Defining The Caymanian Identity

Defining the Caymanian Identity analyzes the factions and schisms surging throughout the multicultural, multi-ethnic, and polarized Cayman Islands to identify who or what is considered a Caymanian. In the modern world where Caymanian traditions have all but been eclipsed, or forgotten, often due to incoming, overpowering cultural sensibilities, it is a challenge to know where traditional Caymanian culture begins and modern Caymanian culture ends. With this idea in mind, Christopher A. Williams investigates the pervasive effects of globalization, multiculturalism, economics, and xenophobia on an authentic, if dying, indigenous Caymanian culture. This book introduces and expounds the provocative solution that the continued prosperity of the Cayman Islands and their so-called indigenous people may well depend on a synergistic moral link between Caymanianness and foreignness, between Caymanianness and modernity.

In an age of rampant xenophobia and the nativist imperative to undo globalization for a return to a bygone, “purer” age, can patently modern identities indefinitely sustain their messages of inclusion and equality? This volume serves to answer this and other pressing existential questions by tracing the development of the Caymanian people from the colonial era into our modern globalized, multicultural age. The emergence of Caymanian nationalism is extensively analyzed and confirmed as a phenomenon that was preceded by fragmented Caymanian identities informed by issues of race and class. Despite this, the native Caymanian people were able to successfully jettison their race-thinking, and in so doing, began to see themselves as members of a singular nationality. This notion of national and cultural solidarity, as this book details, has become a vexing issue, and is now being duly tested given the astonishing numbers of immigrants in Cayman, many of whom are keen to become Caymanians themselves.

" Who is a Caymanian? What should be the nature of the relationship between established Caymanian and expatriate Caymanians in arriving at a definition? J.A. (Roy) Bodden argues that Caymanian society is based on a synergistic and symbiotic relationship between expatriates and Caymanians. At the heart of this dilemma of twenty-first Caymanian society to define its identity and future direction, is its peculiar status as a modern-day frontier society made up of a totally imported population. The author provides an engaging account of the peculiarities of that frontier status, its historical antecedents and the implications for the Islands future development. He introduces a number of new analytical concepts such as pigmentocracy to analyse the role of colour and class distinctions in the Islands development and voluntary colonialism to describe an existing political structure in which there appears to be no desire to evolve beyond the current status as a colony of Great Britain. Bodden is the first Caymanian to offer such a thorough examination of Cayman Islands society. He adopts a multidisciplinary approach to describe and analyse the specific ways that Caymanians and expatriates have grappled and continue to grapple with issues of settlement, colonialism, domination, prejudice, rapid economic growth, modernity and globalization. The Cayman Islands in Transition is a contribution to the emerging academic discipline of Island Studies and is bound to generate considerable debate, discussion and dialogue both within Caymanian society and beyond. "

Cayman Islands Investment and Business Guide - Strategic and Practical Information

Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life takes a spirited conceptualist look back into the history of our development. The book sets out to explore the ways in which a punditry of human equality continues to lock in unassailably assured logical postures, enabled by the historically intertwined roles played by power and the passage of time, towards the invention and sustenance of social truth. Religion, race, and multiculturalism have been written about many times, and from a variety of academic, discipline-specific perspectives. Nonetheless, these social issues remain ever relevant to any sincere bid to understand the inegalitarian aspects of modern society. Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life was primarily written with serious students of philosophy, sociology, the humanities, and history in mind. The author contends that we should never be too afraid to explore contentious or difficult philosophical and social questions.

This book offers a fresh analysis of constitutional, economic, demographic and cultural developments in the overseas territories of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Ranging from Greenland to Gibraltar, the Falklands to the Faroes, and encompassing islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the Caribbean, these territories command attention because of their unique status, and for the ways that they occasionally become flashpoints for rival international claims, dubious financial activities, illegal migration and clashes between metropolitan and local mores. Connell and Aldrich argue that a negotiated dependency brings greater benefits to these territories than might independence.

Global movement is commonly characterized as one of the quintessential experiences of our age. Market forces, territorial conflicts and environmental changes uproot an increasing number of people, while mass communication, travel, tourism, and a global market of commodities, texts, tastes, fashions and ideologies place individuals more than ever in a global arena. As traditional conceptions of individuals as members of stationary, fixed and separate societies and cultures no longer convince, to what extent does movement become central to individuals' self-conceptions? How do people cultivate, negotiate, nurture and maintain an identity? To what extent do individuals become ‘migrants of identity' whose home is movement?Defining ‘home' as ‘where one best knows oneself', this pioneering book explores the various ways in which people perceive themselves to be ‘at home' in today's world. Through a series of case studies, authors show that for a world of travellers, labour migrants, exiles and commuters, ‘home' comes to be found in behavioural routines and techniques, in styles of dress and address, in memories, myths and stories, in jokes and opinions. In short, people who live their lives in movement make sense of their lives as movement.