To Support Local Culture Is to Support Sovereignty (Part 1)

An Op-Ed by Hezron Henry

In Caribbean island states shaped by centuries of extraction, spectacle, and displacement, calls to “support local culture” are often mentioned with good intentions but little depth.

At worst, they’re gestures: buying handcrafted items, attending a festival, tasting the local food. Yet when considered through the frameworks offered by Antonio Benítez-Rojo in “The Repeating Island” and the exhibition “Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime”, this idea of support reveals itself as a far more radical and necessary undertaking that requires political awareness, economic justice, and a commitment to cultural autonomy that challenges both tourism and neocolonial power.

Benítez-Rojo describes the Caribbean not as a unified region but as a “meta archipelago,” a complex, ever-repeating cultural system marked by chaos, hybridity, and rhythm.

In this vision, the islands are not isolated or homogenous but linked by shared legacies of violence, invention, and resistance. Repetition in this context does not mean sameness. It refers to recurring cultural patterns, such as rituals, sounds, and gestures, that span geography and time, adapting with each iteration.

To support local culture, then, is to recognize this nonlinear, layered identity and resist the temptation to flatten it into a marketable aesthetic.

Culture is not an artefact but a process: alive, unfinished, and defiant.

The exhibition “Tropical Is Political: Art Under The Visitor Economy Regime (circa 2022)” deepens this argument by exposing the machinisms of the visitor economy, a system that transforms island life into a consumable paradise for outsiders.

Artists like Joiri Minaya, Abigail Hadeed, and Donna Conlon reveal how tourism, offshore finance, and the legacy of plantation economies continue to shape Caribbean existence. Local culture, in this context, is curated for the foreign gaze, stripped of its history, conflict, and complexity. Support under this system becomes another form of control, where culture is tolerated only when profitable or picturesque.

To truly support local culture, then, is to dismantle these logics. It means honoring the cultural labor of those who remain unseen in glossy brochures: the performers, the stewards of land, the storytellers, the painters and poets whose work resists erasure.

It involves funding the institutions, exhibitions, and publications that give voice to local artists on their own terms, not mediated by foreign curators or economic incentives. It is a stance that recognizes that cultural identity is not just inherited but continually made through struggle and creativity.

Supporting local culture also demands engagement with material conditions such as land ownership, labor rights, and access to education and technology etc. One cannot claim to value the music of a place while ignoring the musician. Nor can one celebrate indigenous food while the land itself is being privatized or poisoned. As “Tropical Is Political” illustrates, cultural support is inseparable from political and environmental sovereignty.

To support local culture is to allow space for ambiguity, contradiction, and critique.

In Benítez-Rojo’s framework, culture is not a neatly packaged story but a polyrhythmic performance: ritual, rupture, and reassembly. It should not be smoothed to fit tourism slogans or state-sponsored branding. True support means allowing culture to breathe, to protest, to evolve without needing to explain or entertain.

In totality, supporting the local culture of an island state is not a passive or symbolic act. It is a commitment to justice, autonomy, and complexity. It means resisting the forces that reduce identity to spectacle and reclaiming the right to define selfhood beyond the gaze of the visitor. It asks us not just to admire the island, but to listen to its repetitions, the sounds of resistance and the whispers of memory.