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The Caribbean Intellectual Tradition That Produced James and Rodney By W. F. Santiago-Valles |
Edouard Glissant[1]
'Some day, when the holistic
investigations on this matter are undertaken, the Caribbean itself
will be surprised to learn how close it came to being a confederation
of Maroon states ... It would certainly be necessary to examine
the participation of the Maroons in the social struggles and
independence movements of the region.'
Antonio Benitez Rojo[2]
Towards the end of his autobiography,
Walter Rodney Speaks,[3] the late Walter Rodney referred to the
idea that intellectual conflict in the academy expresses the
unequal social relations which organise the learning process.
Despite initial disparities in cultural capital, theoretical
assumptions and ideological references, the author encouraged
readers to pursue intellectual achievements by struggling against
ideas and conditions that separated manual and mental work.
Rodney also encouraged his readers to master institutionalised
knowledge, while remaining critical of its dominating intention,
and to do so within a community of scholars that produced an
opposing version of their own social history, against which other
groups could measure their own intellectual progress. Earlier
in the autobiography, Rodney had mentioned the sense of historical
analysis he had acquired in such a community of scholars, a London
study group
taught by Selma and C. L. R. James. The Caribbean students who
participated learnt to investigate the reasons why particular
books were written; what was going on when the bibliographies
were written; the goals of the groups participating in the debates;
and the processes of the books' production and their impact.
Near the end of Walter Rodney Speaks, the author applies this
method when he recommends discussing what determines the context
in which
contemporary contributions to our cultural heritage are given
critical attention.
The taped interviews for that intellectual autobiography were
made at Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1975. The dialogue closed
on a note about the tendency towards imperial globalisation,
a tendency that has intensified during the last twenty-five years.
In certain contemporary situations, where ruptures such as slavery
may not have been collectively absorbed, one of the consequences
of imperial globalisation has been to effect a discontinuity
between a people's
relationship with its surroundings (nature) and its accumulation
of experience (culture). Through what means is the social memory
of these nature/culture relations and of organising collective
self- awareness, transmitted, despite ruptures like colonialism?
Such questions, suggested by the current trend of globalisation,
are important in relation to the formation of communities and
to research into the continuity of popular opposition, together
with the construction of a critical perspective from which to
engage with the type of intellectual contributions discussed
above. In the case of the diasporas that intersected in the Caribbean,
it is also important to emphasise those occasions when the barriers
to continuity and
awareness have been spontaneously overcome. Such occasions include
the expeditions launched by Black Corsairs from Guadeloupe against
the US and Britain from Swedish colonies (1794-1800); the time
when Bolivar received support in Haiti denied him in Jamaica
(1815-1816); when separatists from Guadeloupe were denied asylum
in St Vincent (1987), as well as others that will be discussed
below.[4]
The people of the Caribbean may not collectively have absorbed
the consequences of such occurrences, but there is a tradition
of individuals in organised groups investigating the convergence
of events like these and of discussions between them that extended
to Africa, the rest of the Americas and Europe. One major historical
phenomenon that obtained across the region was the existence
of communities of self-emancipated Maroons who kept colonialism
and slavery under permanent siege. In a number of locations,
rural Maroons joined in alliances (with bandits, revolutionaries,
plantation slaves, abolitionists and urban secret religious societies)
which were not interested in local self-government but wanted
to expel the slavers altogether Such cross-cultural alliances
are still a reference point for popular cultures of opposition
in the Caribbean. Another, not unrelated, historical phenomenon
was the existence of twentieth-century research collectives which
studied the transition from shared experience to the conscious
expression of those continuities which have given historical
depth to more recent popular struggles.
Rene Depestre and Aime Cesaire conceived of intellectual marooning
as distancing oneself from the dominant culture so as to avoid
assimilation, or sabotaging it from within, while creating something
that validated the adverse circumstances of the popular. But,
in the work of Darcy Ribeiro and Wilson Harris, there is another
version of marronage, circulating in the extended Caribbean.
According to the latter, the conscious reorganisation of time
and space by the popular imagination created opportunities to
represent the region's history critically.[5] Such capacity for
transformation had shown itself in the collective initiatives
that successfully contested domination. My argument here is that,
by taking stock of the assets in this second tradition of collective
social research, we can learn how others in similar situations
solved crises in their favour.
Learning
From The Past
What is needed is to reconstruct, as far as possible, that second
Caribbean intellectual tradition into which the relation between
Walter Rodney and C. L. R. James can be inserted. As James's
predecessors addressed the issues of their day, historical research
and participation in popular mobilisations became a means and
method of pursuing cultural sovereignty without denying the dominant
influences. These activists-cum-intellectuals, who preceded Rodney
and his teacher, kept alive past experiences of struggle and
promoted their circulation, using a vocabulary that had emerged
from the region's memories of continuous opposition to enslavement,
confinement and forced migration. By exchanging information with
each other, these groups discovered opportunities that they would
not have perceived in isolation. Such exchanges also provided
support for regional alliances aimed at furthering self-emancipation.
The questioning of cultural authority (the authority that organises
people's lives) which necessarily underpins any emancipatory
strategies took place at work, in transportation, in situations
where the lives of the mass of people depended on co-operation.
This process of questioning was also expressed in dance and music,
in healing and culinary practices, religions, languages and social
movements. And the experience of questioning authority circulated
across the Caribbean as nationalists, Pan-Africanists, feminists
and labour organisers travelled, met, learned and created a new
vocabulary to represent the connections between the region and
the world market. In response to such movements, businessmen
and
financiers were actively reorganising the workplace and extending
its industrial logic to other areas hitherto closed to it, such
as privacy, leisure and marginality.
Persistent and recurring efforts were made to identify both the
predecessors to, and the continuity of, popular movements. As
Walter Rodney pointed out at the 1972 symposium on C. L. R. James,
held at Michigan University:
each generation rewrites its own history ... by posing entirely
different questions based on the stage of development which that
particular society has reached. Certain scholars will be among
the first to raise the new and meaningful issues because of their
connection with the most dynamic groups in society. Thus when
African peoples were mounting a struggle for political independence
... they automatically became interested in recalling previous
resistance. Initially only a scholar committed to...the present
emancipation drive would find it possible to seek out and unearth
the evidence of earlier struggles.[6]
While in Trinidad between 1929 and 1932, James had been linked
to several small collectives connected with the history of popular
movements, a situation that would be repeated on a larger scale
in London between 1932 and 1938. To gain knowledge of the persistence
of our predecessors in struggles whose continuity has been rediscovered
is to reveal connections with excluded social memories. And it
also gives historical depth to expressions of collective awareness
that can then seize the opportunity to learn from previous mistakes.
While it is true that some Maroon communities were complicit
with the colonial administrations, as in the Morant Bay rebellion
(Jamaica 1865), other urban and rural Maroons have earned a place
of honour in the popular imagination. I am thinking of the Cottica
confederation in the
Guianas (1726-1823), the Haitian Maroons (1740-1843), the republicans
and abolitionists in Guadeloupe (1794-1802), the Brazilian Hausas
of Bahia (1807-1835), the collaboration between Haitians and
Cubans in the separatist Aponte conspiracy (1812), the Balaiada
Movement in North-eastern Brazil (1837-1840), and La Escalera
in Cuba (1842-1844).
The small research groups that are examined here tried to represent
cultural history as a holistic experience of struggle, integrating
race, class, gender, nationalism, language and religion. These
activist-intellectuals attempted to evaluate the national and
international dimensions of unequal relations, the social forces
that could change the institutions reproducing those relations
and the solutions being rehearsed in other parts of the world.
In this sense, the predecessors of James and Rodney extended
the analysis of social conflict beyond its industrial manifestations
and, in doing so, demonstrated the pertinence of questioning
all the social conditions that give culture meaning. Recording
the evolution of popular critique while promoting its development,
these small research groups made a conscious effort to overcome
the social division of labour by bringing together manual and
mental workers who integrated theory and practice.
The results included networks of co-operation such as the Popular
University in Cuba (1923-1927), in which direct experience was
contextualised, so creating opportunities for autonomous interpretation.
Cuba's Popular University followed the Mexican model (1912-1922)
created by Diego Rivera, Alfonso Reyes and Jose Vasconcelos,
and held short courses and conferences at which intellectuals
could interact with workers in factories and cultural centres.
This Mexican group, which included Pedro Henriquez Urena, an
intellectual from the Dominican Republic, also founded a graduate
school in 1913 so that its members could teach and learn from
each other. The direct actions, cultural events and publications
that resulted from the activities of the Popular University in
Cuba constituted a record of the participants' thinking about
the problems that they, as Cubans, could not solve alone; their
place in national and regional history; and the international
tendencies in which they were situated. There were international
networks of similar organisations that exchanged both experiences
of struggle and research materials.
Between the world wars, these praxis/research collectives investigated
the recurrence of self-organisation among slaves and Maroons,
as well as the historical opposition between dominant and insurgent
ways of co-operating, both in terms of production and the exchange
of ideas. During the period of unwaged slavery, the manual workers
in these self-emancipation projects shared levels of competence
and mastery that allowed them to understand both the organisation
of society and its transformation. Some rural and urban Maroons,
with their spiritual and military advisors, developed strategies
of communication that sought support for the participants' convictions.
These efforts were so effective that, by the second half of the
eighteenth century, there was an international information network
in the Caribbean which included western diplomats (like the British
consul in Havana), abolitionists (like Vincent Oge in Haiti),
republicans (like Victor Hugues and Louis Delgres in Guadeloupe
and Julien Fedon in Grenada), slave insurgents and Maroon states
(in Venezuela, Haiti, Martinique, Jamaica, the Guianas and Brazil),
and a fleet of Black Corsairs (operating in the eastern Caribbean
against the US and Britain).[7] In this network, manual workers
demonstrated some of the precedents that, during the 1920s and
1930s, were recuperated and creatively reassembled by popular
movements.
Maroons,
Intellectuals And The Popular
Before I go on, it is necessary to elaborate on some of the concepts
previously noted: Maroons, popular cultures, praxis/research
or `thought' collectives, and Maroon intellectuals.
The rural Maroon communities can be defined as the organised
will of the self-emancipated to confront plantation society in
terms both could understand. Instead of resisting the unequal
relations of the day, or offering an alternative within the existing
order, Maroon communities represented opportunities to alter
those relations. The nomadic world of the Maroon communities
organised the lives of Africans, Black Creoles, Aboriginals,
escaped European convicts, smugglers, Christian priests and Sephardic
Jews who, together, created new ties of reciprocity and solidarity.
These communities
organised production on liberated territories that sustained
a separate nation, and did so in contradiction to the logic of
slave society.
According to Sylvia Wynter, locating some of the region's cultural
sources in the slave trade presented particular options for those
designing strategies of communication and struggle.[8] One option
was to accept the denial of specific social memories and group
identities that had been imposed by slavery. Instead, people
appear in official history as individuals who were determined
exclusively by a Caribbean presence which ignored what preceded
it. Another option was to
redefine both the colonialist ethic and the dominant logic as
not expressing the interests of the majorities. The organised
pursuit of liberty, self-sufficiency and sovereignty among the
Maroons was a precedent and a model of `invisible' institutions
that took the second option.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of intellectuals
in the Caribbean have identified these communities and their
descendants as central to the development of plans for economic
and cultural sovereignty. These intellectuals came together in
research groups that evolved as collective efforts to solve common
problems, employing specific ways of organising information.
During times of crisis, the Maroon experience was used to construct
an explanation for the situation in the 1920s and 1930s. The
methodology and style of thinking that emerged from these efforts
was
characterised by its capacity to analyse, verify and apply what
had been learned within a perspective that had been based on
that accumulated experience. Such praxis/research collectives
developed a direction and a set of questions independent of the
research methods that reproduced the existing order. The manual
and mental workers who took part were not just members of a collective
that integrated theory and practice. Rather, it was their participation
and communication with other groups across the region that made
the development of new styles of thought and conceptualisation
possible.[9] Although individuals represented in themselves several
different ways of perceiving experience -- through race, class,
gender,
nationality, religion and political party -- it was the emergence
of a shared vocabulary, created through the exchange of experience,
that made it possible for groups across the region to make sense
of their situation. [10]
Between the world wars, the experiences of conscious opposition
being updated by such research groups provided some of the source
materials that the popular movements needed for transforming
the dominant cultural authorities hitherto presumed valid for
the whole society. The popular entails developing ways of thinking
and acting that go
against the grain of present social relations, in an organised
practice of self-emancipation that is represented in extended
systems of solidarity. The popular is not a separate set of facts
about material reality but, rather, the meaning that the present
context acquires through a system of associations that deny cultural
leadership to the prevailing perspective. Between the sixteenth
and nineteenth centuries, official cultures in Latin America
and the Caribbean had two faces: the oral and written traditions
of a shared religion and calendar, as well as a shared acceptance
of colonialism, capitalism and slavery. But: there was always
a popular rebellious culture of opposition, especially among
the mutinous Blacks who expressed themselves in insurrectionary
forms of conduct whether in the African religious cults practised
in secret or in the incitement to rebellion against slavery.[11]
Since then, the popular has evolved as a recurring need for self-emancipation
that both reassembles ways of overcoming conquest and nurtures
opportunities for unpredictable originality. I use the term 'Maroon
intellectuals' to emphasise the collective character of what
is, essentially, a community of method. Instead of distancing
themselves from dominant ideas, these small research groups bent
and reassembled those ideas so as to present models for collective
action derived from the region's experience of social change.
They used the memories associated with specific places to make
connections between different aspects of a problem, and to propose
ways of participating that integrated multiple struggles. When
these popular memories included social movements that behaved
as intellectual collectives, the small groups treated them as
predecessors and allies. Whether it was Francois McKandal's travelling
school of herbalists planning a national insurrection (Haiti,
1740s and 1750s); the popular assemblies in the Northern Plains
negotiating social programmes that would mobilise both the enslaved
and self-emancipated (Haiti, 1790s-1860s); the Cottica confederation
(1768-1791) that brought together Maroons from across all the
Guianas to expel the Dutch; the urban alliance of Maroons, abolitionists
and republicans in the Nordeste (Brazil, 1798-1840); the Blacks
and Aboriginals who worked together in Veracruz and
Guerrero to expel the Spaniards (Mexico, 1810-1821); or the secret
societies of urban Maroons and artisans who fuelled the Cuban
separatist movement across Europe, North America and inside the
islands (1878-1933), there were vital lessons to be gleaned from
the mistakes and successes of these predecessors.
Understanding the needs of their own daily struggles in the present
made it possible for the praxis/research groups to formulate
pertinent questions for the past. For example, how had their
predecessors taught one another to ask and answer strategic questions
without outside specialists? These small groups created spaces
for public discussion where participants from popular movements
were encouraged to solve the inconsistencies in their own thinking.
In addition, the praxis/ research collectives investigated and
published accounts of direct experience, accompanied by analyses
of the
historical period that contextualised the social actions presented.
And, finally, the Maroon intellectuals created opportunities
for collaboration between manual and mental workers in a climate
of reciprocity that made research and action possible.[12]
Fernando
Ortiz
Among the cornerstones of the Caribbean tradition of activist-intellectuals
who co-operated with the popular movements were the small groups
formed by students and colleagues of Fernando Ortiz in Cuba (1923-1940).
In addition to being a pioneer of African American studies, Ortiz,
through his activities, connected groups involved in armed protests,
secret religious societies, historical research, publications,
international solidarity, party politics and cultural
promotion. Through participation in several social movements,
Ortiz learned the patterns of mixture and reassembly that were
continuously invigorating popular cultures. In Los Negros Brujos
(The Black Magicians, 1906) Ortiz contextualised the practices
of the urban Maroons, and identified their contributions to the
national community. Ten years later, in Los Negros Esclavos (The
Black Slaves,1916) he described the social and emotional conditions
of agricultural slavery to explain the criminalised practices
of the urban underworld. During the military occupation (1898-1902),
for
example, the secret societies of the initiated were persecuted
as gangsters.
Between 1923 and 1925, Ortiz's Society of Cuban Folklore documented
the protagonism of the popular cultures that nationalists had
begun to acknowledge. As a result of exchanges between nationalists,
popular movements and historical researchers, activist-intellectuals
began meeting each other and developing personal connections.
They learnt to express the concerns of the mass of people, using
the hidden script of the popular.[13] What these exchanges produced
were
contacts with oral traditions, touching all aspects of daily
life, that underlined the gaps in the social memories of the
intellectuals. Other small research groups among a younger generation
read Ortiz's books in search of examples of unity and sovereignty.
One such collective met to teach and learn about Cuba's social
problems and about world events, developing radical solutions
to those problems; it also sought to use the arts to mobilise
the population. Known as the Minoristas, its members organised
a cultural group which edited three magazines (Social, Avance
and America Libre); organised the national federation of university
students; a popular university for workers and a political party
that combined race and class issues. There were even Minoristas
in the Senate Commission rewriting the Constitution. In each
instance, Minoristas proposed the full participation of Black
workers (who had produced wealth as slaves and who had been the
backbone of the independence armies) in the public debate.
In order to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, Ortiz
and his colleagues used the creation of the national book collection
as an opportunity to reissue out of print volumes, and to publish
manuscripts on the gaps in their collective memories. What Ortiz
added to each reissue was a foreword setting each book and author
in historical context, much as James taught the members of the
London study group to do thirty-five years later. One significant
example will suffice to show how Ortiz operated on several levels
at once.
The case in point is the biographical introduction to James J.
O'Kelly's La Tierra del Mambi (The Land of the Maroon, 1930)
about the 1868-1878 Cuban war of independence against Spain.
The text by Ortiz was written in the midst of the struggle against
the Machado dictatorship. Drawing parallels between the mass
movements of past and present, between the practice of activist-intellectuals
like the Irish separatist O'Kelly and what was needed in Cuba,
Ortiz distinguished between armed and unarmed politicians, between
those who insisted on sovereignty and those who settled for self-government.
Ortiz also made the point that O'Kelly worked with reformists
and radicals simultaneously in order to seize the initiative
with the former when there were no opportunities for the latter.
In what I consider the most relevant part of the text, Ortiz
writes that, in the absence of radical possibilities, O'Kelly
and his colleagues studied social needs, educated political organisers
and trained civic groups. The passage hints at what Ortiz and
his friends were attempting as well.
Through Gustavo Urrutia's section in the newspaper Diario de
la Marina -- a Sunday cultural supplement about Cuban popular
cultures of African origin -- composers, poets (like Nicolas
Guillen), researchers from the provinces and visitors from abroad
(like Langston Hughes or Arturo Schomburg) were brought together
at academic lectures, public events and community meetings. In
February1930, for example, Langston Hughes arrived in Cuba and,
within a month, had met most of the progressive intellectuals
in Ortiz's circle. Hughes returned to Cuba again and stayed from
April to September 1931, then went on to Haiti before returning
to Cuba at the end of the year. As he travelled between Harlem,
Havana and Haiti, his visits helped accounts of struggle to circulate
across the region. The same occurred when Eusebia Cosme, a member
of the Society of Afro-Cuban Studies (also created by Ortiz)
took her recital tour across the Caribbean. And Ortiz himself,
while in exile in the US (1930-33), came in contact with a network
of publications and intellectuals who were concerned with military
occupation in Central America and the Caribbean.
In 'Nuestra America' (1891), Jose Marti wrote that our understanding
of and ideas about Latin America should be derived from the concrete
and specific knowledge of the region built up by those investigating
the causes of its problems. It is in that intellectual tradition
of cultural decolonisation that Fernando Ortiz and a long list
of his collaborators and students belong. It is a list that includes
Nicolas Guillen, Lydia Cabrera, Wifredo Lam, Jose Antonio Franco,
Artur Ramos and Aguirre Beltran.
Caribbean
Migrants in New York City
From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, there was a growing
community of Caribbean migrants in New York City. After 1918,
some of these migrants were at the centre of radical activity
in Harlem: journalists and labour organisers like Wilfred A.
Domingo (Jamaica), Richard B. Moore (Barbados) and Otto Huiswoud
(Surinam), historian J. A. Rogers (Jamaica), writer Claude McKay
(Jamaica) and editor Cyril V. Briggs (St Kitts). Together with
Grace Campbell, Hubert Harrison (St Croix) and Hermie Dumont
Huiswoud, they advanced their analysis of the relation between
race and class in cooperatives promoting self-government and
self-defence (like the African Blood Brotherhood), political
organisations (like the Socialist and Workers' parties) and newspapers.
The latter included the Amsterdam News, The Messenger
(socialist), The Crusader (African Blood Brotherhood) and The
Emancipator (socialist and anti-Garvey). Then there were associations
and meeting places like the Harlem Educational Forum (1923),
the American Negro Labor Council (1925), Sunday morning study
groups and a Harlem Unitarian congregation (1920). The Crusader
even published a serial novel, between January and October 1919,
entitled Punta Revolutionist. Written by Romeo Dougherty, of
St Thomas, it was about a secret international organisation of
Black radicals that started in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean
during the time of the Spanish-Cuban-American war.
These activists also wrote for the newspapers in their countries
of origin, debated with the Garveyites, presented Caribbean leaders
to metropolitan audiences, connected the region and New York
through a news service of their own creation, and turned the
city into a major intersection of Caribbean cultures. In 1924,
the efforts to create a federation of Black organisations in
the US also benefited from their involvement. Together with the
Garvey movement, the impact of this organised public presence
contributed to the revalorisation of popular cultures in Black
communities during the 1920s.[14] During their tenure in New
York, the Caribbean radicals were even able to overcome the isolation
imposed on their homelands by, variously, the French, British,
Dutch and US occupation forces. As a result, they were able to
carry out concrete interventions against several empires at once.
While this New York group mounted international solidarity campaigns
informed by an awareness of what was common to the whole region,
small organisations throughout the Caribbean were producing the
information for local social movements that were, in a sense,
becoming communication systems about all aspects of daily life.[15]
Some of the New York activist-intellectuals may have met George
Padmore in 1924 when he first came from Trinidad to study in
New York City. Certainly, Pan-Africanism was on the agenda of
The Liberator, edited by Cyril Briggs, a Caribbean immigrant.
This was the publication of the League of Struggle for Negro
Rights, a civil rights organisation presided over by Langston
Hughes. Combining class analysis of race issues with Pan-Africanism,
it promoted Black
nationalist cultural movements and supported research into African
American cultural history.
Ofelia
Dominguez Navarro
During the 1920s, Ofelia Dominguez Navarro, a Cuban and former
suffragette, travelled to national women's meetings in Cuba and
to international women's congresses overseas. Among delegates
from other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, she was
able to construct a representation of a common history. Between
1923 and 1925, she also participated in the Popular University
of Havana, where 2,000 workers studied with cultural nationalists,
labour organisers and political radicals who collaborated with
Fernando Ortiz and opposed the Machado dictatorship. In 1930,
Dominguez Navarro and other former suffragettes created another
organisation to support the priorities of working women, identifying
exploitation, gender oppression, the market economy and foreign
investment as among the chief causes of
women's problems. Called the Union of Working Women, it held
class, race and gender issues to be as important as ending the
Machado regime. The Union's leaders were aristocrats and university
graduates with social status, who were, nonetheless, clearly
socialists.
In January, 1931 Dominguez Navarro was arrested while recruiting
students for armed protests against the government. A couple
of months later, she was arrested again and jailed for seven
months. The solidarity and information network of other political
prisoners connected to the labour movement won her over to their
way of thinking. Upon her release, she continued to defend students
and workers as a lawyer, to speak at public meetings and act
as a newspaper editor when journalists were jailed.
Subsequently, whether in Cuba or in her two periods of Mexican
exile, she worked with small groups collaborating with working
women and organised labour. Dominguez Navarro also worked with
the Mexican government to secure the nationalisation of US petroleum
companies in 1938.
Anton
DeKom
Anton DeKom migrated from Surinam in 1920, first to Haiti and
later to Holland. From 1926 onwards, his articles for Links Richten
(Left Turn), published by a workers' and writers' co-operative
and for the radical De Tribune newspaper were often republished
in Surinam or distributed there as leaflets. By 1927, DeKom had
begun working with a small research group at the Royal Library
of Holland investigating the cultural and economic history of
Surinam. Before C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon or Albert Memmi,
DeKom's work emphasised both the emotional consequences of colonialism
and the ways in which the Maroons opposed the organisation of
slave labour, seeing these as precedents for the independence
movement and for workers' organisation.[16] From 1929 to 1934,
DeKom also worked in the Dutch
office of an international anti-colonial organisation. He probably
exchanged ideas with George Padmore (at that time of Moscow,
London, Paris and Hamburg) and Otto Huiswoud at some of the national
or European meetings of the Anti-Imperialist League or at the
Hamburg international conference of Black workers (1930).
Workers from Surinam had migrated to Curacao (a Dutch island
colony) in 1926, and there came into contact with the radical
press read by Venezuelan exiles. These exchanges probably helped
both groups place their common history in a regional and international
context. When these unemployed migrants returned to Surinam in
1929, their arrival coincided with that of Indonesian, Indian
and Black labour organisers sent from Holland. Since DeKom had
been unable to travel with them, he later began an exchange of
letters with separatist labour leaders in Paramaribo that complemented
his articles in the Dutch press currently circulating in Surinam.
What DeKom's articles and letters proposed was that the industrial
workers and Maroon communities should be brought together in
anti-colonial campaigns that would go beyond the demand for employment
made in the strikes and protests of 1931.
The Surinam General Workers' Association, meanwhile, was operating
as a political party and labour union, with a membership which
included Asian agricultural workers, Black industrial workers
and women domestic employees. By 1932, it had a lending library,
a newspaper, held weekly meetings of almost a thousand people
and maintained international connections with the Left in the
colonial metropolis, Holland.
DeKom returned to Surinam with his family at the end of 1932,
but the Dutch government denied him the opportunity of publicly
discussing his research into the continuity of social opposition.
Travelling through the interior of the colony, however, he was
able to meet with Amerindians, Maroons and Asian agricultural
workers who came together to discuss their common problems. DeKom
listened and took notes. When similar dialogues were held in
the capital city -- in the backyard of his family home -- the
gatherings swelled in two weeks to 4,000 people a day. DeKom's
notes became proposals for independence, education, organisation
and solidarity with those in similar situations abroad.
The alliances and self-organisation that were being forged in
these public debates led to DeKom's arrest, the confiscation
of his research notes and his deportation back to Holland in
May 1933. The protests and strikes, which now encompassed the
coastal Black Creoles in the industrial sector, went on during
the summer and autumn of 1933 (much as they were to do over thirty
years later, in 1968, when Walter Rodney was denied re-entry
to Kingston). Back in Surinam press censorship escalated so that,
by 1934, whole publications were being banned and the arrests
of labour organisers had, by 1935, extended to the banning of
political organisations. Meanwhile, in Holland, DeKom was finally
allowed to publish We, the Slaves of Surinam (1934) under the
supervision of police censors who demanded the excision of the
notes from his 1932-1933 trip. This book was the first modern
history of Surinam. In 1939, the Nazis again confiscated his
manuscripts and research documents. DeKom died in their custody
in 1945.
Patricia
Galvao
During the 1920s, radical intellectuals from the labour movement
in Brazil were investigating the formation of the country's labour
force. While doing so, they studied the programmes of previous
social movements, looking for patterns in the recurring issues
of land, race and class, as well as in the causes and solutions
proposed. Yet, though they studied the slave uprisings and millenarian
religious cults that continuously challenged the Brazilian state,
they did not see a connection with the popular movements that
began to emerge outside the factory gates during the 1930s.
One of those social movements was the Frente Negra (the Black
Front) founded in Sao Paulo between 1930 and 1931 to promote
education and a more active participation in the country's economic
and political life. Frente Negra had an important women's section,
based in Sao Paulo, which campaigned against sexual harassment,
race and gender
discrimination and exploitation in the workplace. But Brazilian
suffragettes, who had won the vote in 1932, did not see any need
to make an alliance with the Frente Negra's women.
The Frente Negra's savings co-op financed home purchases, business
endeavours (like tailors' and barbers' shops), medical offices
and primary schools for its members. Its weekly education meetings
included sections on national history and culture. The Frente
Negra's flag even featured a prominent reference to the Palmares
Maroon community (1595-1695), a link the radical intellectuals
had failed to make.
The Frente Negra's self-help and self-defence campaigns echoed
those of the African Blood Brotherhood (in the US) and the Universal
Negro Improvement Association (across Africa and the Americas).
In the Frente Negra's national publication, O Clarin do Alvorada
(The Bugle of the Dawn), a consistent effort was made to cover
the international conditions in which analogous movements thought
and acted.
Nonetheless, when landowners from southern Brazil staged a coup
in 1930 with the support of North American investors, the only
organised opposition came from the labour movement's party and
its professional intellectuals. It may have been divorced from
the social movements outside the factories but it was the only
national organisation critical of the new situation. The sector
of the modernist cultural movement that included Oswald de Andrade
and Patricia Galvao joined
the party early in 1931.
During March and April 1931, de Andrade, Galvao and Alvaro Duarte
began publishing O Homen do Povo (A Man of the People) as a journal
of commentary about the social conflicts swept under the carpet
by the distorted representations of mass culture. Galvao designed
the illustrations, blocked the titles, organised the layout,
answered the mail, drew the comic strip under one pseudonym and,
under another, wrote a column on page two of every issue under
the heading, `A woman of the people'. Her columns criticised
official morality, the church hierarchy, landowners and charity,
the exploitation of domestic workers by wealthy progressive feminists,
fashion magazines and the lack of solidarity among women.
Arrested shortly after O Homen do Povo was closed down by the
government, Galvao was abandoned by the political prisoners of
her own organisation. Upon her release, she began to research
a novel about the illiterate women of Braz, the Sao Paulo industrial
district where she had grown up. Given the historical conditions
of the formation of the Brazilian labour force, the novel was
intended to illustrate the links between nationality, race, class
and gender. It was undertaken without any intellectual support
from the professional radicals who were currently restructuring
a national communist
organisation from the same industrial district. This organisational
effort was to prove difficult since its activists had recently
fled Braz after a failed strike, but were returning to gather
support for an electoral alliance. Galvao, on the other hand,
was looking for evidence of self-organisation in the tenements,
bars, and city squares where the workers and the marginalised
met and talked to each other.
Galvao's novel Industrial Park (1933) is about the economic control
of public opinion, about the public spaces where neighbours identify
the problems they face and what prevents their solution, and
about those who benefit from the inequities of life in an industrial
district. After a private edition of the novel had gone into
circulation (under yet another pseudonym), Galvao went abroad
as a foreign correspondent for three urban dailies. She travelled
in Central and North America, Asia and Europe, remaining a second
year in Paris (1935) to study at the Popular University with
Paul Nizan
and Georges Politzer. Her studies abroad were interrupted when
she was deported back to Brazil and jailed for a second term.
When the Vargas government staged another coup in 1937, all political
and social organisations were banned until the armed forces overthrew
Vargas in 1945. The Frente Negra reappeared as the Asociaciao
Nacional, to publish a newspaper now called Alvorada under the
direction of Jose Correia Leite, Fernando Goes and Raul J. Amaral.
Much like the members of the Negro Workers Cultural and Social
Association (NWCSA) in Trinidad (1935-1945), those in the Asociaciao
Nacional learned to bring economic, social, cultural and racial
issues together. This new version of the Brazilian group was
organised in sections and its action projects were approved as
soon as they had 1,000 supporters. But, caught between jail,
exile and isolation, Galvao's colleagues had more difficulties
in regrouping and consolidating the lessons from their experiences.
Jacques
Roumain
The US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) forced some native intellectual
workers, who persisted in imitating French culture, to re-evaluate
their allegiance. The continuation of the Maroon wars by peasant
armies (known in the twentieth century as the `cacos'), which
fought the invasion, had lasted from 1915 to 1920 -- even as
the children of the elites were still being sent to study in
Europe.
One group of Haitian intellectuals, who returned to Haiti in
1926 and who included Jacques Roumain, joined the Patriotic Youth
League. This published two magazines, La Trouee (The Breakthrough)
and La Revue Indigene, as well as a newspaper, Le Petit Impartial,
to oppose both the military occupation and the collaboration
of neighbours and
relatives. Unable to find explanations or solutions within the
European traditions they had been trained to accept, the Patriotic
Youth League turned to investigating the Maroon communities and
their peasant descendants who had, till recently, been carrying
on the resistance. At the same time, this small research collective
attempted a critical evaluation of its own `caste'. Encouraged
by Jean Price Mars' public lectures, which stressed the African
contribution to the peasant culture of Haiti, this renewed interest
in the strategies of popular opposition could be seen as an effort
to find precedents and allies against the economic and military
intervention.
In 1928 and again in 1929, Roumain participated in organising
urban mobilisations against the occupation. Even before he was
arrested in 1929, these urban protests had gained support from
recurring peasant uprisings. By the autumn of 1929, this coalition
had evolved into a mass general strike. During his 1929 jail
term, Roumain wrote a critical evaluation of the light-skinned
elites in his novel La Proie et l'Ombre (The Prey and the Shadow),
another called Les Fantoches
(The Puppets) about the urban elites who collaborated with the
occupation and the rich nationalists who eventually joined the
government payroll, and a third, La Montagne Ensorcelee (The
Bewitched Mountain), in which peasants tell the stories of their
daily lives, revealing, in the process, the role of religion
as resistance. In 1930, still under Roumain's leadership, the
urban protests and peasant uprisings continued. At the same time
Roumain was also one of a small group intervening in the electoral
campaign against Vincent Borno. This is precisely the type of
action that Fernando Ortiz recommended in his 1930 biographical
introduction to O'Kelly's book: working with reformists and radicals
simultaneously in order to maintain the initiative. Roumain was
twice appointed to the government in order to isolate him from
the popular movement, and twice he resigned. In 1931, the three
books he had written in jail were published; La Montagne Ensorcelee
with a foreword by Jean Price Mars.
Meanwhile, Langston Hughes, on his second trip to Havana, spent
the spring and summer of 1931 with Nicolas Guillen and some of
the others who combined race, class and nationalism in their
action-oriented research. Hughes brought news from the Cuban
exiles in New York, from the stateside cultural movements and
from the international labour
movement. In the autumn of 1931, Hughes travelled on to Haiti
where he met Roumain. Soon after Hughes's visit, Roumain made
a short trip to New York and returned to make his communist affiliation
public. When he was arrested again at the end of 1932, two other
activist- intellectuals were with him: another Haitian and a
colleague from the
Dominican Republic. Upon his release in early 1933, Roumain researched
and wrote Analyse Schematique, 1932-1934 with other members of
their small radical group, C. Beaulieu and E. D. Charlier. In
that text, they discuss the economic consequences of the US occupation,
the limitations of cultural nationalism, colour prejudice from
a class perspective, and (recalling the Maroon vocabulary against
capitalism, colonialism and slavery), they proposed solutions
for the problems of the peasantry. In 1934, Roumain was arrested
yet again and sentenced to three years imprisonment by a foreign-controlled
military tribunal. In 1936, he was deported to Belgium, then,
in 1937, went on to resume his research and training in Paris,
at the Sorbonne. That same year, he was at an international congress
of writers in Paris together with Nicolas Guillen (Cuba), Alejo
Carpentier (Cuba), Langston Hughes, Leon Damas (Cayenne) and
Rene Martin (Martinique). Most of them, including Roumain, went
on to take part in congresses of anti-fascist writers in Madrid
and Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. He returned to Haiti
in 1941.
Conclusion
Given the necessary brevity of this discussion, I have had to
exclude several groups which were contemporaries or colleagues
of C. L. R. James, either because they did not co-operate actively
with popular movements or because their work has been amply researched
by anglo-phone writers who will be more familiar to Race &
Class readers.[17] I have tried to indicate several instances
in which the popular will merged with the efforts made by groups
of intellectuals who were involved in the regional exchange of
experience and analysis. And I have tried to show how they came
to understand the forces which isolated their countries and attempted
to create the conditions for conscious, emancipatory activity.
They were able to develop the links of a regional community from
a vantage point that recognised the continuity of popular, oppositional
practices.
Despite frequent interruptions in that regional consciousness,
there were occasions when barriers were overcome, demonstrating
cross-cultural relations among some hitherto unacknowledged historical
protagonists.[18] Rodney and James before him were both part
of a tradition of historical analysis learned in small research
groups that connected popular struggles against the indigenous
junior partners of colonial empires across Africa and the Americas.
Understanding the way that such conflicts have been represented
requires recognising the connections between the individuals
and groups producing them, as well as understanding the impact
of events on their work. What I have termed 'maroon collectives'
were a means of asserting the continued evolution of the popular
as a set of processes practised in the Caribbean by a mixture
of diasporic communities from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Arab
world.
The bearers of the knowledge that travelled through those popular
practices had at least two outstanding features: they had gained
their freedom from the direct experience of living with the land,
and their perspective on the present was informed by holistic
memories. My purpose in identifying the memories sustaining these
collective biographies has been to examine the ways in which
the connections between groups and individuals were negotiated.
It is also a way of
commemorating and `re-membering' the occasions on which intellectuals
and popular movements acted together like the 'many-headed hydra'
of classical mythology, whom Hercules had so much difficulty
in slaying, for it ever renewed itself.[19]
References
[1] Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: selected essays (Charlottesville,
University Press of Virginia, 1992).
[2] Antonio Benitez Rojo, La Isla que se Repite: el Caribe y
la perspectiva postmoderna (The Island is Repeated: the Caribbean
and the post-modern perspective) (Hanover, NH, Ediciones del
Norte, 1989).
[3] Walter Rodney, Walter Rodney Speaks: the making of an African
intellectual, edited by Robert A. Hill (Trenton, NJ, African
World Press, 1990), pp. 112-15.
[4] Maryse Conde `Pan Africanism, feminism and culture', in S.
Lemelle and R. D. G. Kelley (eds) Imagining Home: class, culture
and nationalism in the African diaspora (London and New York,
Verso, 1994), pp. 55-65.
[5] Rene Depestre, `Problems of identity for the Black man in
the Caribbean', in J. Hearne (ed.); Carifesta Forum: an anthology
of Caribbean voices (Kingston, Institute of Jamaica, 1976), pp.
61-7; Wilson Harris, History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean
and Guianas (Georgetown, History and Arts Council/Ministry of
Information and Culture, 1970), pp. 13-15, 23-7; and Darcy Ribeiro,
Los Brasilenos: teoria de Brasil (The Brazilians: theory of Brazil)
(Mexico, DF, Siglo XXI, 1978).
|[6] Walter Rodney, `The African revolution', in Paul Buhle (ed.),
C.L.R. James, His Life and Work (London and New York, Allison
and Busby, 1986), p. 34.
[7] Antonio Benitez Rojo, La Isla que se Repite, op. cit., p.
294; Virginia Radcliffe, The Caribbean Heritage (New York, Walker,
1976), pp. 120-1.
[8] Sylvia Wynter, `Beyond the world of man: Glissant and the
new discourse of the Antilles', World Literature Today (Vol.
63, no. 4, Autumn, 1989), pp. 642-4.
[9] C. L. R. James refers to this in a 1944 letter to Constance
Webb -- a new form of representing society developed by Walt
Whitman came with his participation in social struggles, as a
member of a more conscious collective unit. See Anna Grimshaw
(ed.), C.L.R. James Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), pp. 138-9.
[10] Paulo Freire, Extension o Comunicacion? La conscientizacion
en el medio rural (Extension or Communication? Conscientisation
in the rural context) (Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 1973), pp. 73-9;
Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, edited
by T. J. Tren and R. K. Merton (Chicago, IL and London, University
of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 28, 53-4, 64, 97, 99, 118, 123,
142, 179-81.
[11] Darcy Ribeiro, Los Brasilenos, op. cit., p. 164. My translation.
Elsewhere in the text, those initiated in African religions will
he referred to as in secret societies.
[12] C. L. R. James, Grace Lee and P. Chalieu (Cornelius Castoriadis),
Facing Reality, (Detroit, MI, Bewick, 1974), pp. 136, 138, 148,
165; A. M. Nethol and Mabel Piccini, Introduccion a la Pedagogia
de la Comunicacion (Introduction to the Pedagogy of Communication)
(Mexico, DF, Terra Nova, 1984), pp. 88-9, 102-3.
[13] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: the
hidden transcript (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1990)
pp. 120-7.
[14] Ted Vincent, Keep Cool: the Black activists who built the
Jazz Age (London, Pluto, 1995); W. B. Turner and J. M. Turner
(eds), Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: collected
writings, 1920-1972 (London, Pluto, 1988) pp. 35-51, 88-9.
[15] I am very interested in finding out whether any of the radical
Caribbean immigrants in New York City were connected with George
Schuyler's Young Negroes Cooperative League. This group used
economic boycotts, buy-Black campaigns, collective bank accounts,
volunteer services, bulk buying, group homes and the reinvention
of the extended family during the 1930s. Ella Baker, `Fundi',
one of their leading intellectuals, published investigative journalism
(based on her undercover work as a domestic servant) in the NAACP's
The Crisis during 1935.
[16] Gerard Pierre-Charles, El Pensamiento Socio Politico Moderno
en el Caribe (Modern Socio-political Thought in the Caribbean)
(Mexico, DF, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1985); I. Phaf, `Caribbean
imagination and nation building in Antillean and Surinamese literature',
in Callaloo (Vol. 11, no. 1, 1988) pp. 148-71.
[17] The Beacon group (1929-1933) included C. L. R. James before
he migrated to England in 1932. The NWCSA (1935-1945) was a small
group that started in Trinidad after James went to England. The
Negritude group from the Francophone Caribbean is not included
because its participants were students in Paris between 1932
and 1939. Their
later political interventions did not include active participation
in popular movements. In Cesaire's case, running for public office
in Martinique was not even considered until after a seven-month
trip to Haiti in 1944. To the best of my knowledge, Pales Matos
(Puerto Rico) did not himself belong to a small research collective
of activist intellectuals who co-operated with the popular movements.
Schomburg did and, as a cultural promoter, he is surely on the
same level as
Fernando Ortiz or Jean Price Mars. His work, however, has been
amply researched by others. See Elinor D. V. Sinnette, Arthur
Alfonso Schomburg: black bibliophile and collector, a biography
(New York, New York Public Library and Wayne State University
Press, 1989); Winston James, `Afro-Puerto Rican radicalism in
the United States: reflections on the political trajectories
of Arturo Schomburg and Jesus Colon', Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos
(Vol. VIII, nos. 1-
2, 1996), pp. 92-127, and Flor Pineiro de Rivera, Arturo Schomburg:
un Puertorriqueno descubre el legado historico del Negro (San
Juan, Puerto Rico, Centro de Estudios Avanzados, 1989).
[18] Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, op. cit., pp. 222-3,
61-3.
[19] Allusions to the story of Hercules and the Hydra appear
in European versions of the Maroon wars in the Dutch and British
colonies. See Richard Price, To Slay the Hydra: Dutch colonial
perspectives on the Saramaka wars (Ann Arbor, MI, Karoma, 1983),
p. 15; and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, `The many headed
Hydra: sailors, slaves and the Atlantic working class in the
eighteenth century', in R. Sakolsky and J. Koehnline (eds), Gone
to Croatan: origins of North American dropout culture (NY, Autonomedia,
1993), pp. 129-60.
W. F. Santiago-Valles teaches in the Communication Department and on the Black Americana Studies Program at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is also Director of the Lewis Walker Institute for Race and Ethnic Relations there.
Document Number: A66709133 (c) 2002 by The Gale Group, Inc.