Gulf Caribbean Arts Insider: Ancestral Recall: Gulf-Caribbean 9th Ward Nola Native Jazz Avatar Christian Scott Atunde Adjuah

Creole World Overview: The "Northernmost Caribbean" City: New Orleans turns 300

Photo: Leslie-Claire Spillman

New Orleans is often called "the northernmost city of the Caribbean." Why? Because its Caribbean roots are strong and deep. Although founded by the French, New Orleans was governed from Havana, Cuba, as a Spanish colony for the latter half of the 18th century. Starting in the 1790s it was mecca for refugees from the revolutionary unrest in Haiti who, by 1810, had doubled the size of the city and strongly reinforced its Franco-Caribbean identity. Those influences of Haiti and Havana on the city's culture remain an indelible aspect if its identity today. Viewed this way, New Orleans' boisterous Caribbean-American hybrid culture makes it, in the words of Cuban-American urban planner Andres Duany, "the cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean...” More>>

Gulf Caribbean Arts:

Above: Jason deCaires Taylor's Undersea Sculpture in Grenada

Aimé Césaire, Martinique's philosopher-poet, said it best: “The relationships between consciousness and reality are very complex… It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society." Indeed. That process entails a deeper understanding of the Creole cultures of the Gulf-Caribbean nexus and the greater Global South. The Gulf Caribbean Arts Insider explores and celebrates those diverse cultures on their own terms as part of our liberation from the lingering political, economic and intellectual colonialism of the Euro-American world.

Belize: Creolization and the Birth of a Nation

"...Creolization, approximates the idea of Relation for us as nearly as possible. It is not a mere encounter, a shock, but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry." ~Edouard Glissant

The flag of Belize is the only national flag with a black man on it, accompanied by a figure who may be a native Mayan, a Creole or a mestizo -- or in true Belizean fashion, all of the above. The first non-Mayan inhabitants were Jamaican corsairs and lumbermen, and the implements of their trade appear on the banner.

The late former prime minister and Belizean independence leader, George Price, describes how a once fragmented colony forged a national identity based on unity within diversity. For more on Price, see Godfrey Smith's great biography.

About:

"Covering the Global South/ Gulf Caribbean Arts Nexus."

cgs@centergulfsouth.org
Editor and Webmaster:
D. E. Bookhardt

Gulf Caribbean Arts Insider is a production of the Center for Gulf South History and Culture with support from the New Orleans Art Insider. This site is dedicated to the memory of George Cadle Price, the Father of Belizean Independence who, like Martinique's great poet-philosopher, Edourard Glissant, envisioned the Caribbean as the crucible where important new advances in human relations and enlightenment would be realized.