with Peter James Hudson in Global Voices
