Page 159 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

144 Francio Guadeloupe

the Old Testament and experienced in colonial times. Let me explain this
transposition of Jewish history to panhuman history. In the Caribbean set-
ting the Old Testament trials of the Jews are also read as metaphors for the
bondage of the enslaved and indentured that landed on these shores. Bob
Marley’s classic Exodus is a telling example hereof. In this song the Middle
Passage is likened to exile in Egypt and mental emancipation to the Jewish
sojourn to the Promised Land. The hyphen between Judaism and
Christianity, between the Old and New Testament, which in many Western
societies has led to the persecution of Jews as the murderers of Christ, is
interpreted as a continuation of the age old battle of Man against Man. 2
Similarly Babel is conceived as being connected to the day of Pentecost;
the day when Jesus’ apostles received the Holy Spirit and learnt the meta-
language of Christianity; God’s tongue. Since then the enlightened went
around the world spreading the Gospel; spreading the message of human
dignity. Paradoxically, however, the spreading of this message was deeply
implicated in the nightmarish birth of the Caribbean. In the name of
Christ and the capital many were massacred. Many were enslaved. Many
were discriminated. Yet in the name of Christ and equal access to the mar-
ket, the downtrodden in the Caribbean also spoke and fought for human
dignity. A new episode in Pentecost was inaugurated when the enslaved
and the indentured reconciled Christ and the capital to African and Asian
religious and rhythmic motifs. Pentecost, in its Caribbean form, is the
event that accepts the tower of Babel as a shifting whole of constantly
deferred religious and cultural differences under a capitalist-Christian
banner. A banner that proclaims that human dignity should be indestruc-
tible and commensurable with the market. How does such a thing work?
Though not sufficiently recognized, the genesis of capital in the Caribbean
is Amer-Indian encomienda, African slavery, and Asian and European inden-
3
ture (Quijano 2000; Mintz 1996; Beckford 2000). Amer-Indians, Africans,
Asians, and poor Europeans were forced to move and through movement had
to reconstitute themselves in order to survive. Those who did not learn to
move, or weren’t able to move, in their own way to the shifting rhythms of
capital, that awesome machine for shredding incommensurables, perished.
The deep structure of Caribbean imaginations of community is movement:

securing the right of community members to move to the dance of capital.
As a general rule, Cuba’s Soviet backed exemplar exception notwith-
standing, island states in the region have always lacked the power to effec-
tively control the movement of capital or construct anticapitalist national
identities or policies categorically excluding outsiders. Engaging in these
types of politics meant destroying the crop based plantations and the tour-
ist industry. The Caribbean’s logic of survival and imaginations of com-
munity is thus intimately connected to, and born of, the power of the logic