Rupert Lewis and the Black Intellectual Tradition PDF
Preview Rupert Lewis and the Black Intellectual Tradition
Caribbean Reasonings Rupert Lewis and the Black Intellectual Tradition Other Titles in the Caribbean Reasonings Series After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary The Thought of New World: The Quest for Decolonisation The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonisation M. G. Smith: Social Theory and Anthropology in the Caribbean and Beyond Caribbean Political Activism: Essays in Honour of Richard Hart Freedom, Power and Sovereignty: The Thought of Gordon K. Lewis Caribbean Reasonings Series Editors Anthony Bogues Rupert Lewis Brian Meeks Caribbean Reasonings Rupert lewis and the black Intellectual Tradition edited by Clinton A. Hutton, Maziki Thame and Jermaine McCalpin Ian Randle PublIsheRs Kingston • Miami First published in Jamaica, 2018 by Ian Randle Publishers 16 herb McKenley drive box 686 Kingston 6 www.ianrandlepublishers.com Introduction and editorial material © Centre for Caribbean Thought, university of the West Indies Isbn 978-976-637-950-6 (pbk) epub edition @ January 2018 Isbn: 978-976-637-966-7 National Library of Jamaica Cataloguing-In-Publication Data Caribbean reasonings : Rupert lewis and the black intellectual tradition / edited by Clinton a. hutton, Maziki Thame and Jermaine McCalpin. p. ; cm - (Caribbean reasonings) Bibliography : p. – Includes index Isbn 978-976-637-950-6 (pbk) 1. Lewis, Rupert – Intellectual life 2. Lewis, Rupert – Political and social views 3. black nationalism 4. Intellectual life I. hutton, Clinton a., editor. II. Thame, Maziki, editor. III. McCalpin, Jermaine, editor. 320.5 dc 23 Caribbean Reasonings : Rupert lewis and the black intellectual tradition. Copyright ©2018 by Centre for Caribbean Thought, university of the West Indies. all rights reserved under International and Pan-american Conventions. by payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. no part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Ian Randle Publishers. Cover and book design by Ian Randle Publishers Contents Introduction /vii Maziki Thame acronyms and abbreviations /xiii 1. UWI Mona and the Government of Jamaica, 1967–69 /1 Ken Post 2. Jamaican black Power in the 1960s /39 Rupert Lewis 3. Reflections on the Caribbean Radical Tradition: a Conversation with Professor Rupert lewis /64 Rupert Lewis interviewed by Jermaine McCalpin 4. Radical Caribbean Thought: Rupert Lewis and the Politics of an ‘Internal Dread’ /83 Anthony Bogues 5. edward seaga and the Question of levelling: seeing Manley from the Other side /97 F.S.J. Ledgister 6. Characteristics of the Grenadian Revolution and the Caribbean situation /116 Maurice Bishop interviewed by Rupert Lewis 7. blowing the abeng: Rupert lewis and the Rebuilding of Caribbean socialism /137 Paget Henry 8. echoes of the bandung Movement in the Caribbean and China’s Presence in the Region Today /162 Rupert Lewis 9. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano: black Radical heretic or black Radical liberal? /172 Charles W. Mills 10. Jean-Jacques dessalines and the haitian Revolution: Global agency of universal Modernity /191 Clinton A. Hutton 11. The sett Girls and the Pedagogy of the streets: an aural black Counterpublic /207 Linda Sturtz 12. ‘Sankofa’: Garvey’s Pan Africanism, Negritude, and decolonising narratives /239 Mawuena Logan 13. arthur lewis: Mild afro-saxon or Militant anti-Racist? lessons from his struggles and his disparagement by Other black Power advocates /250 Mark Figueroa 14. Memory Gems of Revolution: The lived experiences of elean Rosalyn Thomas /280 Linnette Vassell 15. Pedagogy and Leroy Clarke’s Philosophy of Being, Freedom and sovereignty /297 Clinton A. Hutton 16. The Radical aesthetic of sistren Theatre Collective, Jamaica /311 Nicosia Shakes Contributors /337 Index /341 Introduction Maziki Thame When asked by Jermaine McCalpin how he would define the Caribbean Radical Tradition, Rupert lewis responded that it is about liberation, that the tradition is framed as an answer to the existential question of what it means to be human. This is above and beyond the ruminations of the liberation of the european person. What it means to be a human for peoples who have been defined as anything other than human requires more than philosophy; it involves praxis.1 The idea for the production of this volume came from Clinton hutton, who posed in a department of Government meeting at the university of the West Indies, Mona, the need for the department to honour Professor Rupert lewis with a conference on the occasion of his retirement and to publish a selection of essays from the conference presentations. The department immediately embraced the idea and a core of its members – Christine Cummings, Clinton Hutton, Jermaine McCalpin, dhanaraj Thakur and myself, almost all of whom were taught by Rupert lewis, were in the vanguard of the organisation of a successful conference. This volume began with the effort of colleagues at the university of the West Indies (uWI) and within the Caribbean diaspora (many of whom were also his students) to recognise the contributions of Rupert lewis in the pursuit of Caribbean and human liberation. The idea of Caribbean liberation is not static and, while beginning with the enslavement of africans racialised in the wake of european capitalist expansion, those who peopled the Caribbean have been faced with multiple types of dehumanisation in the process of becoming Caribbean that required them to imagine liberation in different ways. Lewis has been steadfast in working in the spirit of Marcus Garvey’s idea that the emancipation of the body could be externally bestowed but that mental emancipation depended on black people’s own agency. CARIBBEAN REASONINGS: RupERt LEwIS Indeed, the two types of emancipation that Garvey spoke to were connected in ways that he did not imagine, and is a part of the struggle for liberation in the Caribbean present. We might think, for instance, of the ways women of the Caribbean have been perpetually required to face down attempts to reduce them to being bodies without agency or the politics around sexual agency in the contemporary Caribbean. In his philosophy and practice of politics, lewis has been centrally preoccupied with the trouble with blackness and with those at the bottom and faced with ‘downpression’. The praxis of Rupert Lewis was seeking to radically transform Caribbean reality. disappointment about the meaning of independence mobilised his generation, who believed they had the opportunity to remake the Caribbean, to reposition it in relation to its colonial and oppressive past. his ideas were shaped as part of the ferment of his time, coming of age and to activism as a student at Mona in the 1960s, he became part of the struggle for black Power centred around abeng and Rastafari. lewis has remained rooted in Black Nationalism and his academic and life’s work reflect that anchoring, influenced by his time with fellow travellers, spanning generation, including the second wife of Marcus Garvey, amy Jacques Garvey, and Walter Rodney. his work on Marcus Garvey, Walter Rodney and the african-Caribbean experience are important sources for anyone wanting to understand how people of african descent have or might contend with the psychic and material challenges they faced in their past and present. lewis is also a thinker on the political left. his involvement in the politics of the left that matured in the 1970s and 1980s can be seen as part of the alternatives created by the global left during the Cold War, the african liberation struggles and in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution in the Caribbean. This volume addresses those issues that lewis has grappled with as a radical intellectual and activist. It does so by including not only academic papers but also personal reflections, which are acts of memorialisation that locate Rupert lewis and his contemporaries in relationships cemented in the process of struggle and in making life in serious times. The first chapter is one such effort by Ken Post to record the memories of his two years in Jamaica in a time of protest at Mona and across Kingston, which brought him into activism alongside his students and colleagues. Post assesses the larger national context and his contradictory place as a white Marxist in the midst viii INTRODUCTION of ‘Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s’ (Rupert Lewis advances Post’s telling in chapter 2). linnette Vassell is also engaged in an effort to memorialise in chapter 14, ‘Memory Gems of Revolution: The Lived Experiences of Elean Rosalyn Thomas.’ She reflects on the life and meaning of elean Thomas, who, with lewis, was among the leaders of the Marxist-Leninist Workers Party of Jamaica. Vassell’s telling of Thomas’s journey introduces us to some of the leading women of the radical left who sought to centre ordinary people in the politics of the 1970s and 1980s and who were mobilised around what it meant to be women in that struggle. Vassell declares her intention to make known those women who stood up for progress and on whose backs men’s achievements have been made. Politics on the left is also explored by Rupert lewis, Fragano ledgister and Paget henry. We saw it fitting to reproduce in this volume an interview lewis conducted with Maurice bishop in the period of the Grenada Revolution. The interview is a primary source which speaks to how the left and vanguard politics of the Grenadian Revolution were being defined, what were seen as its challenges and how bishop located the revolution in its time and place. We see through bishop, the ever-present consideration of american interests in the region and how governments of the day and their opposition were responding to Reagonomics at the cusp of the neoliberal turn. Ledgister’s ‘Edward Seaga and the Question of Levelling: Seeing Manley from the Other Side’ (chapter 5) examines the views of the leader of one such government, edward seaga, regarding the 1970s and specifically, Michael Manley, the leader of that process. In chapter 7, ‘Blowing the Abeng: Rupert Lewis and the Rebuilding of Caribbean Socialism’, Henry discusses Lewis’s contributions as a figure who is both involved in the politics of black nationalism and the political left and as an academic studying the conjunctures of race and class in the Caribbean. Paget henry is also concerned to address the question of the future of black socialist transformation emerging out of the collapses within it, what he sees as Lewis’s and others’ retreat from it, and the crisis within global capitalism. Lewis himself considers this new juncture in chapter 8, ‘Echoes of the Bandung Movement in the Caribbean and China’s Presence in the Region Today’, republished from Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2016). he is keen to raise the race question at a defining moment of China's rise in the Caribbean and the world. ix
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