All:
<< UWI's intellectuals are far too preoccupied with
preserving their positions of status and authority
within the islands' political and social systems to
bother with anything not directly concerned with
that--this usually means a banal and intellectually
shallow Afrocentrism, supporting and legitimising
government cultural and economic policy which has more
to do with African American politics and exporting
primitivism for grants from first world foundations,
than actually doing research on something they can't
get a grant for.
>>
Raymond, I found your post interesting and I felt the rage and frustration
that I also feel about the place that I call home but in which I can *find*
no home, as it were. But I wondered about the passage that I've pasted above.
When you get to the intellectual class, any discussion of their function must
attend to the fact that, particularly at Mona, the state has always viewed
the Ivory tower with suspicion. Witness the Jamaican state's expulsion of
Rodney and much of the New world Group in the '60's and 70's. One of the most
insistent demands for civil justice in Jamaica has come from the academy in
the form of Trevor Munroe, Carl Stone, Selwyn Ryan, Selwyn Cudjoe to give
other examples. So I don't think your description of the Caribbean public
sphere and its relationship to "non-acquisitive" labour holds vis a vis the
intellectuals.
As to their putative Afrocentricism: again I can't agree. If there is an
adoption of an afrocentric position--whether shallow or thoroughly
engaged--then oughtn't they to have lots to say about the Haitian revolution?
Shouldn't they be rallying round the first Black independent nation in the
hemisphere?... So I think you paint with too broad a brush. The kinds of rage
and frustration one feels about the insular, philistine nature of so many
Caribbean cultures doesn't directly translate to the folks in the academy who
are underpaid and overworked for the most part. Only within the past 4 or 5
years have they begun to react to the failure of Grenada and the deleterious
effects of neo-liberalism and structural adjustment programs.
So you are probably right about the ways in which each island views other
islands within the Caribbean public sphere (if there is one) but I think the
intellectuals, in their engagement with Castro via Carifesta, with their
attempts to include the work of Francophone writers (Martinique, Guadeloupe,
French Guyana, but once again not Haiti) in the "syllabus" for the regional
CXC exams, I think they have been a model of the idea of federation that the
public sphere has given up on. But let's keep talking; I'm finding this very
interesting.
Best
Joseph N Clarke
Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literatures
in English
The University of Pennsylvania
English Department, Bennett Hall 119
3340 Walnut Street
Philadelphia PA 19104-6273 USA
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