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Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands. Charles V. Carnegie. New Brunswick, NJ, and London, UK: Rutgers University Press, 2002. xiv + 242 pp. (Cloth US$60.00; Paper US$25.00)
Like many contemporary scholars, Charles Carnegie is wrestling with the various issues that have emerged with the proliferation of neoliberal capitalist globalization. His new book is a brilliantly-conceived ethnographic exploration of the role of nation-states and nationalisms within the contemporary era of intensified transnationalism. Carnegie is particularly interested in getting to the bottom of what he sees as the central paradox of the contemporary period: while "sovereignty is anchored to bounded territorial units, the populations over which that sovereignty might be exercised and the resources those populations control are increasingly transterritorial" (p. 7). The book is also a cautionary tale about the exclusions and contradictions enacted through modernist projects that delineate community membership through racial or national belonging, and a search for new models through which we might imagine global community.
Throughout Postnationalism Prefigured, Carnegie uses ethnographic and historical data compiled from years of research in the Caribbean to sustain two interrelated arguments. First, he exposes the inequities and iniquities of ideological projects that continue to bind group identity to territory and race by foregrounding the various kinds of border transgression that have been the mainstays of Caribbean people's experiences and cognitive maps. Carnegie's second argument concerns the tendency among scholars to reproduce territoriallyand racially-based conceptualizations of identity. He indicts the paradigm of linear progress, particularly evident in historical and economic accounts of nationalism, for leading scholars...