The Caribbean is one of the first diaspora societies

Evidence

How can we think about slavery? How can we think about ancestors of mine being enslaved in chains to somebody else, particularly to the English and the Scots? It’s kind of unthinkable. So I think out-of-place-ness is inevitably a condition of the diaspora but is strangely enough a condition of the Caribbean too, which is, of course, a diaspora too, because everybody who is there came from somewhere else. The indigenous people who belonged there were wiped out within one hundred years, and after that everybody comes from somewhere else. The Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the British, the Africans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Portuguese—they’re all from somewhere else. We are one of the first diaspora societies. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1083

Categorization

• XREF: This reframes diaspora from a modern phenomenon into a founding condition of the Caribbean — connects to the field’s treatment of migrancy and ‘double consciousness’ and to the concept of the imagined community of the nation being built on displacement rather than autochthony. — connects to: The Caribbean was the primal scene of the Africa-West encounter
• SEED: A piece on how ‘diaspora as original condition’ undercuts nativist claims of territorial belonging — arguing that the Americas are built on displacement, so claims of who ‘really’ belongs are always historically shallow.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 1083

Broader Connections

• The Caribbean was the primal scene of the Africa-West encounter #expands (0.72)