Volume 63, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Selling the Caribbean: Questions of Value in a Globalized World / Issue Editors: Christian Mair, Susanne Mühleisen and Eva Ulrike Pirker

Taking the cue from the widespread metaphorical use of economic concepts such as resources or markets in both sociolinguistics and cultural studies, the present introduction sets out to discuss more literal aspects of the financial value of languages and the economy of the literary marketplace in the – mostly ‘Anglophone’ – Caribbean. Globalization, in particular a globally operating media and entertainment industry, and increased mobility – both in the shape of migration from the Caribbean and tourism into the region – have led to the widespread commodification of the region’s natural, linguistic, and cultural resources. These developments have shaken up the traditional colonial and early post-colonial order but ushered in new inequalities. This introduction and the present special issue of ZAA explore the potential and dangers of this state of affairs from a cross-disciplinary perspective, bringing together approaches from (socio)linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.

The article looks at language as capital, with particular reference to the Jamaican language, highlighting the parallels and interactions between the economic and linguistic systems. In the ongoing discourse on language in Jamaica, Jamaican Creole has generally been viewed as a problem. It is normally the first excuse offered for why many Jamaican children do poorly in English in high-stakes examinations, and is often seen as a hindrance to social and economic advancement both locally and internationally. By looking at the expansion of the language in several ‘new’ domains, and drawing on research in linguistics which deals with this expansion, the article argues that Jamaican has been undergoing a revaluation which has the potential to place economic power in the hands of its speakers. This project is important because the Jamaican language has normally been viewed as a burden for Black Jamaicans. The word burden in the title is being used not in the sense of an onerous task which one is obligated to do, but in the sense of a hindrance, something one should get rid of. The question mark signals that I wish to interrogate the perspective which labels the language as an obstacle for its speakers.

This article illustrates the value redistributions of Jamaican Creole (JC) and Standard English (StE) in the public sphere of radio by investigating changes in the discursive practices of language use, norms and other framework conditions of radio production, as well as listeners’ perception of linguistic variation on air. JC was marginalized and stigmatized in pre- and early post-independence Jamaican radio but has subsequently acquired an important role, mainly in dialogic and informal contexts. Despite its increased value, JC has not substantially challenged the prestige position of StE, which has remained the unmarked choice for formal broadcasting. However, there has been a localization of StE on the air away from exonormative standards and towards Jamaican English (JE) while British and American influences remain in place. In this linguistic decolonization process both JC and JE have acquired new values, but remnants of an unequal power distribution linger on.

Colonial structures, such as the triangular trade between Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean, have served as a breeding ground for the development of global capitalism and its beneficiaries, who continue their political domination via economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Even without the colonial structures to support it, capitalism as an economic practice and ideology also fails on a functional, ethical, and moral level to foster justice and enhance the common good, as capitalism critic Christian Felber points out. Stephanie Black’s documentary Life and Debt (2001) and Sergio Bianchi’s feature film Cronicamente Inviável (2000) likewise discuss capitalism’s inability to connect with concepts of justice, as their examples of Jamaica and Brazil, two post-colonial countries that share historical and social similarities despite their different positions in the current global economy, show. While Jamaica in Life and Debt serves as a case study of enforced economic and political dependence through the IMF by means of an extension of colonial hierarchies, Cronicamente Inviável looks at the ideological side of capitalism embedded in the microcosm of Brazilian society.

In this article I trace the geographies of poverty and wealth represented in two contemporary Jamaican novels, Brian Meeks’s Paint the Town Red (2003) and Diana McCaulay’s popular novel, Dog-Heart (2010), and argue that despite the emphasis on the seemingly fixed distance between rich and poor, these novels are also concerned to present spaces of interconnection and relations of intimacy that cross physically imposed borders. In both novels, the city is affectively mapped: its spaces produce many varied and contradictory emotions that in turn define those spaces and their inhabitants. Using the work of social geographers I focus on the texts’ interrogation of kindness, compassion and intimacy, and their effectiveness as a means of transforming individual lives that are, finally, defined by the social, economic, and political structures which produce the humiliation, rage, and violence that destroy lives.

Taking the topos of the Caribbean as paradise as point of departure, this article analyses how Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao re-write the stereotype of the paradisiacal and picturesque islands. This entails that literary texts and novels, as a form of armchair tourism, potentially offer a form of engagement with poverty in which the voyeuristic gaze can be deflected. Complex literary texts can be a ‘safer’ form of exploring, vicariously experiencing, and thinking about poverty.