Hadiya Sewer Gibney, Whit McFarlane, Dominic Latty, Vernon VIlifestyle, Brigitte Berry I am tagging you with this quote from Gordon K. Lewiss 1972 booklength sociological study of the Virgin Islands (A Caribbean Lilliput) because it relates to the lively discussion you participated in on my page yesterday regarding USVI decolonization issues. Even if some of this jars our sensibilities, it seems that every word is true: The tragedy of the Virgin Islands, in a sense, is that their awareness of Caribbean identity and their willingness even to recognize that there is such an issue at stake have been blunted. This was caused, first, by the temptation to seek psychological compensation for the Americanizing pressure, at times so unbearable, in a romantic nostalgia for the Danish past (as evident in books like Pastor Larsens Virgin Islands Story 1942, and Knud-Hansens From Denmark to the United States 1947), and, second, by a readiness to enjoy, without asking too many awkward questions, the economic benefits that flow from the American relationship. A book like Valdemar Hills A Golden Jubilee,1967, is a characteristic expression of that latter attitude, constituting a hymm of praise to most things American, so that reading it makes it easy to understand how, in the Caribbean, American largesse makes it difficult for small-islanders to adopt a stance of critical independence. A book, in turn, like Darwin Creques The U.S. Virgin Islands and the Eastern Caribbean, 1968, although more critical in tone, is on the whole equally euphoric in its general arguments. Even the heroic efforts of the great names in the history of the Virgin Islands political struggle after 1917 -- Rothschild Francis, D. Hamilton Jackson, Lionel Roberts, Caspar Holstein, Ashley Totten, and the rest -- can be seen not so much as a struggle against American rule as such, but rather as an effort to gain for Virgin Islanders as many of the rights and privileges that pertained to that rule as possible. Not even Jarvis, the remarkable historian of the Creole patrimony, could ever bring himself to undertake a thoroughgoing critique of the American colonial system, despite the fact that he saw clearly enough at times the damage it was doing to Virgin Islands life and society. It is worth noting that as the basic character of the continentals in the insular life changes, moving away from being a marginal sea of escapists and beachcombers (on which theme many mediocre novels have been written) to become a functionally operating group of resident business and professional people, their role as culture carrier of American values becomes more and more pronounced. The implications of that process cannot forever be avoided by Virgin Islanders despite their characteristic retreat into ghettos of private life and of the public sector of the economy which they still control by means of their elaborate machine of patronage politics.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Jun 2014 14:08:09 +0000
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