The previous chapter identifies two forms of Caribbean diasporan self-understandings, namely, the cultural and cosmopolitan. These identities are not mutually exclusive but inter-related through a common cultural heritage and are the product of a common diasporan experience, but we must also acknowledge their differences. The cultural and cosmopolitan identities decentralize Black ethnicity but nevertheless they center identity on the Black Atlantic experience and function both as a source and tool for contemporary Black intellectual discourse. Also, neither the cultural nor the cosmopolitan identity fosters the formation of or embodies any particular Caribbean diasporan community.

Leaving aside the limitations of these two different but mutually related identities, I wish to identify another form of identity that has emerged out of the diasporan experience to constitute a distinct Caribbean community that I am calling Caribamerican. I must, however, underscore that the Caribamerican identity premises self-understanding on ethnicity, concretizes in the formation of a community and departs from and is independent of African American identity. The argument, then, can be made that in the absence of any concrete manifestation of the Caribbean diasporan identity, the Caribamerican identity, while inclusive of the cultural and cosmopolitan identities but accentuating Caribbean ethnicity, has become the collective representative identity of the Caribbean diaspora.

Inherent in the term diaspora, as previously discussed, are notions and practices such as movement, migration, exile, alienation, marginalization, dislocation but also settling down, forming communities and putting down roots and so forth. These experiences must be historicized.