Caribbean modernity was born from violent rupture, not civil evolution.

Evidence

Far from being continuous with our pasts, our relation to that history is marked by the most horrendous, violent, abrupt, ruptural breaks. Instead of the slowly evolving pact of civil association so central to the liberal discourse of Western modernity, our “civil association” was inaugurated by an act of imperial will. What we now call the Caribbean was reborn in and through violence. The pathway to our modernity is marked out by conquest, expropriation, genocide, slavery, the plantation system, and the long tutelage of colonial dependency. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 829

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘civil association inaugurated by imperial will’ directly counters Locke/Hobbes/Rawlsian liberal fiction of the social contract — key for the field’s critique of Western modernity’s self-image.
• DEFINE: Establishes the Caribbean as paradigm case of colonial modernity as cataclysmic rupture rather than gradual contract.