Book review : Civil society organizations, governance and the Caribbean community

Abstract

This volume by Kristina Hinds represents a recent wave in critical Caribbean scholarship. This wave turns away from liberal, structural and Marxian economics, institutional politics and cultural pluralist paradigms that used to dominate Caribbean studies. These paradigms, driven by the academic elites at the University of the West Indies, had focused on class, race, ethnicity, market, mode of production and small size as organizing concepts for deterministic accounts of Caribbean reality. They lost traction under the changed conditions of neoliberal capitalism and its discourses. The new framing that Hinds represents is more nebulous, emphasising intersubjective meanings from standpoints of gender, language and ethical values. The interpretive methods familiar in History and Literary Studies are applied to social and political phenomena. This new Caribbean approach is part of the constructivist trend in global scholarship. In this epistemology, the main factor in the explanation of social change, is the constructed meanings arising from public discourses, and inherited from the colonial past. [excerpt from the review]