Beyond Coloniality

Aaron Kamugisha

Description

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.

Preface
1. Beyond Caribbean Coloniality
2. The Contemporary as Absurdity: Denials of Citizenship in the Caribbean Postcolony
3. Caribbean Racial States
4. A Jamesian Poiesis? C.L.R. James's New Society and Caribbean Freedom
5. The Caribbean Beyond: Reading Sylvia Wynter on Freedom and the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition
6. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Latin American
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• CARICOM Single Market and Economy
• Anglophone Caribbean
• Caribbean Court of Justice
• Development studies
• C. L. R. James
• Sylvia Wynter
• CCJ
• Caribbean
• George Lamming
• Audre Lorde
• Michael Manley
• Conseil privé
• Walter Rodney

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253036292
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BEYOND COLONIALITY
BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA
Herman L. Bennett, Kim D. Butler, Judith A. Byfield, and Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, editors
BEYOND COLONIALITY
Citizenship and Freedom in the
Caribbean Intellectual Tradition
Aaron Kamugisha
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Aaron Kamugisha
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03626-1 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-03627-8 (web PDF)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
For my sister, Kemi Kamugisha
And in memory of my mother and grandmother,
Stephanie Kamugisha (1948-2013) and
Dorin St. Hill (1919-2008)
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Beyond Caribbean Coloniality
Part I. The Coloniality of the Present
2 The Coloniality of Citizenship in the Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean
3 Creole Discourse and Racism in the Caribbean
Part II. The Caribbean Beyond
4 A Jamesian Poiesis? C. L. R. James s New Society and Caribbean Freedom
5 The Caribbean Beyond: Sylvia Wynter s Black Experience of New World Coloniality and the Human after Western Man
Conclusion: A Caribbean Sympathy
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
T HE THOUGHTS THAT I articulate in Beyond Coloniality have occupied my mind for well over a decade, and the conversations that have inspired me to think that a work like this is possible have been many. I am grateful to many friends and colleagues who have shared their thoughts with me on this journey: Jacqui Alexander, Kamau Brathwaite, Timothy Brennan, Mark Campbell, Gena Chang-Campbell, Chris Cozier, Lewis Gordon, Peter Hudson, Pablo Idahosa, Chike Jeffers, Samia Khatun, Robin Kelley, Kamala Kempadoo, Aisha Khan, George Lamming, Neil Lazarus, David McNally, Melanie Newton, Raj Patel, Annie Paul, Jemima Pierre, Richard Pithouse, Heather Russell, David Scott, Ato Sekyi-Otu, Nitasha Sharma, Maziki Thame, Greg Thomas, Todne Thomas, Krista Thompson, Alissa Trotz, Rinaldo Walcott, Alex Weheliye, and Elleni Centime Zeleke. In particular, Paget Henry, Percy Hintzen, and Patrick Taylor have been superb mentors and friends.
Over the past few years, parts of this book were presented in several locations around the world. Thanks to Andrew Smith (University of Glasgow), Elleke Boehemer (Oxford University), Minkah Makalani (University of Texas at Austin), Peter Hudson and Jemima Pierre (at the symposium Black Folk in Dark Times hosted by Vanderbilt University), Katherine McKittrick (Queen s University), Lawrence Hamilton (University of Witwatersrand), and Melanie Newton (University of Toronto) for invitations to deliver my work and to the entire Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University for a memorable postdoctoral fellowship year in 2007-8. I would like to thank Marilyn Lake at the University of Melbourne, Sue Thomas at Latrobe University, and Karina Smith at Victoria University for giving me the opportunity to present my work in Melbourne; and in New Zealand, to Tony Ballantyne at the University of Otago and Charlotte McDonald at Victoria University of Wellington-all in a very memorable month of May 2015. Kuan Hsing-Chen was a gracious and thoughtful host at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, as were Chris Taylor and Kris Manjapra at a special symposium, Global Capitalism, through the Caribbean Prism at Harvard University, and Mike Niblett at Warwick University. I am indebted to many colleagues and friends in South Africa, from three separate trips over the last five years. Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Ruchi Chaturvedi s invitation to be the inaugural guest of their ongoing Other Universals symposium was a wonderful encounter I will not forget. Many, many thanks to Richard Pithouse, Michael Neocosmos, and Vashna Jagarnath in Grahamstown and Isabel Hofmeyr, Eric Worby, and Dilip Menon in Johannesburg. At the University of Giessen, Lea Hulsen and Jens Kugele facilitated a first visit to Germany through a fascinating intellectual encounter at the University of Giessen, while Robin Kelley was a great host at the University of California, Los Angeles.
At the University of the West Indies, I would like to thank my colleagues Joan Cuffie, Halimah Deshong, Therese Hadchity, Tonya Haynes, Kristina Hinds, Gabrielle Hosein, Yanique Hume, Tennyson Joseph, Maureen Warner Lewis, Rupert Lewis, Don Marshall, Tracy Robinson, Christianne Walcott, Tara Wilkinson-McClean, and Dale Webber. Thanks especially to Hilary Beckles, for his support of my work and scholarly example. I would also like to acknowledge the School for Graduate Studies and Research of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, for their generous assistance in funding this research, and the staff in the West Indian collections at the library of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, for their assistance in utilizing the C. L. R. James Archive.
I have had a number of memorable collaborations with colleagues on a series of edited collections. Thanks to Alissa Trotz for our special issue of Race and Class (2007) Caribbean Trajectories: 200 Years On ; Peter Hudson for the C. L. R. James Journal (2014) issue on Black Canadian Thought ; Jane Gordon, Lewis Gordon, Paget Henry, and Neil Roberts for Journeys in Caribbean Thought ; and most of all, Yanique Hume for our collaborations that produced Caribbean Cultural Thought and Caribbean Popular Culture . I have also benefitted from a number of invitations by colleagues to contribute to their edited collections and participate in the intellectual life of journals under their editorship. For this, I would like to thank especially Hilary Beckles, Michael Bucknor, Paget Henry, Brian Meeks, Heather Russell, Jeremy Pontying, and David Scott. The invitation by Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr to participate in the 10 Books That Changed the British Empire project introduced me to a world of intellectual historians whose work I had not encountered and for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks to Sylvia Wynter, a key inspiration behind this study, for the gift of her work and the memory of our conversations about what it will mean to exist within a different world.
For reading chapters and for their discerning feedback, I am indebted to Tonya Haynes, Christian H gsbjerg, Peter Hudson, Aisha Khan, Katherine McKittrick, Richard Pithouse, Heather Russell, and Todne Thomas and I especially thank David Austin, Percy Hintzen, Mimi Sheller, and Rinaldo Walcott for reading the entire manuscript and for their generous and scrupulous comments. I appreciate the dedication Indiana University Press has shown to this project; special thanks are in order to my editor Dee Mortensen, and also David Miller, Robert Sloan, Julia Turner, and Paige Rasmussen for expertly guiding my project through to publication.
Parts of this book have been published in different forms in Race and Class 49, no. 2 (2007), Small Axe 34 (2011), Small Axe 49 (2006), and Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture , edited by Hilary Beckles and Heather Russell (University of the West Indies Press, 2015). I d like to thank the Institute of Race Relations, Duke University Press, and the University of the West Indies Press for their permission to reprint parts of these articles, which appear in a substantially revised form in this book. Thanks also to the University of California Press for permission to republish portions of the poems Lost Body and A Salute to the Third World by Aim C saire and to Kamau Brathwaite for permission to quote from his lecture Middle Passages. I am forever grateful to Leandro Soto for our many conversations about art and life and for permission to reproduce his painting Sirens en el mar Caribe on the cover of this book.
Among my many friends, thanks go especially to Damien Appelwaite, Kyesha Appelwaite, Stan Armstrong, Jason Carmichael, Kerri Catlyn, Ayola Mayers, Sade Mayers, Robert Harewood, Paul Simpson, Alberta Whittle, and Rose Whittle, for the companionship and laughter without which life would be so dreary and, quite simply, scarcely worth living. The considerate and thoughtful advice offered by Steven Butcher, Sergio Catlyn, Ryan Davis, Robin Douglas, Anton Hunte, Brian Lashley, Michelle Workman, and Shemeika Williams will never be forgotten.
This book is in part dedicated to the memory of my mother and grandmother, Stephanie Kamugisha and Dorin St. Hill, for their care and wisdom. To Arlette, thank you so much for making me understand the importance of artistic courage in this world. To all my in-laws, foremost Uji Oboh, thank you for everything over this last decade. Kemi, my sister, this book is for you and for the time and conversations we have shared over all my life. To my niece and nephew, Asha and Tega, thank you for your presence in my world.
Alana, I thank you for your confidence, grace, and happiness and for revealing to me the true meaning of love.
Bathsheba, Barbados,
August 2018
BEYOND COLONIALITY
1 Beyond Caribbean Coloniality
T HE CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN -an area of experience that so many of its dispos