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Facing Up To Caribbean History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Jalil Sued-Badillo
Jalil Sued-Badillo*
Affiliation:
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, PR 00931
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Abstract

The history from the Incas onward must be learned by heart, even if we do not teach of the riches of Greece, for our Greece is preferable to that Greece which is not ours.

Jose Martí (1978:8)

Five hundred years away from the events that initiated the conquest and subordination of the Caribbean—the first America—by the power centers of the world, the historiography of the region still suffers from a failure to adequately disclose and discuss in an integral and coherent manner the economic processes successively imposed on the region. This is particularly true of sixteenth-century Caribbean history, in which the region consistently has been downplayed and misconstructed as a borderland at the fringes of the world. Within this traditional context, modern archaeology—mainly United States oriented—has contributed very little to the efforts of the region's inhabitants to extricate themselves from the mantle of colonial historical misinterpretations. I argue for a rereading of the early colonial period from an integral multidisciplinary perspective.

Resumen

Resumen

A quinientos años de los eventos que iniciaron la conquista y subordinatión del Caribe—la primera América— a los centros hegemónicos del mundo, su historiografía no revela adecuadamente ni discute en forma integral y coherente los procesos económicos sucesivamente impuestos sobre la región. Esto es particularmente cierto en lo que concierne al Caribe en el sigh XVI, cuya historia ha sido subestimada e incorrectamente interpretada como la de una región económicamente marginal. Dentro de este contexto de interpretatión traditional, la arqueología moderna, particularmente la norteamericana, ha contribuido poco a los esfuerzos caribeños por desembarazarse de las interpretaciones históricas coloniales. El autor argumenta en favor de una relectura de este temprano período desde perspectivas integrales y multidisciplinarias.

Type
Articles
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , October 1992 , pp. 599 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 1992

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