Making Notes: What is Caribbean Dependency Thought? Part Three

Where does CDT stand?

For Greene (1984) it is classified among the main theoretical streams in Caribbean social science which include cultural pluralism, plantation, and Marxism.

For Bernal, Figueroa, and Witter (1984) it is placed within the “critical tradition” in Caribbean economic thought, locating it as the stage that followed W. Arthur Lewis’ work on Caribbean industrialization and preceded Marxist political economy.

It has also been characterized as:

-An ideology of epistemic and economic decolonization and of economic nationalism. But which values and interests were served by the new ideology, those of the nation as a whole, of the validating elites, or of the dispossessed black masses?

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-An ideology of the first post-colonial generation of Afro-Caribbean males intent on taking political power from the “Afro-Saxon” elites who inherited political power from the colonial authorities, and on wresting the levers of economic control from white expatriates.

-A model of intellectual “creolization” as proposed by Lewis (1983) “whereby [metropolitan] modes of thought were absorbed and assimilated and then reshaped to fit the special and unique requirements of Caribbean society … [giving] birth to an indigenous collection of ideas that can properly be termed Caribbean sui generis.

-An element in a wider global process of counter-hegemonic resistance to Eurocentric thought.

-A connection with broader intellectual currents in the era of decolonization by which the people of the global South asserted the right to their own interpretation of their history, reality, and vision of the future. It is a source of intellectual capital in providing alternatives to the universalistic, context-free, ahistorical, asocial, and apolitical neo-classical economics that underpins neoliberal globalization.

- One of various manifestations of resistance in the behavioural, religious, ideological, and philosophical spheres that such an experience engendered among those who were the objects of that history but who sought to become the subjects of their own history.

-A critical and counter-hegemonic thought in the region and in the global South.

[Notes from Girvan, N. (2006). “Caribbean Dependency Thought Revisited,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies. 27, 3: 328-352.]

References

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Beckford, G.L. and M. Witter (1982) SmallGarden, Bitter Weed: The Political Economy of Struggle and Change in Jamaica,Morant Bay, Jamaica: Maroon Publishing House.

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