A legacy of trauma: Caribbean slavery, race, class, and contemporary identity in Abeng

The disruptions and transformations caused by the slave trade are largely demographic and cultural. It was through this extended and traumatic forced population transfer that Caribbean colonies across the board became dominantly black communities. For these island nations and territories, the inescapable fact of their blackness had always marked a tangible and material link with their origins in Africa. Jamaica was home to more rebellions than all of the other British islands combined, proof positive of the continuing identitarian role of African culture in the Caribbean during the period of slavery. Colonization's phenomenon of ethnocultural creolization marked an interpenetration of populations and practices originating both from the colonial metropole and from the African continent, such that long-held notions of race and social stratification would be have to be revised as independence approached, posing a set of complex tensions effectively articulated in Michelle Cliff's novel Abeng.