The Lost New World of Caribbean Studies: Recalling an Un-American Puerto Rico Project

Caribbean studies, institutionalized from inception as part of the “third world,” might be beneficially reconceptualized minus the postwar geopolitical presumptions of three worlds and, remapped, instead, within the two-world schema. To resituate the Caribbean this way enables recognition of the region as an inaugural space in the invention of a modern consciousness—not as a problematic tertiary portion of the globe where modernity is a belated burden. In advancing this case for a hemispheric recasting of the Caribbeanist field, it helps to reread a little-known essay that took the New World approach to the region. Titled “Paths to National Self-Discovery: USA and Puerto Rico,” it first appeared in 1956 and was written by Daniel J. Boorstin, a historian of the United States. Unlike conventional scholarship on the Caribbean, including the definitive work, The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology, Boorstin's essay framed Puerto Rico within the familiar “New World” rather than the exotic “third world” in relation to First World North America.