The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World

by Mervyn C. Alleyne

"The definition and evolution of the categories of race and ethnicity have long been debated among historians and scholars of social anthropology. Mervyn Alleyne's work examines how the meanings and values of race and ethnicity have been constructed historically and how they are represented symbolically, with particular focus on the Caribbean." Alleyne examines the historical development of these categories in Europe, in Asia and in Africa and then proceeds to an analysis of the Caribbean, with a focus on Puerto Rico, Martinique and Jamaica as three different modalities of race and ethnicity and three different colonial systems. Through a unique approach grounded in linguistic, ethnographic and historic analysis, Alleyne draws on a wide array of evidence to ultimately oppose the widely held notion that racial antagonism against black people is the consequence of New World slavery in the period following the "discovery" of the Americas in the late fifteenth century.

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Matthias · Rating 1 out of 5]

Apocryphally, an aspiring composer once sent his work to an elder of the craft, hoping for approval. "Your music is both original and beautiful," came the reply, "but, unfortunately, the parts that are beautiful are not original, and the parts that are original are not beautiful." Dr. Alleyne's work is both theoretically interesting and factually well-documented, but the parts that theoretically interesting are not factually well-documented and the parts that are factually well-documented are not are not theoretically interesting.

The theoretical first half presents an admirably provocative thesis - that, contrary to the opinion of the vast majority of contemporary historians of the relevant material, racism was not born out of slavery and the colonial encounter, but has much deeper roots stretching into classical antiquity. (Azar Gat argues for something similar in "Nations," although as I have not yet read that work, I canot say to what extent it succeeds.) Unfortunately, he has little evidence to offer for this other than the philological, and the fact that phenotypically distinct foreigners (how often? how representative?) were often regarded as aesthetically displeasing. (Specious argument from etymology may be forgivable if you can write as well as Nietzsche, but not if you do so as dryly as Alleyne.) Citation is used sparingly, I recognized a number of strictly factual inaccuracies (that the Chinese never dominated any sort of world-system, that Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are defined confessionally...,) and the text is full of "we can reasonably assume"s and "surely we can concludes"s and other such saltations. He does not seem to be familiar with the historicist arguments in great detail. Although he receives points for honesty in pointing out in the introduction that this area is beyond his training as a linguist, he does not appear to have surmounted the additional obstacles which this imposes.

The second half of the book is somewhat comprehensive-seeming delineation of how perceived racial categories exist and are being reconstructed in Puerto Rico, Martinique, and Jamaica. The theoretical relationship with the first half of the book is unclear, to the extent that it has a theoretical claim running through it it depends on an uncritical acceptance of British slavery as more harshly racist than the Continental varieties. This is not an unsupportable position, but it is no longer historiographically uncontroversial, and Alleyne shows no signs of familiarity with the literature. Overall, it amounts to something Baconian, and while many of the individual facts (to the extent they can be trusted?) are interesting, I'm left wondering why I should care. Since I /started/ very interested in this subject, I find it difficult to come up with a more denigrating summary of it than that.