Chelsea Stieber

This research focuses on the prominence and extent of fascism in the 20th-century Caribbean. Most scholarship on the region has focused on Marxist and radical leftist thought to the exclusion of substantive analyses of the antiliberal forces of the far right. Scaled to the multilingual, multinational, and multiracial space of the Caribbean, the project explores the literature, politics, and culture of antiliberalism and integralism in the Caribbean. The project’s interdisciplinary literary-historical methodology and source base emphasize the essential value of locally-produced print sources. In so doing, it makes a case for moving beyond a study of “fascism in the Caribbean,” which remains locked in a European center-Caribbean periphery “imitative” mode, toward an accounting of locally-bounded, homegrown Caribbean fascism. The legacy of 20th-century Caribbean fascism that the project uncovers has important consequences for our understanding of the past, and for making sense of the resurgence of antiliberal, integralist nationalism in the region today.