Based on life story interviews across three generations of Caribbean families in Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean, this paper will examine the role of memory in the maintenance of transnational kinship networks and the role of those networks as model and metaphors in the movements for Independence. First, it will ...
(Show more)Based on life story interviews across three generations of Caribbean families in Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean, this paper will examine the role of memory in the maintenance of transnational kinship networks and the role of those networks as model and metaphors in the movements for Independence. First, it will argue that the family memory reflected an inclusive concept of family in which lineage and descent were the central arbiters of membership. Equally, the language and narratives through which memories were recalled and recounted were important in establishing and maintaining family membership and contact across generations and oceans and for encoding prescriptions for good behaviour. Families were inclusive and cosmopolitan, flexible and democratic. These qualities passed below the colonial radar, for the the predominant belief which guided colonial social policy in the West Indies in the twentieth century assumed that Black families lacked morals, structure and men, a void which could explain poverty and lack of citizenship.
Second, this paper will argue that Caribbean families stood as beacons of Creole pride, as singularly West Indian institutions which not only provided for their members strategies for survival, but foci for an alternative order, as models and metaphors for social organisation. Moreover, the transnational family networks established through migration became conduits through which remittances, people and ideas could pass. Abroad, they emerged as central to migrant identities. Reclaiming, therefore, the link between citizenship and family, this paper will conclude that one element in the development of twentieth century cultural pride (central in the Independence movements) in the British West Indies was early socialisation into the fundamental, but thoroughly Creolised, institution of the family which provided an alternative world view and ultimately an alternative vision of independent nationhood through federation – a model which, like families, was inclusive, cosmopolitan, flexible and democratic.
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