“We Are All Haitians Now”? The Caribbean, Transnational Histories, and Empire

The recent ‘transnational turn’ has been crucial in terms of troubling assumptions about what constitutes a legitimate basic unit of historical analysis. What the term ‘transnational’ can mask, however, is the historical fact and current legacy of colonialism, imperial expansion and unequal distribution of global power. From the vantage point of Caribbean history – with a particular focus on the transnationalisation of Haitian history – I argue that transnational approaches need to explicitly acknowledge and engage with the historical and current realities of empire in order to avoid lending support to ‘real world’ colonizing agendas.
Haiti and the wider Caribbean exemplify the fact that the modern historiographical tradition of many formerly colonized places began as ‘transnational’ interventions, long before this term came into vogue. Anti-colonial historiography in the Caribbean articulated its demands for Caribbean sovereignty through radical analyses of the linkages that tied the Caribbean to other parts of the world. These early anti-colonial historians wrote expressly against a tradition of transnational historiography that was overtly pro-imperial and that stronglyinfluenced imperial policy.
I raise the Caribbean’s transnational historical tradition in order to demonstrate that transnational histories in the 21st century remain a key site for ideological struggles over empire and colonialism. On one hand I critique, as simplistic and ahistorical, attempts to draw facile parallels between the world of today and the world at the high point of colonial rule. On the other hand, I agree with scholars who critique the ‘new’ transnationalism for too often serving as a mask for what is in fact an imperial epistemological engagement with the Caribbean that mirrors, in disturbing ways, the precarious place of the Caribbean in the global economy and politics.