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Tania Isaac suggests, in her writing here as in her choreography and performance pieces, an intense, complex experience of knowing her native island, St. Lucia, through its dance and its ways of looking at the body. To do this she finds four names for St. Lucia which suggest metaphoric characterizations of the multiple selves of her island. She uses these selves to explore the movement of St. Lucian kwadril (quadrille), masquerade, calypso, and soca, of Carnival of the bands playing mas and the more individualistic Carnival of Ol' Mas. Isaac uses description and metaphor to suggest a density and variety of cultural information, a layering that can contain all contradictions.

St Lucia is a small developing island nation in the Caribbean which historically depended on the banana industry as a major source of output growth, employment, and foreign exchange. When external conditions in its main export market became unfavorable, the country gradually made the transition to a largely services economy with a major emphasis on the tourism sector. With high levels of unemployment (especially among the youth) and poverty, St Lucia has made efforts to create good jobs through agricultural diversification, information services, financial and related services, tourism, and government services. There is also potential for job creation in the “green” economy and the “blue” economy (coastal activities). To meet its jobs challenges, St Lucia needs to develop a strategic development plan which would include provisions for production diversification into new areas, human resources development, development finance, regional and international economic agreements, and institutional arrangements to complement strategic policy actions.

Much has been written about the “sugar revolution” sweeping the islands of the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Recent work by archaeologists, however, has challenged this overarching narrative. On the island of St. Lucia, a program of landscape survey joined with a close analysis of maps and census records has revealed a very different pattern of landscape development. Underneath the remains of vast sugar estates with their monumental surviving architecture—the curing and boiling houses, lime kilns, windmills and water wheels—lies evidence of an earlier phase of small-scale plantations growing a surprising diversity of crops. Building on a legacy of subsistence agriculture inherited from the Amerindians, European settlers on St. Lucia carved out a patchwork of small holdings cultivating cotton, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, ginger, cassava, indigo, and bananas. The comparative absence of large sugar plantations allowed people without much capital to purchase and develop land, creating new opportunities for free people of color to amass wealth and gain political power. The emergence of this class of free black landowners had a profound impact on St. Lucian society, which in turn greatly affected the larger political struggles that rocked the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century.

This chapter examines the period from 1997–2006, which involved the St. Lucia Labor Party’s (SLP) return to political power, resulting in tensions between an earlier radicalism and a new and contradictory accommodation to global neoliberalism. The discussions cover the Left compromise to globalization; economic policy of the SLP in government between 1997 and 2006; the Labour Code and the SLP defeat; and the efficacy of the Left compromise to neoliberalism.

This chapter examines the link between neoliberalism and fair trade farming in the Eastern Caribbean. More specifically, it considers whether the fair trade movement's social justice and economic priorities are realized on the ground by focusing on the banana industry in Mabouya Valley, the largest banana-producing region in St. Lucia. Drawing on ethnographic research in the area conducted over three periods from 2000 to 2004, combined with an extensive survey of demography, economic activities, and attitudes among fifty-eight certified fair trade and seventy-five conventional banana growers residing in Mabouya Valley, the chapter explores whether fair trade in practice adequately satisfies mutuality and transparency in producer–consumer relationships. It shows that the fair trade market offers material and social advantages to Caribbean farmers.

This introductory chapter begins with the author's explanation of why he chose “Nobody's Nation” as the title of this book. It then discusses the central themes in Walcott's works. It describes the author's visit to St. Lucia, where he had two conversations that seem, in retrospect, to define the polarities of Walcott's imagination. This is followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

In 1964, Nell and Dilys left New York on the Queen Mary, bound for London. The next stop was Burton Bradstock in West Dorset, home of poet Howard Griffin, where Nell began painting garden views. The women spent time in Paris and Lisbon before flying to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where Nell’s dealer Elinor Poindexter and her husband owned a banana plantation. Nell delighted in the native plants and birds. She taught the teenaged son of their cook to read and write and enjoyed visits by Arthur Cohen, her major collector, and poet Galway Kinnell. But despite the lush surroundings, the eleven months on St. Lucia were plagued by inconveniences, from quarreling workmen to scorpions and torrential rains. Nell’s April 1966 Poindexter Gallery show, which included many works completed in St. Lucia, was well reviewed. Then came a great shock: in late May, Dilys suddenly moved out.