This is Lecture Four of The Course: Caribbean Thought a course at The Jamaica Theological Seminary, Lectured via Zoom recording by Rev. Renaldo McKenzie. It promises to be quite academic, ethnographic, and powerful as the students and Lecturer contend for the Caribbean and explore its challenges and explore solutions. We discuss Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Trinidad, Haiti, the US, the Slave Trade, and did a SWOT analysis of the Caribbean.  (Brain-teaser/Activity:  1. I currently reside in the US as a Naturalized US Citizen, from Jamaica. Would I be considered a “First Generation American”?) 2. Come up with one or two sentences that define/s Jamaica in relation to Caribbean.  Learning Objectives: 1. To critically formulate and present a concept of the Caribbean in relation to its position in history which has given rise to its present reality. 2. To begin to trace Caribbean Thinking through its process of coming t  be, moving beyond Independence and the tensions between competing political thought in Jamaica – capitalism and socialism. 3. To begin to develop a critical and academic frame within which to provide commentary and contributions on current issues of society and identifying media that facilitate these expressions.  What is the Caribbean Thought? Past influences on the Present?   This is a question of being, as much as it is a question of tradition, culture, and thinking. But it is also a question about the place and peoples of the Caribbean. It represents part of a new world with new people, islands of paradise in the Americas with language, history, culture, religious consciousness, politics and economies that are inherited from its mixed past. When we hear of Caribbean today, we think of beautiful islands of paradise with sun, sea, sand, cannabis, Bob Marley and reggae music, Usain Bolt, irie people living out their best dreams, desires and life. But Neoliberalism challenges this motif, stating that the Caribbean is made up of dependent vulnerable states whose beauty is divorced from its people and enjoyed mainly by those outside of it. Further, the Caribbean represents a people who have been disrupted, detached, displaced, hybridized and made into dependent capitalist states with some level of modernity to promote consumption within the neoliberal globalized world which is largely a consumer society.  Needless to say, the Caribbean remains vulnerable and open to penetration from without and exogenous shocks from within and is recreated within the mole and frame of its former masters, since decolonization and independence. These former masters are now landlords within the newly created globalized world where freed men now pay rent. This is the new condition of the Caribbean and the world since decolonization and the drive for a post-colonial world where the Caribbean had a dream of nations of freed men who were sovereign of their own lives met a neoliberal globalized world in the 1970s and beyond, where nationalists succumbed to denationalization of the nation so as to free up globalization. This was a type of globalization that ultimately continued a strategy of pharasaicalism now defined in the 20th century as the Bureaucratic Phenomenon – where established rules made through arrangements only governed the new nations and freed peoples, but the old masters and their new elitist friends of the Washington consensus were largely above those rules, as for them, the law is not a shackle, only those who are within a particular dynamic of life and society.).

But the world is created to serve interests. Whose interests? Man or God? But God may be the invocation man has used to justify a space in the dynamic of life.... 

Creator/Host: Rev. Renaldo C. McKenzie, Adjunct Professor at Jamaica Theological Seminary and Author of Neoliberalism, Globalization, Income Inequality, Poverty and Resistance. Visit us at www.theneoliberal.com