My perspective on the frontier in this chapter involves an examination of concepts of ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ in relation to St Vincent. While the concerns with ‘civilisation’ and ‘wilderness’ persist, they are inflected with the perspectives of the authors whose work I examine. This chapter, then, applies the malleable concept of the frontier to a study of rhetoric
Territorially small though St Vincent may be, the frontier between (‘wild’) hinterland country and (‘civilised’) urbanity is reinforced by the island’s complex and difficult topography. The natural wild persists in twenty-first century St Vincent in its hills and central mountainous terrain. Numerous divisions, spurs and folds slice through either side of the island
is either open or it is closed – though closure may take a while. The implication for St Vincent then is that once British hegemony was established the frontier was closed. Caribbean historians appear to agree with this perspective and have mostly consigned frontier analysis to the past. For example, Gordon Lewis, bemoaning the lack of scholarship in the region based on the concept of the frontier
The book argues that the frontier, usually associated with the era of colonial conquest, has great, continuing and under explored relevance to the Caribbean region. Identifying the frontier as a moral, ideational and physical boundary between what is imagined as civilization and wilderness, the book seeks to extend frontier analysis by focusing on the Eastern Caribbean multi island state of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The continuing relevance of the concept of frontier, and allied notions of civilization and wilderness, are illuminated through an analysis of the ways in which SVG is perceived and experienced by both outsiders to the society and its insiders. Using literary sources, biographies and autobiography, the book shows how St. Vincent is imagined and made sense of as a modern frontier; a society in the balance between an imposed civilized order and an untameable wild that always encroaches, whether in the form of social dislocation, the urban presence of the ‘Wilderness people’ or illegal marijuana farming in the northern St. Vincent hills. The frontier as examined here has historically been and remains very much a global production. Simultaneously, it is argued that contemporary processes of globalization shape the development of tourism and finance sectors, as well as patterns of migration, they connect to shifting conceptions of the civilized and the wild, and have implications for the role of the state and politics in frontier societies.
(embodying the ‘wild’: nature, chaos and that which needed to be tamed); the planters’ and intellectuals’ fear of the land returning to bush; and, in contrast, a growing lyricism in response to the beauty of the environment in its wild state. At a practical level, the colonial authorities in St Vincent were anxious to improve the society and protect it from contamination by wild
Managing (and not managing) ‘wild’ frontier remnants: the St Vincent Grenadines In this chapter I wish to tease out the different, more contemporary meanings of the frontier in the southern extreme of the collective thirty-two-island state of SVG. To the south of the St Vincent main island lie the Grenadines. They stretch over some 60.4 km (37.5 mi) and have a combined area
-first centuries – i.e. the impact and meaning of globalisation? This question, it seems to me, comes even more clearly into focus when the perspective shifts from the relatively better known and more visible anglophone island states of Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago, to an even more peripheral multi-island Caribbean micro-state, St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). Can a country of some 389 km 2 (150 mi 2
. In a region with an above-average rate for rape and sexual violence, such cases in St Vincent and the Grenadines (women raped and sexually assaulted) in 2011 reached 389 per 100,000 population compared to a global average of 15 per 100,000. 3 A recent review of gang violence in Trinidad offered the extreme suggestion that with an estimated 95 gangs and approximately 1,269 members, gangs have a
undoubtedly reflected the pre-existing ‘good sense’ surrounding diabetes treatment and built such developments into the performance-related system. International trends also accelerated the creation of managerial structures, and opportunities for professional–state co-operation, in British diabetes care. As noted in Chapter 5 , the St Vincent Declaration of 1989 was integral here. The Declaration set out basic quantified targets for the care and prevention of diabetes to be applied across national contexts, and resulted from a conference of leading
objects’ at both the individual and the collective levels. 1 I am thinking here of the St Vincent ganja growers, the isolated surgeon, ganja bar owner, schoolteacher and woodsman. 2 I have suggested also that the ‘wild’ has found a way to reinvent itself, most recently by seeking protection in the form of TCMP in the Grenadines. So it appears that the ‘wild’ and ‘civilised’ relationship that I have