Abstract
In a recent issue of Small Axe dedicated to the question ‘What is Caribbean Studies?’, David Scott suggests that ‘to think something like “Caribbean studies” is already to be inside, to be in a conversation with, one dimension or another of the archive of thinking about what the Caribbean supposedly is, supposedly was’. 1 The two-volume collection Caribbean Political Thought, edited by Aaron Kamugisha, and the allied text, Caribbean Cultural Thought, edited by Kamugisha and Yanique Hume, assemble a richly representative sample from that archive. In so doing, they demonstrate not only how the question of what the Caribbean is has been answered in the past, but also how it might be answered in our contemporary moment. Gathering together a diverse range of writings stretching from the colonial encounter to recent reflections on the impact of neoliberalism, these collections brilliantly showcase the ways in which Caribbean writers, critics, politicians and activists have sought to conceptualise the region and to understand its specificity within the context of the historical development of capitalism over the longue durée. All three volumes place particular emphasis on the significance of struggles around cultural practice to the battles waged in the Caribbean over state and society.
The first volume of Caribbean Political Thought, subtitled The Colonial State to Caribbean Internationalisms, opens with the Haitian Constitution of 1805. The first independent constitution in the Caribbean, this document marks a key moment in what Édouard Glissant has called the region’s ‘irruption into modernity’. 2 That it is followed by the Platt Amendment – the legislation imposed on Cuba by the United States curtailing the island’s sovereignty following its successful campaign against Spanish rule – nicely highlights how the Caribbean has long struggled in the pincer grip of competing imperialisms. The second section of the collection reproduces seminal speeches by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Fidel Castro, Walter Rodney and Maurice Bishop, as well as a selection of significant manifestos, including Marcus Garvey’s ‘Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World’. The subsequent sections, ‘The Colonial State’, ‘Anti-Colonial Thought’, and ‘Caribbean Internationalisms’, bring together writings by those directly engaged in the anti-colonial struggle, including José Martí, Cheddi Jagan, Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and C. L. R. James. They also incorporate more recent critical appraisals of issues such as colonial governmentality (David Scott), pro- and anti-slavery discourses (Gordon Lewis and Hilary Beckles) and the invention of the category of man as a rational being (Sylvia Wynter).
In closing the ‘Anti-Colonial Thought’ section with Fanon’s ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, Kamugisha gestures towards the second volume, Theories of the Postcolonial State. The material selected for this volume reflects the increasing disillusion felt by many at the independence settlements achieved by large numbers of Caribbean territories in the second half of the twentieth century. The backbone to the majority of these nationalist movements had been the strategic alliance between proletarian organisations and political parties led by the more radical fractions of the middle classes. Yet once independence had been secured, the leaders of these parties worked, in many instances, to demobilise the masses and generally acted in precisely the way Fanon had predicted and condemned in his famous essay. Lacking the economic power of a ‘proper’ national bourgeoisie, the new postcolonial elites became a comprador class, often serving as local agents for foreign capital. Even the titles of some of the articles included in this volume attest to the difficulties and disappointments provoked by these developments: ‘State Against Nation’ (Michel-Rolph Trouillot); ‘Clientelism, Power and Democracy’ (Carl Stone); ‘The Rise of the Authoritarian State’ (C. Y. Thomas); ‘Politics, Corruption and the Police’ (George Danns); and so on.
The companion volume on cultural thought is a similarly comprehensive gathering together of work by some of the Caribbean’s most celebrated writers and thinkers alongside several lesser-known essays. As Hume and Kamugisha put it in their introduction, the collection engages in a dialogic exercise of excavating classic texts of the past and placing them in dialogue with more contemporary interrogations and explorations of regional cultural politics and debates concerning identity, history, coloniality, diaspora, aesthetics, religion and spirituality, gender and sexuality and nationalisms.
The selected material incorporates poetry by Martin Carter, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett and Léon Damas, among others; essays on the specificity of Caribbean aesthetics by such writers as Alejo Carpentier, Kamau Brathwaite and Jacques Stephen Alexis; critical analyses of the development of Caribbean religions by thinkers like Barry Chevannes and Gloria Wekker; and explorations of social and cultural change by intellectuals ranging from Fernando Ortiz, Jean Price-Mars and Antonio Benítez-Rojo to Sydney Mintz, Gordon Rohlehr and Patricia Mohammed. The collection’s subtitle, From Plantation to Diaspora, might suggest that the organisation of the volume reiterates the (highly problematic) narrative popular within certain brands of postcolonial studies, in which the binary opposition between colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism is ultimately displaced by the fluid, hybrid vectors of a ‘post-national’ world. However, the editors are careful to distance themselves from this narrative, highlighting the constitutive imbrication of Caribbean nationalisms with the diaspora and pointing out, rightly, the way in which ‘Caribbean cultural thought has been diasporic from its inception’.
Overall, these collections offer a well-chosen sample of political and cultural thought from the Caribbean. As the editors acknowledge, volumes of this kind and the principles of selection on which they are based are always likely to provoke arguments about what gets included and what gets left out. Indeed, such arguments are precisely one of the great merits of this sort of exercise, forcing recognition of the dynamics of canon formation at work in the consolidation of specific academic fields. Kamugisha admits that despite his anxiety to ‘show a fidelity to the territorial, linguistic and cultural complexity of the region’, the ‘collections focus on the Anglophone Caribbean due to incredible costs and problems associated with gaining access to, and principally, translating many of the remarkable political documents existing in the Caribbean’ (The Colonial State). This may account for some of the more striking omissions from the three volumes. Most obviously, the Dutch Caribbean is largely absent (Wekker’s essay on mati work in Suriname is an exception). Thus, there is no place for the likes of Frank Martinus Arion or Astrid Roemer, both of whom have made important contributions to the theorisation of ‘Caribbeanness’. With regards to the Francophone Caribbean, Glissant is included, but somewhat surprisingly – given the splash they made in Caribbean studies in the early 1990s – the Martinican Créolistes Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant do not feature. Nor do a cluster of significant Guadeloupean writers: Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Daniel Maximin. Notable absentees from the Anglophone tradition include V. S. Naipaul and Roger Mais (whose blistering 1944 article, ‘Now We Know’, which landed him a six-month prison sentence for sedition, would have sat comfortably alongside the various other anti-colonial polemics included here). Despite these omissions, the three collections represent a comprehensive and judicious selection of material and together provide a fantastic resource for anyone seeking to, as Scott puts it, think something like ‘Caribbean studies’.