Caribbeans in Motion: Transoceanic, Transnational, Tidalectic

Borderlands studies, diaspora studies, Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean studies,  and especially Caribbean studies have all brought transnational spaces and interwoven cultural histories into the foreground of what were once national historiographies. Caribbean studies in particular has revealed the transoceanic spaces of African, Asian, European and indigenous island hopping and ocean crossing. This paper will explore the usefulness of transnational approaches to Black diasporic history by highlighting the theoretical contributions of the new field of mobilities research as applied to the Caribbean region. Caribbean mobilities research aims to look at the various forms of what Arjun Appadurai first described as “modernity at large”, through an empirical approach that highlights “scapes”, flows, relationality, transoceanic imaginaries, and dispersed geographies of transnational belonging, which Kamau Brathwaite called “tidalectics”. However, theorists of mobility also seek to explore immobility (including highly channeled, uneven, coerced or friction-filled movements, barriers, gate-keeping mechanisms, demobilizations and remobilizations), and draw our attention to issues of uneven power and mobility justice that shaped Caribbean modernity. Through specific empirical examples, this analysis will show how concepts and approaches developed within mobilities research can illuminate historiographic approaches to circum-Caribbean and transatlantic pasts.