Literary Black Power in the Caribbean

Fiction, Music and Film

Rita Keresztesi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000221626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary Black Power in the Caribbean focuses on the Black Power movement in the

anglophone Caribbean as represented and critically debated in literary texts,

music and film.

This volume is groundbreaking in its focus on the creative arts and artists in

their evaluations of, and insights on, the relevance of the Black Power message

across the region. The author takes a cultural studies approach to bring together

the political with the aesthetic, enriching an already fertile debate on the era and

the subject of Black Power in the Caribbean region. The chapters discuss various

aspects of Black Power in the Caribbean: on the pages of journals and magazines,

at contemporary conferences that radicalized academia to join forces with communities,

in fiction and essays by writers and intellectuals, in calypso and reggae

music, and in the first films produced in the Caribbean.

Produced at the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Port

of Spain, Trinidad, this timely book will be of interest to students and academics

focusing on Black Power, Caribbean literary and cultural studies, African diaspora,

and Global South radical political and cultural theory.

1 The Long Caribbean Seventies

The zenith of the Long Seventies, 1968, was an important year for global radical action and social theory. While Western Europe saw Marxist working-class struggles fizzle on the streets of Paris or Rome, Eastern Europe tested the limits of Soviet bureaucratic rule in Prague, and the USA stretched its founding democratic ideals to their breaking points during civil rights protests. In the Caribbean, 1968’s most important intellectual gatherings, followed by collective radicalization, took place in Havana, Cuba and Montreal, Canada. David Austin’s recent books on black Canadian activism, Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Shaping of Global Black Consciousness and the earlier Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal, address racism and black activism in Canada through historical accounts, interviews, and literary sources. The Black Writers Congress held in October 1968 radicalized West Indian students in Canada and at home. The forceful messages delivered at the conference reverberated throughout Jamaica and would also prove influential in the Black Power protests in Trinidad in 1970. In Jamaica, the Hugh Shearer government obstructed Guyanese historian Walter Rodney from re-entering the island to resume his teaching position at the University of West Indies at Mona after his attendance of the congress in Montreal. Later, black students rioted at the Sir George Williams University in Montreal, and Black Power protests ignited in Trinidad when the Eric Williams refused entry to Stokely Carmichael in Port of Spain in February 1970.

“Year of the Heroic Guerrilla”

The Cultural Congress of Havana, held on January 4–11, 1968, at the Hotel Habana Libre, was a meeting of intellectuals from all over the world to discuss problems in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. There, the year was designated as the “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla.” Several hundred attendees from over 70 countries gathered to discuss the role of artists and intellectuals in the revolutionary process. Noted thinkers and writers, such as John La Rose, Andrew Salkey, and C.L.R. James, were in attendance. The gathering was preceded by an informal preparational meeting of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) at the home of Orlando Patterson in 1967, an event also attended by two Cuban writers, Pablo Armando Fernandez and Edmundo Desnoes (see the George Padmore Institute website). Energized by the heightened role of culture and education in Cuba, C.L.R. James famously argued for the abolition of the category of the “intellectual,” as he was observing the democratization of education and culture in Cuba. Walter Rodney, in a similar democratizing move, based on his experiences with organized political parties and trade unions in Jamaica, opted for nontraditional Black Power alliances outside of formal political institutions. Rodney was inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Writers Congress in Montreal, while in Cuba writers and artists took to the center for political inspiration and action. More generally, the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana “provided a forum for defining the role of artists and writers in revolutionary situations, positioning intellectual work as the ideological corollary of armed struggle and situating artists and writers as the bridge between the political vanguard and the people” (Gordon-Nesbitt, “Consume and Create”). The Black Arts/Black Power message was not welcomed in Cuba, as artists who racialized culture at the congress were later marginalized. A group of black intellectuals, such as Walterio Carbonell, Nancy Morejón, and Nicolá Guillén Landrián, demanded a clear and more direct commitment of the revolution in Cuba against racism and discrimination. In turn, they were accused of opening a “racial breach” in the revolution, with some of the participants imprisoned briefly after the congress (Aguirre, “Cuba’s 1968”).

The Black Writers Congress – Montreal, 1968

The Congress of Black Writers, held at McGill University from October 11 to 14, 1968 and organized largely by black West Indian University students and activists, brought together African, North American, and Caribbean intellectuals, political organizers, and writers. The congress was attended by some of the most influential black intellectuals of the time, such as C.L.R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Lloyd Best, James Foreman, and Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael brought the message of Black Power to the Congress and inspired empowerment through revolutionary action. The meeting compounded the international nature of the black struggle and was a turning point in African diasporic consciousness. The Congress in Montreal and the parallel events in the USA rallied the forces of black consciousness in the Caribbean. While the radical Long Seventies era was politically a defeat, resulting in failed traditional social movements, the revolutionary momentum still yielded a paradigm shift in activist thinking and organizing. In the Caribbean, the events of 1968, the Black Writers Congress in particular, recharged the struggles that brought political independence from colonial rule and recalibrated decolonial theory.

The Black Power movement in the USA found an eager audience among Caribbean intellectuals in Montreal. The Caribbean Conference Committee (CCC), formed in 1965 by a group of Caribbean intellectuals and students now living in Canada, laid the groundwork for the 1968 congress. The writings of the New World Group and their publication the New World Quarterly played a critical role in educating the black student leadership, as did the writings of C.L.R. James and other black left-oriented intellectuals. Their conferences during the 1960s attracted students who would later lead the Sir George Williams University protests in 1969 and social protests in the Caribbean.

The Montreal Congress in its official statement cited modern white oppression as the central theme of the academic presentations. Participants discussed and debated the history and struggles of people of African descent and the contemporary meaning of Black Power in the face of widespread racism in the Global North and the impact of colonialism and imperialism in the Global South. The organizers focused on the cultural, spiritual, political, and economic struggles and recognized the importance of writing history from the perspective of the oppressed. David Austin’s book on the black writers’ conference in Montreal Fear of a Black Nation notes that the goal of the Congress was to give an accurate account of the Black liberation struggle from slavery to the present. History and memory were central themes of the presentations with the ultimate goal to confront economic and cultural white supremacy. Topics of the congress included African history, psychology of racism, history of slavery and slave revolts, the role and meaning of Black Power, and the history of anticolonial struggles. The congress ended with the passing of a series of “Resolutions” that energized the participants to continue the work of historical recovery and cultural activism for future political action.

Walter Rodney on Black Power in the Caribbean

In his lecture entitled “African History in the Service of the Black Liberation,” given on October 12, 1968, at the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal, Rodney articulated the locational meaning of Black Power. He included a lightly edited version of the speech as Chapter 5 in his book The Groundings with My Brothers. The speech opens with a punch, the weaponization of African historical knowledge in the struggle for black liberation. Historical periodization, with the omen of 1492, marks definitions and redefinitions of the modern era, when key concepts and ideals such as the human, humanism, liberty, or equality were tested in the Americas. Speaking on the role of the black historian engaged in education about African history and heritage, Rodney emphasized the need for revolutionary mobilization, but with different parameters in North America and the West Indies. Rodney outlined several levels of co-optations of the black aesthetic and the Black Power message: in North America, the commodification of culture and knowledge had divorced reflection from action; the Caribbean is impacted by continued imperialist and neocolonial conditions directed at the Global South from the Global North. He demonstrated the nuances of black radical action in the contexts of Cuba and Jamaica in comparison to the USA and Canada. The socialist revolution of Cuba, in Rodney’s analysis, made a bigger impact on black selfhood than the postindependence black and brown political leadership of a 95% black Jamaica where Afro-centric education was frowned upon by black and brown elites. Here, Rodney highlights the intersectionality of two struggles, the struggle for racial justice and the struggle for class equality and equitable distribution of wealth. In Rodney’s analysis, if in the USA a Rockefeller financed an academic position in African history, it would be by monies gained through South African gold and diamonds, as was the case of the University of California system. In the Global North the neoliberal system, ushered in by the political upheavals of 1968 and sealed by the fall of the Eastern Block in 1989, monetized cultural values and co-opted revolutionary action – even the message of Black Power.

Rodney, speaking to his international audience in Montreal, continued his argument with a discussion of precolonial African history as an alternative to the Western episteme. He declared: a “capitalist society – is a robber society” (Rodney, “African”). Rodney’s speech and later book chapter surmised example after example of traditional African societies for security of body and soul because of the support by traditional communal social ties later severed by colonization. Precolonial African societies practiced a system of restitutions that was driven by the notion: “You replace what you have taken” (Rodney, “African”). In contrast, European law is based on retribution and the criminalization of the offender. Michel Foucault made a similar intervention of conflating the crime with the person under modern mass social orders as he described the rise of carceral societies in his Discipline and Punish. Rodney’s A History of the Upper Guinea Coast: 1545–1800 was based on his research of precolonial Upper Guinea Coast societies and informed his later analysis of colonial and neocolonial societies. His theory racializes the economic and social systems of pre- and postcapitalist societies, an added insight to Foucault’s understanding of modern social disciplinary orders. When situating the Black Power message in a historical global context, Rodney finds a culturally specific economic system he labels “white cultural imperialism” that is at the core of Black Power struggles.

Rodney ended his lecture with a practical note for Black Nationalism: “the analysis of culture-history is extremely relevant to the present revolution,” connecting racial and class equality with human rights for Caribbean appropriations of Black Power (Rodney, “African”). Upon discussing universal human rights, Rodney cited Marx on the class struggle as the beginning of “the history of humanity” (Marx in Rodney, “African History”). Fanon concluded his anticolonial treatise with a wish for a new “man” as human: “This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new humanism” (Fanon, Wretched 178). The articulation of a “universal” humanity was also the project of modernity. In critique of the limited, by class, gender, race, and culture, definition of the human Western philosophy championed, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Rodney, and Sylvia Wynter continued the work of postcolonial and decolonial theory as it applies to the Caribbean. Rodney’s Black Power message at the Congress in Montreal was a call to action specific to the Caribbean:

We could do more with our own history, the history of black people in the New World, as a basis for working out what is a revolutionary strategy in the New World and what will be revolutionary in the new situation . . . African history, as carried out by the black brothers and sisters, will have to be a process of coming to grips with all the aspects of African history and with trying to determine what are the categories into which we should fit things . . . that we break out from those terms of reference [the criteria of European history]. (Rodney, “African”)

The Sir George Williams University affair

Inspired by the fiery message of black revolutionary message of the Black Writers Congress, students caused substantial damage to the new computer system of the university at Sir George Williams (SGWU) during a 14-day occupation in February 1969. Close to 200 students occupied the computer center carrying placards with “We Want Justice” and “Montreal Alabama” (see Lindeman, “A look back at Montreal’s race-related 1969 Computer Riot”). The events leading up to the riot began in the spring of 1968 when six West Indian students accused their biology lecturer Perry Anderson of racism because of suspected unfair grading. The university agreed to establish a committee to investigate the allegations, but the hearings were a source of controversy among the student body at SGWU (now Concordia). On January 28, 1969, the student newspaper The Georgian handed over the reins of the newspaper to the protestors. The issue went on to be known as The Black Georgian noted the racial implications of the events:

On Wednesday 22nd. January, Vice Principal O’Brien – the ‘top Brass’ of this University, denied the mentioning of the ‘risk of violence’ in a letter written to Prof. Anderson. When he finally admitted that he had used this phrase he hastened to explain that he was afraid of violence from “WHITE STUDENTS.”

The following is a copy of the minutes of a meeting held by the “rulers of this University” before the sham hearing on Sunday 26th at which Vice Principal O’Brien was present. The contents of these minutes are another example of this gentleman’s mania with violence and his racism. Since violence has not yet been mentioned or used by the Black students, one can only conclude that this man and the people at the meeting are admitting that they are not prepared to deal out justice but instead are taking precautions against any just repercussions. They have also proven their racist altitude by showing that they immediately connect Blackness with violence. (The Black Georgian)

The students called the administration on their bluff of avoiding charges of racism, noting the violence has a...