Roots or Routes? migrations of identity in The Bahamas (1999/2005)

It is not at all uncommon for Bahamian intellectuals to assert that the Bahamas has little or no sense of national identity. Often discussions of the topic are greeted with raised eyebrows and comments like “National identity? and what is that?” or “We don’t have a national identity”. One woman told me that her sense of paucity of the Bahamian national identity was derived from what she had observed Bahamians do in Miami: as soon as they landed, they assumed American personae, took on American accents, and blended into the landscape — unlike their Jamaican counterparts, who remained actively Jamaican years after they had adopted American citizenship. Another person argued that “The outside, the American media, is really the thing that to me shapes the culture. ” And even this august body, the Bahamas Association for Cultural Studies, entitled its first annual conference Uncovering Bahamian Selves — implying that if a “Bahamian self” exists, then it is very well hidden indeed.

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