Frontiers of the Caribbean

In this innovative and engaging book, Caribbean poet and scholar Philip Nanton explores the idea of the frontier – a concept most commonly associated with the colonial past but revived by Nanton as an essential analytical tool in interpreting the postcolonial present, with particular relevance to the Caribbean region. 

Nanton takes the notion of the frontier beyond a physical boundary to suggest that it is a site of balance between civilisation and wilderness, the former overdetermined and the latter almost lost in postcolonial discourse. For Nanton, the two exist in a state of symbiosis: wilderness is necessarily implicated in any discussion of civilisation. He sees the frontier as a moral landscape where the two notions meet and clash, at rural and urban, collective and individual and national and international levels. 

Nanton illuminates the enduring importance of the frontier by focusing his attention on the little-studied multi-island state of St Vincent and the Grenadines. He examines how it is defined and imagined in the balance between an imposed civilised order and an untameable wild that is forever encroaching. He discerns frontier traits in the adventurous coastal wanderings of the fisherman, sailor and sea-port smuggler, the hill-wandering woodcutter, the urban dame-school teacher and the mountainside ganja-grower, noting the continuing metaphorical power within Caribbean society of the figure of the pioneer. 

But the frontier has historically been and remains a global production. Expanding his focus, Nanton investigates how contemporary processes of globalisation have shaped the region and how they connect to the shifting relationship of civilisation and wilderness – noting in particular the search for the exotic and the remnant wild by international tourism.