The Film Cure: Responses to Modernity in the Cinemas of the Caribbean

The Caribbean, in the memorable phrase of Martinican critic and novelist Edouard Glissant, has experienced an “irruption into modernity.”1 Catapulted from colonial societies organized around plantation economies to nation-states with intricate ties to the developed world, Caribbean countries have had to (and will continue to have to) adopt certain features of industrial and postindustrial reality. Even so, they have sought to retain those features of their own Creole cultures that not merely define what it means to be Caribbean but also provide ways of negotiating with a modernity that has been as ferocious in its effects as it has been rapid in its onslaught.2 The arts, popular culture, and Afro-Atlantic religions play key roles in this process of accommodation; cinema contributes by providing a potential medium (actually, multimedia) for combining the other elements while creating its own effects. Cinema links the Caribbean with modernity both by its industrial mode of production and by its nature as a baroque medium capable of gathering an archipelago of cultural materials. Consider first how films are made as a product and then the variety of fiction films that offer stories of how modernity has been suffered, confronted, absorbed, rejected, embraced, or transformed by Caribbean peoples.