The Colonial and Anti Colonial Arthur Lewis: Lessons for Decolonial Caribbean Development (original) (raw)
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Where the Present is Haunted by the Past': Disarticulating Colonialism's Legacy in the Caribbean
Cultural Dynamics, 1999
The complex theoretical and political formulations of the Caribbean historian and activist Walter Rodney (1942-80) were based on a strategy of bringing to light and thereby undermining the divisive influence of pejorative colonialera constructions of the various racial diasporas in the region. His interventions in public life in Jamaica and Guyana in the late 1960s and 1970s which foreground race without essentializing it, and which refuse to submit to the false opposition of 'race or class' in social analysis and organizing, contribute to an understanding of how strategic and expansive uses of 'blackness' work within and across nation-states to articulate new forms of politics. Walter Rodney's life and work also has much to tell us about how to conduct an engaged, socially relevant academic praxis.
Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 2014
as elites struggled to retain control, but in France itself as counterrevolutionaries grew dominant. A brief interlude of hard-won emancipation was shot through with contradictions, restrictions, and exclusionary racism. The book ends with the tragic and violent reinstatement of slavery in Guadeloupe, which as Dubois points out, is unprecedented and unrepeated in history. Any one of these episodes could be a book in itself; this impressive work takes on all three. The principal claim, that slaves' struggles shifted the terms of universalism, raises questions. As Dubois himself suggests, even this version of universalism, supposedly transformed to a more radically egalitarian one, fell short in practice. The declarations of emancipation were accompanied by efforts to restrict the freedoms of former slaves. Dubois ignores extensive debates about the uneven nature of "universalism"such as critiques of the enlightenment and critiques of liberal theory and practice-which underscore the ways in which the notion of universalism is, and was, contentious. Some engagement with these complex debates might have enriched his discussions and clariªed precisely how events in the Caribbean changed notions of democracy, equality, and freedom, or, rather, how they impinged on concepts that were continually in ºux.
Akilah Lamsee - Colonial Education and Caribbean Cultural Identity
Colonial Education and Caribbean Cultural Identity , 2022
Caribbean cultural identity is largely shaped by the region’s extraordinary history. The coming of the Europeans to the region ushered in an era of subjugation, a state which, it can be argued, still lingers in contemporary Caribbean society. The region served as a field for imperialist control which saw successive hegemonic powers implement policies based on the process of racial othering and difference. The nations that ultimately made up the Anglophone Caribbean saw the implementation of a colonial project that catered to the needs of the British administration. Even with the transition from a slave society to a free society, the British hegemony sought to maintain its position at the top of the social and economic pyramid. They held on to the ethnocentric notion that their culture was the repository for refinement and civilised values and that without it the colonies would disintegrate. As such, avenues for maintaining social control had to be found. Religion was one such strategy that was used as a tool for social control. Christian values and norms such as the superiority of married state, gendered roles and even the way one dressed were used to create a homogenous society, a docile and God fearing society which, for the white elite, would be easier to control and would keep the masses content and in their rightful place in society. Religion alone though did not meet the motive of the ruling class, even though clerics meted out a theology based on the “acceptance of oppression and deprivation on earth” to maintain the hierarchy, a more secular approach was needed in order to have a more comprehensive outlet for social regulation (Turner 56). The educational sphere provided the perfect arena for social acculturation and the maintenance of the status quo that saw the planter class perched at the top. It provided a space where the secular goals of the rulers of the colony could be merged with Christian ethic in order to socialise the lower class into desired patterns of behaviour. The automatic confluence of religion and education was designed for the creation of colonial functionaries and this convergence was the first phase which saw the use of education as a socialising tool in the period leading up to emancipation and thereafter. Successive educational policies in the region kept this socialising agenda alive in a quest to create a respectable Caribbean society as it encouraged power over the minds of the masses, a schema that was quite successful in England (Turner 55). This paper explores how the use of educational policies in the Caribbean helped shape the cultural identity of the region as it played an intrinsic part in the everyday lives of the masses oftentimes limiting agency on their part. It uses Trinidad as it’s main point of reference with occasional mention of other British Colonial territories as educational policies were fairly uniformed throughout the region.
Memory, Migration and (De)Colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond
Press, forthcoming). Ruth Minott Egglestone grew up in Jamaica but has spent most of her teaching career in England and Scotland. She has a background in literature (English and Spanish), education, drama and cultural studies. Her seminal doctoral thesis mapped the development of the Jamaican Pantomime tradition as a model of national identity and a new theatrical form. She is currently working with children in the field of inclusive education, refining a manuscript about teaching with a reggae sensibility in Britain, and collaborating on a biography of Roger Mais. At present, there are also two Shakespeare-based writing projects in the pipeline. Peter Ramrayka, MBA, CIHM, FIHM, FRSPH, FIHEEM, is author of the acclaimed monograph Recycling a Son of the British Raj (Hansib, 2015), which highlights the cultural transformational changes and challenges he went through in his early life as an Indo-Guyanese migrant to the UK. He was an officer in the RAF, and rose to a senior management position in the National Health Service. His career was interspersed with national, international and voluntary consultancies in the UK (including being appointed a Justice of the Peace), Botswana, Pakistan and Tanzania. Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez is visiting professor of philosophy at Oxford College of Emory. His work focuses on the interconnection between history, politics, and aesthetics in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a philosophical attempt at approaching these topics collectively. He is particularly interested in aesthetic theories and practices (such as literature and film) of this world region that critique colonial forms of self-understanding and self-expression, and contribute to new epistemologies of resistance. His work investigates a MEMORY, MIGRATION AND (DE)COLONISATION viii European philosophical tradition of history and aesthetics as challenged by the existence of the Americas. Bruce Nobrega was born in Guyana and attended Queens College. He came to England for the second time in 1969, and settled, just in time to be included in what is now termed the Windrush Generation. He studied quantity surveying and up to his retirement worked on various projects including social housing. He is a long-standing treasurer of a BAME housing association, originally formed for women; he is a committee member on various organisations connected with the community; and he has been involved with the Adult Literacy Programme. He is an activist whose travels have enhanced his knowledge and understanding of black history, and the nuanced effects that the various western colonising powers have had on their subject-citizens. Kelly Delancy is from Nassau, Bahamas. She graduated in 2011 with a BA in anthropology from the State University of New York and in 2015 with an MA in anthropology from the University of Florida. She hopes the information generated during her studies will be of value to future generations of Bahamians and others interested in the history of south Eleuthera and the Bahamas. Delancy currently assists researchers tracing Bahamian histories and continues to share information collected on community histories through the 'From Dat Time': Oral and Public History Institute of the University of the Bahamas, and through the Finding Home Bahamas project, which can be found on Facebook and Instagram. Simeon Simeonov is a PhD student at Brown University interested in the history of extraterritoriality and its relationship to diasporas, empires, states, colonialism and decolonisation. His work historicises the creation of the modern nation state as a process shaped as much by 'external' as by 'internal' agents and institutions. Methodologically, his scholarship aims at transcending the inner-disciplinary boundaries separating cultural, social, political and diplomatic history. It is only by elucidating the role of marginalised groups as political and diplomatic agents that we can fully understand the stakes of creating colonial and post-colonial polities and the political-economic system of global capitalism. William 'Lez' Henry, born in Lewisham, London to Jamaican parents, is the British reggae deejay Lezlee Lyrix. He is an associate professor at the University of West London and is renowned as a first-class public speaker. He has lectured nationally and internationally and featured in numerous documentaries and current affairs television and radio programmes. He also writes about many of the concerns of the African diaspora in the UK, and is a keen martial artist.
An Illusive Independence: Neocolonial Intervention in the Caribbean
Through an analysis highlighting the historical continuities between the colonial era and the Caribbean’s experience under capitalist neoliberal globalisation, this article will argue that in many ways the political and economic experience of the Caribbean over the past 50 years can accurately be characterised as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, as independence in the region has been merely a symbolic event—not an ongoing condition. That said, no historical overview of the political reality of the Caribbean would be complete without including the short-lived but incredibly important periods of disruption which sought to extinguish the flames of neocolonialism and bring about the self-determination and genuine development of the Caribbean people.
Natural History and Anti-Colonial Critique: Critical Theory and Caribbean Decolonization
2020
In spite of the Frankfurt school's emphasis on the 'consumer society' and its relative silence on questions of colonialism and imperialism, this paper aims to reconstruct critical resources for the critique of colonialism in the work of Theodor Adorno. Specifically, the paper aims to demonstrate the merits of his conception of 'natural history,' by examining what is shared between this concept and the materialist analyses of anti-colonial critique in the 20th century. The paper distinguishes how 'natural history' has, historically, functioned as an ideological rationalization of colonization and how, critically, it echoes basic aspects of the critical work of Franz Fanon, Walter Rodney, and C.L.R. James. Constructing an unexpected encounter between Adorno and thinkers of African and Caribbean decolonization, the paper advocates for a renewed critical conception of natural history which speaks to not only the false naturalization of racial and geographical hierarchy and the exploitation of natural resources in the colonies, but also to the realities of global inequality and underdevelopment.