Abstract
Dear CS Editor,
Thank you for inviting me to review Dr. Andrew Smith’s book and special thanks for substituting my word, diapers, with the French word, couches, in the published review. Thanks also for inviting this exchange of comments between author and critic.
In Dr. Smith’s rejoinder to my review, he still failed to define what he means by “culture.” My original review suggested that he should have done so in a rather constructive way that he failed to see. To define culture as a struggle, is to follow James, Cabral, Fanon, Ngugi and others, and avoid atomizing “the study of culture” in such a way to underemphasize politics. Smith minimizes the contributions of James by restricting him to “the study of culture” and relatively erasing his contributions to cultural studies despite the fact that James is recognized as one the founding fathers of cultural studies. He follows Hannah Arendt to see culture as the “end” or goal of politics and thereby raises the additional question of what becomes of both when that goal is not scored as in a goalless draw; or in a “Culture 0: Politics 5” kind of result.
The more aware we are of the dangers of Eurocentrism or “colonialist criticism” even for European scholars, the better our work will become—but to deny that white supremacy exists in scholarship is to wallow in unnecessary escapism. It is true that James was influenced by European thinkers but also true that he learned a lot from thinkers of African descent. Smith distorted this by, for example, dismissing Kwame Nkrumah as a tyrant whereas James underscored lessons from Nkrumah’s revolutionary education program. Colonialist criticism silences and erases the other (as Carol Boyce Davis implies) when a book on James obsesses about the letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb while ignoring his fellow-Trinidadian and comrade, Claudia Jones, who was detained and deported along with him for their international scholar-activism.
James deserves to be celebrated, and I have done so in a television documentary series and several published scholarly articles about his contributions to sociology, but he is not above critique. We do James a disservice by approaching his work uncritically as Stuart Hall once cautioned. If Smith has any original critique to offer about James, he has yet to identify it. That may be what his Caribbean reviewers were suggesting to him: what is the new knowledge that Smith’s book contributed? To expect only praise from reviewers is to be misguided and infantile if not deluded.
As I said in the original review, Smith’s book is well-written but it suffers from a lack of clarity on its key concept of culture by atomizing it to restrict the influence of James to entertainment. Moreover, by being simply celebratory, the book lacks any original critical insights into the limitations of James that could guide students to go beyond James today. Finally, by adopting a Eurocentric orientation to James, the author missed the opportunity to discover crucial Africa-centered aspects in the work of James.