Caribbean Political Thought

Caribbean Political Thought: Theories of the Post-Colonial State reckons with the vast body of radical work and thought on the post-colonial Caribbean state. It focuses on the period after the Second World War, when a significant number of Caribbean countries gained their independence, and the character of the region's post-colonial politics had become clear. The survey of political thought in this collection is divided into four sections: theories of the post-colonial state, theorizing post-colonial citizenship, Caribbean regionalism and political culture. Includes contributions from: Walter Rodney Ernesto Sagas Percy Hintzen Michel-Rolph Trouillot Carl Stone Brian Meeks CY Thomas George Danns M. Jacqui Alexander Norman Girvan George Belle Eudine Barriteau Hilbourne Watson Tracy Robinson Obika Gray Patricia Mohammed Charles Mills C.L.R. James Frantz Fanon Stuart Hall Edouard Glissant Archie Singham Eric Williams Rupert Lewis Jack Dahomay George Lamming Erna Brodber Sylvia Wynter Arthur Lewis Patsy Lewis Havelock R.H. Ross-Brewster

Caribbean Political Thought: The Colonial State toCaribbean Internationalisms uncovers, collects and reflects on the wealth of political thought produced in the Caribbean region. It traces the political thought of the Caribbean from the debate between Bartolome de Las Casas and Gines de Sepulveda on the categorization of Native people in the New World, through the Haitian Revolution, to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The ideas of revolutionaries and intellectuals are counterposed with manifestos, constitutional excerpts and speeches to give a view of the range of political options, questions, and immense choices that have faced the region's people over the last 500 years. Includes Contributions from: Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrius Trevor Munroe Jean-Jacques Dessalines Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff Amy Jacques Garvey Dantes Bellegarde Jacques Roumain W. Burghart Turner and Joyce Moore Turner Fidel Castro Walter Rodney Maurice Bishop Sylvia Wynter Gordon Lewis Anthony Bogues Hilary Beckles Bechu Roy Augier David Scott Antenor Firmin Jose Marti J.J. Thomas Hubert Harrison Marcus Garvey Rhoda Reddock Pedro Albizu Campos George Padmore Suzanne Cesaire Aime Cesaire Claudia Jones Cheddi Jagan Lloyd Best Frantz Fanon C.L.R. James Che Guevara Lewis R. Gordon

The dawn of the twenty-first century is an opportune time for the people of the Caribbean to take stock of the entire experience of the past forty years since the ending of direct colonialism. The authors believe it is now time to chart our future by carefully learning the lessons of the recent past. This interdisciplinary collection is the first to cross traditionally restrictive disciplinary barriers to address the tough questions that face the Caribbean today. What went wrong with the nationalist project? What, if any, are the realistic options for a more prosperous Caribbean? What are to be the roles of race, gender and class in a more global, less national world? Meeks and Lindahl include thought-provoking articles from twenty-one respected thinkers in diverse fields of study. The groundbreaking articles include critiques of existing bodies of thought, reformulations of general theoretical approaches, policy-oriented alternatives for future development, and more. This book is a must for statesmen, academics and students of political theory, social theory, Caribbean studies, comparative gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism and Caribbean history and anyone interested

Against the lethargy and despair of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean experience, Aaron Kamugisha gives a powerful argument for advancing Caribbean radical thought as an answer to the conundrums of the present. Beyond Coloniality is an extended meditation on Caribbean thought and freedom at the beginning of the 21st century and a profound rejection of the postindependence social and political organization of the Anglophone Caribbean and its contentment with neocolonial arrangements of power. Kamugisha provides a dazzling reading of two towering figures of the Caribbean intellectual tradition, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their quest for human freedom beyond coloniality. Ultimately, he urges the Caribbean to recall and reconsider the radicalism of its most distinguished 20th-century thinkers in order to imagine a future beyond neocolonialism.

"The study is concerned mainly with the growth and development of political ideas in the Caribbean since the latter half of the eighteenth century. It attempts an analysis of the more significant intellectual formulations which have emerged in the region during the period ... it includes reference to some of the major economic theories which have shaped the Caribbean reality over the years."--Introduction ([p. xi]).

Placing Rodney's work in the larger tradition of West Indian involvement with continental Africa, Walter Rodney's Intellectual and Political Thought traces the evolution of Walter Rodney's political ideas through biography, analysis of his writings on Africa and the Caribbean, and his political practice. Rooted in transatlantic history and politics, Rodney's intellectual and political thought critiqued the British Empire and capitalism in the diasporic locations of Guyana, Jamaica, London and Tanzania, as well as the processes of recolonisation. A West Indian, Pan-Africanist and Marxist, Walter Rodney functioned in the intellectual tradition of C. L. R. James, Henry Sylvester-Williams, and George Padmore of Trinidad and Tobago, Theophilus Scholes and Marcus Garvey of Jamaica, and the collective force of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica during the 1950s and 1960s - although his post-colonial-era perspective also set him apart from these earlier figures and movements.

Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance examines the Caribbean popular - an idea that has been an important and contested terrain for exploring the dynamic and oftentimes subversive cultural expressions of the region. The Caribbean popular arts, whether embodied in the hybrid musical genres or vernacular performance and festival traditions, have historically provided a space for social and political critique, the performance of visibility and also articulations of a temporal emancipatory ethos with its attendant acquisition of power and status. Beyond the spaces of their local/regional enactments and the social realities out of which they emerged and continue to circulate, Caribbean popular culture has over time contributed to contemporary understandings of global and diasporic cultures and, at the same time, the dynamics of inter-cultural encounters. The terrain of the popular has been a generative site for the study of Caribbean societies, and has produced enduring theoretical postulations that have been pivotal to the shaping of the intellectual production on the Caribbean. It is also the most powerful force that socializes contemporary Caribbean citizens into an understanding of their identities, the limits of their citizenship, and the meaning of their worlds.

In his coverage of the intervening decades Martinez-Fernandez ranges widely, discussing, for example, expansionism and filibustering; the Cuban "Africanization Scare"; the regional impact of the American Civil War; Haiti's repeated invasions of the Dominican Republic; the mechanization of the sugar industry; the polarization of Dominican politics; and the annexationist/reformist debate in Cuba