Table Of ContentCaribbean 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
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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
