Dear Joseph & All;
The answer to your question must
expose a few dirty secrets about "Caribbean scholars
and scholarship":
The Ian Randle Publication "Contending with Destiny"
consists of the proceedings of a conference held at
UWI Mona in 1999, whose theme was The Caribbean in the
21 st Century. The content illustrates clearly that
when AngloCaribbean scholars talk about the Caribbean,
they mean, generally, the Anglo Caribbean, unless some
very specific agenda is served by invoking the
non-AngloCaribbean.
The essay by Ralph Premdas in the same volume (161)
states explicitly the each island is concerned with
its own affairs rather than any regional bloc. The
failure of the Federation attempt demonstrated this,
and provided a reason: the ethos of the Anglophone
Caribbean is a particularly philistine, nakedly
rapacious, and determinedly insular. Trinidadians,
because of their wealth, look down on the rest of the
Caribbean.
The Francophone Caribbean, as Naipaul said, is
France--this means stability, order, and devices that
prevent psychopaths from strangling countries. They
actually have very little in common with the
AngloCaribbean, and there is some commerce, but
nothing significant politically and culturally.
The Hispanophone Caribbean, for all its problems has a
notion of art and culture which has helped to sustain
a sense of humanism if not humanity, or at least
pockets of it.
In the Anglophone Caribbean, nothing that does not
support the ruling political party, or make money is
considered to be of any importance. Read Walcott's
"What the Twilight Says".
Nothing seems set to change because of the social
systems created by a particularly damaged set of post
Independence leaders. Neither Williams nor Manley, nor
any of the other players in the 1950s, could
countenance losing their fiefdoms to federal control.
Williams manipulated the culture of Trinidad into one
of gross inefficiency, institutionalised corruption,
and ethnic hostility to ensure he ruled till he
died--he also exiled CLR James. The Manley dynasty
destroyed Jamaica through the same hubristic sense of
entitlement.
Barbados is the most stable society in the region, and
is justifiably contemptuous of Trinidad and Jamaica.
The others (St Lucia, St Vincent etc) are simply too
small to be considered nations in any but the nominal
sense.
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.
Readers of this list might have seen a post recently
from me which described an IndoTrinidadian calypso
tent--were it not for me, no one from UWI St Augustine
would have even acknowledged its existence, or the
social implications.
There's also the fact that all islands, without
exception, are far more interested in, and connected
to, North America--the mass of the population see it
as a place to escape to--than they are in their
neighbours. Haiti is seen as a backward, violent
place, if seen at all. And while many UWI graduate
students probably know who CLR James is, I would
estimate 95 per cent of them have read nothing of his,
and know very little past "Beyond a Boundary". I would
say the same is true of many lecturers.
Still, you might want to look at Trinidadian
calypsonian, David Rudder's song "Haiti"--Rudder has
migrated to Canada, by the way.
I don't know if this has helped.
Raymond.
--- [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Greetings Fellow Caribbeanists:
> I assigned Joan Dayan's "Haiti, History and the
> Gods" (a very under-read
> text) to my graduate class and we found ourselves
> confronting the following
> question: why is there such silence about Haiti in
> Anglophone Caribbean
> studies? Am I wrong in this? James tried to center
> Haiti and the Haitian
> revolution as crucial to New World black identity in
> is classic text and
> Lamming took up the call by discussing James in his
> own now classic text,
> "The Pleasures of Exile" but there seems to be very
> little that has tried to
> find an anchor in the event that is Haiti. Is Haiti
> a kind of traumatic
> kernel in West Indian identity? If Anglophone
> intellectuals were able to
> "journey" epistemologically and literally to
> Castro's Cuba why have they not
> done so with Haiti? Of course perhaps the most basic
> barrier here is language
> but language does not seem to have prevented an
> encounter with Cuba? I'd be
> interested in hearing other's thoughts on this. I'm
> hoping that its a case of
> my simply not knowing the literature.
> 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
> [log in to unmask]
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