Notes
Jack Webb, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and William Tantam
Throughout the history of colonialism in the Caribbean, there have been processes of decolonisation. Caribbean peoples have adopted (and adopt) various techniques – from advocating imperial reform to employing strategic military resistance – to challenge, change and in many cases overturn the political structures of colonialism. This dynamic has not only taken place within the region itself. As people migrated from the Caribbean to North America and Europe during, for instance, the era of formal decolonisation in the mid to late twentieth century, they confronted new ‘colonised’ contexts across the West and in particular in Britain. By challenging ideas of racial superiority and British exceptionalism that were prevalent in the ‘motherland’, Caribbean migrants worked to decolonise these new contexts. As the ensuing chapters illustrate, these acts of decolonisation become clear in the memories of members of the Caribbean diaspora now based in Britain. Academic and personal accounts are placed in conversation through the inclusion of critical reflections of Caribbean migrants and academic works that detail and critique broader contexts of Caribbean migration and decolonisation. In reading these chapters together, a complex vision of Caribbean decolonisation(s) emerges, a process that takes place as much in the personal context as in that of the transnational.
This volume provides a nuanced understanding of decolonisation, an understanding which is rooted in community knowledge and heritage as much as it is in scholarly pronouncements. We understand decolonisation to be a negotiated process rather than any fixed event. Conceiving of it in this way stresses the actions of, and interplay between, people in the Caribbean and the broader Atlantic, and moves us away from a binary notion of colonisers and colonised. Through perceiving decolonisation as processual, rather than as an event, we are necessarily paying particular attention to the ranging forms that such processes can take and their varying outcomes. As many of the contributors to this book point out, processes of decolonisation coincide with, or indeed involve, acts of colonialism.1 Our use of the term (de)colonisation is thus a means through which to stress the multiplicity of processes of colonisation that are advancing and receding simultaneously across various contexts.
Rather than an event, too often identified by scholars as the formal ‘transfer of power’ from imperial authorities to national political elites, processes of decolonisation have occurred throughout histories of colonialism as acts of negotiation between colonised and colonising peoples. In this sense, decolonisation can be seen to have occurred across historical and cultural contexts, both before and after the formal decolonisation acts of the mid to late 20th century. To some extent, this understanding of decolonisation has been made possible by critiques of colonialism offered by scholars such as Frantz Fanon (1967) and Ashis Nandy (1983). Respectively working on the Caribbean and South Asian contexts, both these critics highlight the effects of colonisation on the cultures and world views of people within colonised regions. More than just territorial annexations, Nandy explains, there is a ‘second colonialism’: ‘This colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all … The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds’ (1983, p. xi). This move towards an understanding of colonialism in personal, intellectual and cultural terms brings into question the multiple power struggles of and against imperialism beyond the diplomatic sphere. Jordana Bailkin emphasises the need for a turn towards a more pluralistic conception of decolonisation when she writes that ‘the extraordinarily diverse challenges to European empire cannot be reduced to a singular process’ (2015, p. 885). Decolonisation, then, needs to be recognised as a set of processes that could take place in the everyday as much as an event that occurred with the formal transfer of power.
The chapters that follow demonstrate the multiple processes of decolonisation that have taken place throughout the history of the Caribbean, from personal acts of challenging and correcting racialised discourse to efforts to prevent multinational corporations expropriating resources from Caribbean communities. This more diffuse treatment of decolonisation, as something that could be enacted personally as much as on the state level, is illustrated most effectively in the chapters that reflect on the actions of Caribbean migrants to Britain. Such individuals worked, both wittingly and unwittingly, to challenge ideologies of colonialism, such as forms of racism and nationalism, within the ‘motherland’. Caribbean decolonisation was not, then, a process that applied only to the Caribbean: it also occurred across the Atlantic World. This phenomenon was proliferated and made more expedient by the fifty thousand Caribbean people who arrived in Britain during the Windrush generation. Decolonisation is not something that was brokered solely by colonial governments and local political elites but is a negotiated process that involved many, if not all, of these Caribbean migrants, as well as those that stayed at home.
By moving away from decolonisation as a fixed event and paying attention to the constant negotiation of colonisation and decolonisation in the history of the Caribbean, we necessarily acknowledge the agency of ‘colonised’ Caribbean peoples in dismantling not only colonial political structures and institutions but also the knowledges and cultures of imperialism. This emphasis on personal interaction and negotiation highlights further the extent to which both colonisation and decolonisation were not inevitable effects so much as multifaceted processes which could simultaneously advance or recede in any particular historical moment. Just as colonisation did not follow a simple path of annexation and control, decolonisation has not simply progressed in the wake of colonisation. Historically, the two processes are inextricably entwined and in constant conversation.
Decolonisation in histories of the Caribbean
By moving away from the conceptualisation of decolonisation as a formal event, it becomes clear that aspects of imperialism, and resistance to it, have – to use Ann Laura Stoler’s term – endured (2016). It also illustrates the fact that acts of decolonisation have a long history that precedes the withdrawal of colonial forces. The substantial resistance to European settlement by Amerindian communities in the Lesser Antilles has seen one historian refer to the area as the ‘Poison Arrow Curtain’ (Burnett, 2000, p. 19). In his assessment of 18th-century Dutch colonialism in Guyana, historian Alvin Thompson has argued persuasively that much of the Dutch portrayal of ‘ownership’ of Guyana was illusory and emphasised the extent to which the Dutch relied upon the assistance of the indigenous communities of the region (1987, p. 199). And during the English invasion of Jamaica (1655), to illustrate the point further, a group of resident African men and women enslaved by the Spanish on the island seized the opportunity not only to escape and form their own communities, but also to resist and harass the English army (Pestana, 2017; chapter 8 by Simeonov in this volume). These communities would go on to form the Maroon settlements that took in the enslaved who had escaped from the plantation system. The rejection of colonial rule by a population of self-emancipated African people thus occurred at the very beginning of the British colonisation of the Caribbean.
The meaning of decolonisation has evolved throughout the history of the Caribbean. Nowhere is the shifting significance of decolonisation clearer than in the Haitian context. In the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), the armies of enslaved and ‘free’ people of mixed ethnicity defeated the colonial forces of France, Spain and Britain. Enslavement was abolished, reinstated and abolished again. And, on 1 January 1804, the revolutionaries declared independence from French colonial rule.2 Despite such radical assertions of emancipation and liberation, the effort to decolonise the territory in a formal sense was not omnipresent throughout the revolution. The painstaking research of scholars such as Carolyn Fick (1990; 1998) has laid out the complex ideological motivations behind the actions of the enslaved, illustrating that many would-be revolutionaries were, at the outset, compelled to violence through the desire for improved working conditions rather than any notion of Haitian independence. It became clear to the leaders of the rebelling armies, however, that to maintain their self-emancipated status and permanently to destroy the plantation system, it was necessary to declare independence from the enslaving forces of France. What made this gesture especially radical in the context of the Atlantic world was not necessarily the declaration of independence, as this had a precedent in the United States, but the assertion of what this country was to become: a nation state governed by people of African descent, with the exenslaved predominant among its ranks. This statement of ‘black’ independence and statehood ended the violence of military procedures in Haiti, but also set the nascent nation on a trajectory of ideological conflict with the world’s colonising powers. In a sense, the formal declaration of the independence of Haiti in 1804 marked the beginning of struggles to decolonise, to assert the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and to have this recognised by the Atlantic’s imperial powers.
The decolonisation of Haiti was, and continues to be, a negotiated process, a negotiation that took place over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 1804 Haitian leaders have issued clear statements of their right and ability to govern over the independent nation in a language designed to be understood by European and American audiences.3 Some of the earliest examples of these include the writings of Boisrand-Tonnerre and the Baron de Vastey (Daut, 2017, 2009).4 These early Haitian authors, as Marlene Daut makes clear, asserted the legitimacy of the Haitian nation. Vastey observes that ‘[t]he majority of historians who have written about the colonies were whites, colonists even … [N]ow that we have Haitian printing presses … we can reveal the crimes of the colonists and respond to the most absurd calumnies, invented by the prejudice and greed of our oppressors’ (in Daut, 2009, p. 3). The military engagements of the Haitian Revolution were over and independence had been declared but, as Vastey realised, Haitians were now faced with a new project of decolonisation.
It is clear that varying projects of decolonisation had taken place within the Haitian and the wider Caribbean contexts long before any discussions concerning the formal transference of power occurred among amongst colonial elites. These histories of decolonisation have, though, been neglected within the academy. This is not least because evidence of the involvement of Caribbean peoples in these negotiations is not readily available in the archives. Archival records overwhelmingly represent decolonisation as the formal ‘transfer of power’ (Mir, 2015). This situation is the outcome of the very practice of archivisation. As Jacques Derrida makes clear, the act of archivisation determines what is to be accessible and inaccessible to the future; it ‘produces as much as it records the event’ (1996, p. 17). As the colonial authorities constructed archives, they also created a narrative of imperialism for future researchers. Commenting on the condition of the records pertaining to decolonisation at the National Archives in London, Caroline Elkins, for instance, observes ‘[f] rom the carefully managed files, a sense of a coherent decolonisation process, and one that adhered to and imparted the rule of law, just as the colonial administration and archivists in London adhered, and still adhere, to the rule of document preservation’ (2015, p. 852). For Caribbeanists, then, the archive can be a dangerous place as it offers versions of the past that reflect the concerns of the imperial authorities rather than a more democratic record of the voices and actions of the ‘colonised’ peoples. This archival bias is part of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has referred to as the ‘silencing’ of certain Caribbean pasts (1995).
To generate histories that encompass ‘colonised’ Caribbean voices, it is necessary to reconsider what constitutes the archive. One means through which to create a more democratic collection of data, and thus to generate inclusive histories of decolonisation, is the use of oral histories. Perhaps in part because of the lack of archival material pertaining to Caribbean life outside imperial accounts, oral testimony has proved particularly fruitful for scholars of the region (Besson, 2002; Chamberlain, 2005). This volume adds to this tradition by considering the importance of oral accounts in creating a more pluralistic understanding of decolonisation. The memories of Caribbean peoples serve to construct a particular archive that provides alternative visions of decolonisation. Without such memories and the experiences that they recall, the history of decolonisation remains limited and, indeed, dominated by imperial narratives. The act of recording life histories thus aids in the decolonisation of the archive. This is not necessarily to isolate the experiences of Caribbean peoples and place them at the ‘centre of scholarship’, so much as to move towards a multifaceted history of the Caribbean in which the overwhelming significance of the actions of Caribbean peoples is recognised.5
Personal acts of decolonisation
As Caribbean people migrated within and across national contexts, they reckoned with multiple forms of colonisation and the attending imperial logics. Examining personal testimonies of such Caribbean migrants enriches any understanding of decolonisation as a democratic venture that takes place in locales across the Atlantic. Christer Petley describes the need to recognise historical relations between the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic as akin to islands in relation to one another, rather than as ‘metropoles’ (centres) and ‘colonies’ (peripheries) (2011). Examining the movements and experiences of peoples between these ‘islands’ challenges notions of a centre/periphery divide. Histories of decolonisation also emerge as decentred ventures. As the Guyanese schoolteacher and all-round educator Joyce Trotman once exclaimed, amidst an oral history interview to her ‘British’ interviewee: ‘So this is your history too? People always see the Caribbean as a different place to Britain, as if Caribbean people are not British. We’ve all got British grandfathers and family. My grandfather was Scottish. What you’re asking about is British history too, it’s not just Caribbean’.6 Trotman here provides a powerful reminder that the history of the Caribbean involves a set of personal entanglements with the wider world and in particular with imperial powers.
Oral histories help to emphasise the rich tapestry of Caribbean lives as opposed to an imposed colonial narrative. The chapters in this book which are based on memoir (Nobrega, Ramrayka, Braithwaite and to some extent Egglestone, Chambers and Henry) and its analysis (Westmaas) all highlight the various and specific struggles for, and encounters with, decolonisation. Westmaas, for instance, examines the experiences of two Guyanese migrants (Joyce Trotman and Eric Huntley) to Britain during the period of formal decolonisation in their country of birth. Leaving one decolonising context, they were met in Britain with a set of colonial world views that worked to deny their status as British citizens and instead emphasised a racial inferiority. Their experiences were not, though, wholly equivalent to one another as each set about challenging the colonial mindsets with which they were confronted. Faced with racism in the classrooms of London’s East End in the 1960s, Trotman worked to educate her pupils with astonishing effect on the absurdity of the concept of racial hierarchy. Trotman decolonised both institution and community as she fronted down child racists-in-progress and challenged them to critique the prejudicial stories they heard at home.7 Eric and Jessica Huntley strove for the decolonisation of their native Guyana, by organising on behalf of the British Guyana Freedom Association and of the British context, by establishing the radical anti-racist, anti-colonial bookshop and publishers, Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications. This publisher formed a nodal point in decolonising networks, producing and disseminating anti-colonial ideas from its base in London.8
In many of the essays and testimonies of Windrush-era migrants we can see that they inadvertently found themselves taking on the burden of decolonising the metropole. In Peter Ramrayka’s case, this took place through his work in institutions like the RAF and the NHS (chapter 5). From Bruce Nobrega’s powerful act of confronting his boss with the fact of the company’s discriminatory pay policy (chapter 2) to the time Joyce Trotman, as a student, confronted the uncharitable behaviour of ‘Christians’ at her hostel (chapter 11), it is clear that while Guyana was literally in the process of decolonising, its migrants to the UK were performing a role in decolonising the minds of the British people they encountered every day. Sometimes these acts of resistance were subtle challenges to invisible colour bars, for example Peter Ramrayka’s ascendance to a senior management role in the NHS when there was a seemingly unwritten rule that people of colour could not occupy management positions; at other times it is clear that Windrush migrants were literally putting their lives on the line.9
Through these same contributors we are able to understand, at firsthand, the power of the colonial structures that dominated their lives in the Caribbean. Joyce Trotman, for example, references the sense of belonging to a collective empire that was fuelled by the singing of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Poignantly, she notes that at the same time Indian indentured labourers were present outside the church, passengers of empire notoriously poorly treated in colonial Guyana, awaiting a portion of land or return voyage to India. Bruce Nobrega also highlights the propaganda of empire as he reminisces on the extent to which Guyanese of the colonial era felt a sense of British identity through the process of ‘indoctrination’ that formed part of their experiences in church and in school. He references the face of Queen Elizabeth on his exercise books – only one element of his daily life that served to send him a message of ‘belonging’ to the ‘mother country’.10 This experience intercedes with that of Anne Braithwaite, who describes how she learned to see her compatriots through a racialised lens under colonial tutoring.
While migrants were involuntarily burdened with decolonising the minds of the people and institutions they encountered in the UK, some were also coming to terms with the myths of colonial benevolence that had been peddled by the British at home. These stories are more than descriptive: they challenge how we define activism and resistance. For it is evident in each of these chapters that the individual lives of Windrush-era migrants were records of continual fights against prejudice and racism. Whether or not they were teachers like Joyce Trotman, they were forced into the role of educators. Crucially, Guyana’s Windrush women had an important part to play in this story and Bruce Nobrega’s dedication to his mother Cécile Nobrega, the remarkable woman responsible for Britain’s first public statue of a black woman, depicted on the cover of this volume, is indicative of the knowledge, at community level, of the vast contribution made by these women. The extent to which the contribution of Windrush women has been devalued or ignored is seen in the lack of attention paid to their output. While many of us know the memoir To Sir With Love by Guyana-born E. R. Brathwaite, few have read or are aware of his fellow Guyanese Beryl Gilroy’s biographical novel Black Teacher and her pioneering work in schools in the 1950s.
The primary focus of this volume is to place in conversation academic knowledges of (de)colonisation with those of the Caribbean community and in particular members of the Windrush generation. Its aims are perhaps best summed up by one of the contributors, Kelly Delancey, whose piece was motivated by her desire to understand how the ‘residents and descendants of Tarpum Bay define their heritage and themselves’. Her determination to rectify the situation of top-down heritage creation and prioritise a community’s right to share their history in their own words is the very essence of the editors’ intention to disrupt and challenge academic power by giving voice to the lived experience and authority of British Windrush-era migrants.11 Through placing academia in conversation with individual self-reflections of decolonisation, we are able to consider in new ways how academics have traditionally accepted and enforced colonial structures rather than critiqued and confronted them. Such analysis forms an important part of the work of Henry, Chambers and Egglestone (chapters 4, 6 and 10 respectively) as they reference their own experiences, directly disturbing the lie of the academic as an impartial observer. Henry shows how problematic the assumption of ‘Eurocentric’ academic authority over the lives and experiences of black youth has been by exposing the ‘hidden’ history of references to decolonisation in the deejay performance. Such references have been completely missed by theorists who were confined by their own negative preconceptions. Chambers’s important assessment of the transnational lives and after-lives of colonialism begins with a call to activism to ‘join a decolonisation quest to re-navigate history’. Chambers, however, is not only concerned with the reassessment of history but urges a movement towards ‘the sacred work of decolonising what we remember’, unsettling binaries of black/white and colonised/coloniser as she questions the meaning of Black History Month when it is observed in the unceded territory of Vancouver, for example.
While the chapter by Chambers highlights the continual and dynamic process of decolonisation and the transnational capitalist networks of exploitation, both Matthew Smith (chapter 1) and Anne Braithwaite (chapter 7) reference how the shadows of colonialism operate to detrimental effect in contemporary Guyana and Jamaica. Brathwaite, for example, highlights the fact that many of the Guyanese elite, helped to power by the US and Britain in 1966, feature in positions of power in today’s government. The divisive racism the British promoted between Indian-Guyanese and African-Guyanese when the country was a colony still ‘stymies’ the country, she observes. In both Brathwaite’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ contexts, forms of colonialism threaten to return: capitalist interests loom like parasites in the distance as oil companies prepare to begin work in Guyana; and as Brexit prompts British politicians to consider new trading opportunities, the Commonwealth is increasingly returning as a viable sphere of influence in the British imagination. With these threats, Brathwaite is rightly able to say that the work of decolonisation is ongoing.
Practising decolonisation
This volume attempts not only to reflect on processes of decolonisation but also, as Braithwaite urges us, to participate in its practice. This commitment comes out of early conversations among the editors when convening the conference ‘Memory, Migration and (De)colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond’ (University of London, 2017) from which this volume proceeds. There is, of course, a major problem in that academia has a long tradition of producing knowledge to service colonial ventures. Indeed, although the academy has become much more self-reflective in the past 50 years and various scholarly works published since the civil-rights movement have sought to critique and dismantle colonial knowledge, more work remains to be done to decolonise the academy. Various universities have also been highlighted as continuing to extol and honour imperial traditions, sparking counter-movements seeking to decolonise the university. The pioneering work of the campaign ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ provides one example of the attempt to challenge colonial cultures in the academy. In 2015 this movement recognised the statue of Cecil Rhodes – the late-19th-century British prime minister of the Cape – on the campus of the University of Cape Town as a clear example of the ongoing extolling of imperial figures, knowledges and narratives within the university setting. After significant protest, in particular by students, the university removed the statue in recognition of the need to decolonise academia more broadly. This movement has since gained momentum and inspired parallel campaigns across Europe and the United States. While planning our own conference, we were keen to think of how to decolonise the space of the event and consistently to challenge established boundaries between those attending from inside and outside the academy. Indeed, our starting point was that decolonisation was not only a series of historical moments, with the Haitian Revolution as a key point in this trajectory, but that it also held meanings in the present in terms of challenging the boundaries that continue to centre the privileged view of those within the academy (most often white and male). Concomitantly, we were committed to ensuring that ‘terms on which [academics] start debates about decolonisation and decoloniality are determined by those on the margins’ (Esson et. al, 2017). We wanted to challenge consistently the emergence of boundaries between academic and non-academic participants and to find means to democratise participants’ contributions. In this section, we think through the different methods by which we attempted to decolonise the conference and its outputs.
Through the close relationships of the organisers, and particularly Roderick Westmaas, to the Guyanese community in London, we were privileged to receive their support in organising the event and participating in it, and in producing this publication. Following the maxim ‘nothing about us, without us, is for us’ (with its own history particularly aligned with disability-rights activism), we were committed to including the experiences of those who had moved from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom and had their own views on memory, migration and decolonisation. While it was easy to provide a space in which to speak, we wanted to assume the responsibility to go further by facilitating their inclusion in discussions throughout the conference and not only in the sections dealing with ‘Caribbean migrants’ experiences’.
At the same time, while wanting to be ambitious in our attempts to break down boundaries between knowledges, each of the organisers was also constrained by his or her junior status within the academy and its concomitant precarity. It can be a challenge to be ambitious and to try to alter established formats without being a little anxious about the outcomes. We knew that we wanted to encourage different forms of participation and the submissions reflected this. We received more typically ‘academic’ submissions from disciplines including criminology, literature, history, sociology and anthropology. We received the community involvement of a range of Caribbean migrants’ voices. We were also fortunate to have submissions that challenged the boundaries between formal and informal knowledges, including community practitioners, independent researchers and popular authors.
Further, while trying to emphasise the interconnectedness of people and knowledges from different disciplines and backgrounds we also did not want participants to feel as though they were having to sacrifice depth of analysis or insight in order to make their input transferable. We were concerned that community participants should not gain the impression that their contributions were viewed as entertainment or addenda rather than equally valid insights into the discussions. Conversely, we were aware that some academics can feel threatened by questions raised about their research and wanted to maintain an openness to discussion and a willingness to learn from the unique opportunities offered by the conference’s mixture of knowledges.
Decolonising the space of the conference also consisted in encouraging innovative ways of contributing. Our invitation of guest speakers Professor Tina K. Ramnarine and Dr Lez Henry was inspired by their commitment to challenging traditional forms of academic knowledge and production, and their continued dedication to engaging with communities outside the university. Alongside those working within the academy and the voices of Caribbean migrants we were fortunate to receive presentations from independent researchers working from outside the academy. Indeed, Nadine Chambers’ engagement with the organisers has been invaluable in pushing us to think further about how to maintain the commitment to decolonisation in the process of producing this publication. For instance, the fact that it is to be made open-access and thus available to those without university privileges was key in our decision to approach ILAS/University of London Press. The conference also included the contribution of the artist Rubén Dávila, who gave a performance of his work ‘El Vuelo del Golondrino’ on the experience of Caribbean and Andean migrants to New York.
We therefore decided to organise the community voices as the opening plenary session and elicited ideas for skills workshops, to be interspersed between panels, that would provide tools which might enable the community members to communicate their experiences further. These workshops consisted of ‘Creating memoirs and recording experience: how to produce podcasts and write memoirs’; and ‘Organising for the Caribbean: how to campaign for change in the Caribbean’. Each offered practice-based discussions for how to transmit the experiences of Caribbean communities to wider audiences. Importantly, we wanted to make sure that the conference might offer means through which contributors might be empowered with new skills for disseminating or further mining their experiences, or for organising events around themes emerging from their histories. We felt that community members were often encouraged to attend conferences as though their attendance at these events or introduction into these spaces was enough to justify their gift of time and knowledge. In contrast, we felt responsible for making sure that the conference was meaningful and useful for all those presenting. The workshops were one means through which we attempted to deliver concrete contributions to nonacademic participants who might want to develop their studies and their organisations further.
These community experiences and workshops also enhanced the more formal academic contributions by elucidating the challenges of life-history research and community organising and helped to place the discussions within a wider political and social context. One consistent theme to emerge was the highly politicised legacy of the Haitian Revolution, particularly for Haitians living abroad but also for the Caribbean diaspora more generally. The mixture of viewpoints on the issues underscored the recognition that history is both lived and living and has a dramatic impact on people and communities. The heterogeneous contributions demonstrated the continuities of racisms and placed them in wider historical and global contexts.
Moreover, the conference unearthed and sought to recognise the processes of marginalisation, often overlooked, that continue to exclude people from educational institutions. This thread began in the Caribbean migrants’ session in which contributors spoke of their experiences of school in the Caribbean and how these school networks allowed some to travel and achieve social mobility. It continued through Joyce Trotman’s experience of racism working as a school teacher in the UK, as well as those of a participant who was the first black police officer in his area. A number of contributions approached these themes in terms of higher education and how certain forms of knowledge and researchers are privileged. Marginalisation can work in myriad ways and can easily emerge in forms of academic discussion and event-planning through a lack of care and attention given to thinking about how best to engage with participants who might find the traditional conference format exclusionary.
We have tried to carry these sentiments through into the production of this volume. Similar to our thoughts about how best to integrate personal experiences of migration into the conference, we also wanted to think about how best to intersperse these contributions through the book. We decided that rather than having a section for migrants’ experiences and a separate one for ‘academic’ contributions, it would be more in keeping with our commitment to decolonisation to intersperse each type of submission. Bruce Nobrega’s ‘Why did we come?’, Peter Ramrayka’s ‘Journeying through the motherland’, Anne Braithwaite’s ‘Organising for the Caribbean’ and Roderick Westmaas’s ‘Maybe one day I’ll go home’ use personal testimony as a way into thoughts about aspects of memory, migration and decolonisation in people’s contemporary lives. Thus they serve as a consistent reminder that these discussions have real-world implications and effects felt beyond the academy. While the Haitian Revolution was a particular historical moment, its legacy as a symbol for the overturning of established hierarchies and the democratisation of knowledge practices lives long.
Fortunately, the organisers were blessed by the openness and generosity of all the participants. In the lead up to the conference, all the organisers were taken aback by the support we received from them. Putting the event together became exciting for what it might produce and what we might learn if we critically reflect on the academic practices we take for granted and begin to challenge them. Similarly, as editors we have been more fortunate to have the continued support and input of the contributors, which has not only included their own chapter submissions but also their ideas for how to make the volume meaningful and useful.
However, while we were extremely grateful for and excited about the conference and its productions, we also recognise that much further work remains to be done and more improvements need to be made. London as a venue for knowledge-exchange is steeped in colonial and historical associations. For centuries the city has been enriched and, indeed, made rich by the labour of Caribbean populations, often with little or no remuneration. One significant difficulty for the organisers was the lack of funds available to include more participants from the Caribbean. Although we attempted to mitigate these issues by drawing on the wealth of experience among the Caribbean community in the UK, we were aware of the power imbalances that allowed us to hold a discussion of the Haitian Revolution in London. Nevertheless, we were fortunate to have the contributions of Clara Rachel Eybalin and Marie Lily Cerat, who are active members of Haitian communities in Europe and America. It is our feeling that future conferences might be able to make better use of internet technologies to bypass the prohibitive economic and climate costs of long-distance travel to conferences, and the better to include Caribbean practitioners within discussions.
This volume and the conference constitute our modest attempts to decolonise academic practices through recognising and challenging the boundaries imposed between different forms of knowledge. Recognition of the existence of hierarchies of understanding that emerge between those generated within the ‘academy’ and those emerging from outside constituted a starting point for how we might think about attempting to democratise knowledges. The question to which we consistently returned might be summarised as ‘how to integrate different approaches to decolonisation and reflect that in our practices and the spaces we create’. Decolonisation is always a collaborative act. While the chapters that follow emerge from a variety of disciplines, each has something valuable to contribute to understandings of decolonisation in the Caribbean. Moreover, the efforts made to discuss and learn across disciplinary boundaries themselves constitute a significant act of academic decolonisation. These chapters demonstrate that attempts to dismantle established hierarchies of knowledge have occurred throughout different fields and stages of research. Indeed, decolonisation requires systematic critical reflection on all aspects of practice, from research planning to methods, writing and teaching. What follows is our contribution to this broad global movement currently changing the way we think about the relationship of the academy to other forms of knowledge and cultural production.
The contributions
The chapters are organised so that academic analyses of questions of migration and decolonisation are punctuated by ‘community voices’. Chapter 1, by Matthew Smith, opens our book by detailing emigration from Jamaica in the wake of formal decolonisation in the 1960s. The island’s leaders and ruling elite packaged full self-government as a leap towards modernity in which the challenges of the past would be overcome, and yet Smith illustrates that for many this era was characterised by economic hardship leading to an outflow of people. Indeed, it was a paradox of 1960s Jamaica that in the early years of nationhood the country experienced its highest rates of migration up to that time. This chapter offers a fresh perspective on 1960s Jamaica by examining the hopes and losses of the young nation coming into its own in an unravelling world. Bruce Nobrega, in chapter 2, offers a counterpoint to Smith’s focus on emigration through his reflections on leaving his native Guyana for London. He charts both the effect of ‘indoctrination’ by imperial propaganda when growing up in British Guiana as it instilled a tentative admiration for Britain; and the everyday challenges – once in Britain – of finding a new home and work in the face of an often racist, hostile host population. What becomes palpable is the protagonist’s double movement of disenchantment with the empire and the motherland and yet a growing sense of affection for his new surroundings as he made them ‘home’ through establishing community.
Chapter 3 picks up on and discusses the themes of community and memory through the context of heritage in Tarpum Bay, Bahamas. Here Kelly Delancy illustrates the power of oral-history interviews in tracking the passing of intangible heritage – in this case the knowledges, traditions and values – between generations and the construction of local identities. In the absence of official commemorations of local histories or memories, Delancy shows how the recent past, specifically relating to processes of decolonisation, is related through elders to the benefit of their descendants. In particular, Delancy provides a forceful analysis of how national narratives concerning decolonisation, independence and nationalism are received and mediated within the local context. Chapter 4 by Lez Henry sustains a focus on community in relation to the international, or what Henry terms the ‘outernational’, through the discussion of a community of Caribbean deejays and lyricists based in London in the 1980s. In particular, Henry examines the lyrics and linguistic styles of these artists to argue that these types of lyricism were far more than types of resistance but were, in fact, postcolonial forms of linguistic, cultural antagonism couched in Rastafarian and Garveyite sensibilities. Through such expression, and with the creation of alternative public arenas in which it was consumed, an autonomous sociocultural self that unified members of the Caribbean was created within the UK. Reaching across the ‘Black Atlantic’ these musical cultures combated, and still combat, the imposition of a Eurocentric ‘alien’ worldview on African peoples on an outernational level.
Peter Ramrayka, in chapter 5, illustrates how Caribbean migrants shaped British culture in ways very different to those discussed by Henry, as he considers his experience of moving from the Caribbean and working within two key British institutions: the National Health Service and the Royal Air Force. These two organisations would attract many Caribbean workers. Ramrayka’s chapter is a powerful meditation on a particular experience of career progression in a national context that was so often unwelcoming to Caribbean arrivals. Ramrayka reflects that racism was not so great an obstacle to him as to many of his travelling countrymen, reminding us of the wide variation in the experiences of Caribbean migrants. More to the point, his chapter, especially when read next to Henry’s, demonstrates the multifaceted impact that Caribbean migrants had on shaping Britain’s greatest of institutions, the NHS, and indeed on the British cultural landscape.
Chapter 6, by Nadine Chambers, merges personal reflection with scholarship to create a stimulating, ‘decolonised’ critique of the activity of multinational companies in the (de)colonial Caribbean and Canada. In particular, Chambers’ chapter highlights the little-documented impact on the Jamaican rural community of Kitimaat of capitalist transnational corporations which have developed smelters to process ore. Through her compelling exploration of the relations between notions of indigeneity and decolonisation, Chambers emphasises the urgent need for scholarship to be driven by ethics that centre the concerns of the communities affected and hold multinational companies to account. Anne Braithwaite’s ensuing essay in chapter 7 proffers techniques through which to organise against such ongoing acts of colonialism, as discussed by Chambers. As a young migrant to Britain, Braithwaite successfully campaigned against the expropriation of resources from her native Guyana by multinational companies. To some extent, Braithwaite comments, this realisation of continuing colonialism in Guyana and the Guyanese government’s lack of action against it were made possible by her vantage point from Britain. For Braithwaite this struggle for Guyanese decolonisation was a self-reflective journey. As she relates: ‘At the heart of my quest was a desire to understand Guyana’s position in the world, but mainly my place in it here – and there’.
The chapters by Chambers and Braithwaite both provide a strong sense of the continuation of colonial narratives and practices into our present. Chapter 8, by Simeon Simeonov, historicises the modes of colonisation in the transnational, or rather transcolonial, by interrogating the creation and proliferation of consulates across the Caribbean. These institutions formed nodal points in colonial networks and were key in creating and transmitting knowledges for the purposes of trade, diplomacy, policy, migration and citizenship. However, consulates in the Caribbean were not straightforward forces of colonialism but, as Simeonov elaborates, while working to enforce the colonialism of the empire they represented, they could also undermine colonial rivals. Consulates could effect modes of decolonisation just as they promoted a rival form of colonialism. Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez, in chapter 9, provides a more theoretical analysis of Caribbean pasts and, indeed, how such pasts have been defined and thought about by the key Caribbean thinkers Édouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Notions of any sort of linear history in the Caribbean are made problematic by the fact that for so many of its current inhabitants the first experience of their ancestors in the Caribbean was marked by a ‘brutal dislocation’, a historical ‘abyss’. Gualdrón carefully teases out the different responses of the three Caribbean thinkers to this problem. Whereas Fanon demands a break with history (in particular with the concept of black, or blackness) in order to decolonise and liberate, Glissant does not want to break completely with the identity that was created through an apparatus of enslavement, transportation, colonisation and exploitation. In a move that is radically anti-colonial, Gualdrón argues, Glissant thus links emancipation to the history of those same devices employed in the creation of ‘blackness’ and the resistance to them: this, Gualdrón proffers, is the history of a productive abyss.
In chapter 10 Ruth Minnot Egglestone blurs the lines between the personal and the academic once again to offer a forceful reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to reflect on decolonisation. Egglestone thinks deeply about her personal act of reading Julius Caesar at a time when Jamaica was still creating a national identity under Michael Manley. In this play Egglestone finds allegorical reference points with which to understand processes of decolonisation in the Caribbean. In Cassius, Egglestone perceives a ‘hungry thinker’, a patriot who emphasises dignity and self-respect over blind loyalty to ‘the state’. As a young reader Egglestone identified with this character and used him to understand the formal transference of power from Britain to the Jamaican people. More than this, for Egglestone Julius Caesar – recently translated into Jamaican Patwa and Rastafari vernacular – should be considered alongside Jamaican folk stories and pantomime, such as the figure of Anancy, who acts as a warning against both credulity and one-upmanship. Read side-by-side, Egglestone explains, these stories pose many uncomfortable questions relating to Caribbean politics and power.
In the final chapter of this book, aptly entitled ‘Maybe one day I’ll go home’, Rod Westmaas considers the notion of a return, a return not to Africa as thought about by so many descendants of transatlantic enslavement, but to ‘home’ in the Caribbean. Rod Westmaas discusses this theme by relating the stories of two Guyanese Windrush migrants to Britain, Joyce Trotman and Eric Huntley. As noted above, both the protagonists worked to decolonise – wittingly and unwittingly – the Guyanese and British contexts. Based on oral interviews with these elders, Westmaas provides their stories with detail and care to work through their personal experiences and motivations in migrating and decolonising. Huntley, along with his partner Jessica, established the radical anti-racist and anti-colonial bookshop Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, which would go on to publish works by eminent Caribbean anti-colonialists such as Walter Rodney. Trotman, who incidentally published her work on Guyanese proverbs with Bogle-L’Ouverture, became a formidable educator in both Britain and Guyana. She did not punish those students who aimed racist abuse at her in the schools of the East End of London but instead remained committed to their education. Trotman dealt with these pupils by educating them on the absurdity of their racialised thoughts. The stories of these two individuals and their acts of decolonisation provide forceful illustrations of the productive responses of Caribbean migrants to imperialism and its afterlives.
Taken together, what these chapters demonstrate is that decolonisation should not necessarily be conceived of as a simple opposition to colonisation. The act of migration between the Caribbean and Britain is itself an illustration of the productive consequences of old colonial ties. Decolonisation is not the simple division of deeply entwined histories into two, colonial and non-colonial, blocs. Instead, to understand decolonisation in its multiplicity, it is imperative to understand the aims and desires of colonised peoples in any particular moment. What these chapters offer is not only an intervention into academic scholarship, a simple refinement of our concepts for understanding decolonisation, but also a demonstration of the value of bringing together academic and community voices – many of which belong to people once considered ‘colonised subjects’ – to show the varying, yet related experiences and versions of (de)colonisation.
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1 See ch. 6 by Nadine Chambers and ch. 8 by Simeon Simeonov for two widely differing examples. Chambers deals with the expropriation of resources from Jamaican communities by multinational companies in our contemporary era, while Simeonov discusses how consuls aided in the advance of colonisation while undermining colonial rivals in the 18th and 19th centuries.
2 For general histories of the Haitian Revolution, see James (1938), Dubois (2004) and Geggus (2001).
3 On the adoption of European symbolism by Haitian leaders see Aravamudan (1999).
4 Aravamudan also makes clear that such tactics were deployed by revolutionaries such as Toussaint Louverture during the revolution.
5 On the complicated process of recognising ‘colonised’ peoples in scholarship, see Creary (2012).
6 Joyce Trotman in an interview with Rod Westmaas and Jack Webb. Trotman was addressing Webb in this exchange.
7 See also the biography of Beryl Gilroy, Black Teacher, which was published by the Huntleys’ press.
8 The lives of Eric and Jessica Huntley were recently part of the exhibition ‘No Colour Bar’ that ran at London’s Guildhall in 2016.
9 See, for example, the racist attacks on the Huntleys’ bookshop documented in Andrews (2014).
10 The placement of the monarch’s image on colonial Guyanese exercise books fuelled the early work of the British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke. See I. Khanna, ‘The artistic imagination of Hew Locke’ (https://www.stabroeknews.com/2012/features/in-the-diaspora/08/06/the-artistic-imagination-of-hew-locke/ [accessed 4 Feb. 2019]).
11 See ch. 3 in this volume: Kelly Delancy, ‘History to heritage: an assessment of Tarpum Bay, Eleuthera, The Bahamas’.