In a 1992 essay, Caribbeanist anthropologist Charles Carnegie identified the ‘stultifying effects’ of nationalism on social thought in the postcolonial English-speaking Caribbean (Carnegie 1992: 5). For Carnegie, these stultifying effects had two main components and one significant consequence. The first component was the eclipse of long-term anthropological studies by rapid macro-econometric analysis. The second component was a relative confining of research to the larger English-speaking Caribbean countries, namely the ‘big four’ of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Barbados. These countries received the lion's share of attention while publications on geographically and economically smaller islands such as St. Vincent and the Grenadines or St. Kitts and Nevis relatively diminished (ibid.: 11). These intellectual changes could be identified in Caribbean-based journals like Social and Economic Studies. The result was that ethnographic research lost standing in the ‘high intellectual politics’ in the Caribbean. Carnegie argued this had produced an intellectual parochialism that was antithetical to the global scope of the Caribbean social imaginary. In turn, this parochialism had unduly limited the discourse around topics like decolonization and transnational solidarity.

Perhaps in line with his analysis, Carnegie's thesis has not received a warm welcome in the past three decades. More specifically, the question of whether it is nationalism that has stultified Caribbean scholarship or whether the impact of global neoliberal governance provides a better explanation has been raised. This critique places neoliberalism and nationalism in an antithetical relationship, with the first usually meaning the subordination of local imperatives to global dictates often through the almost uncritical acceptance of policies from institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and Inter-American Development Bank. Indeed, this critique directly contradicts parts of Carnegie's thesis by attributing the rise of radical and progressive thought by well-known Caribbeanists Norman Girvan, Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt, among others, to postwar nationalism. Here nationalism can carry decolonization. As such, these critics do not see good grounds for the charge of parochialism per se.

Although we do not fully agree with either view – to our minds there are degrees of merit to both perspectives – it does seem like these positions are talking past one another. On the one hand, it is true that during the twentieth century Black democratic nationalism did provide a useful avenue to oppose imperialism and the many facets of bigoted Eurocentrism.