African American Manhood in the Making of Caribbean (Inter)Nationalism

Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962, Michelle Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0822335514

My father has been obsessed with Billy Eckstine for as long as I can remember. As a black boy coming of age in colonial Jamaica in the 1950s, my father had before him many images of dignified, educated, black and brown West Indian professional men: teachers and civil servants, trade union leaders and lawyers. But Billy Eckstine was different. The devastatingly handsome African American crooner led big bands composed of jazz luminaries like Dizzy Gillespie. Eckstine refused to walk through the back door of any Jim Crow American establishment because, as Miles Davis later recounted, "B didn't take no shit off nobody."¹ Yet this race rebel came packaged in the accoutrements of High Style: the tailored suits, the cigar holder, the throngs of screaming black—and white—women. Eckstine played music that was inescapably associated with blackness; yet he was thoroughly modern. In the colonial Caribbean, blackness and cosmopolitanism were mutually exclusive traits. Yet here was Billy Eckstine, a black man, an American: he was Modern Blackness, personified.

Reading Michelle Stephens's Black Empire, I was reminded of the admiration my father's generation had for African American men like Paul Robeson and Billy Eckstine.² And I was reminded that this admiration did not merely reflect the fabulousness of individual celebrities, but also confirmed that African Americans came to represent for West Indians a way to be black in the world. The importance of this book is that it brings to the fore a relationship not often acknowledged: the centrality, not simply the influence, of the African American experience in Caribbean thought. Indeed, it seems that the Caribbean has found it difficult to acknowledge the contributions of black America to its own genesis.

Though in the English-speaking Caribbean black people occupied many positions of rank, they did so essentially as political servants: after all these were still colonial societies, dependencies on an English authority. African Americans, despite their own subjugation, provided a template for how to carve out a modern black society in a free republic. The African American experience had produced famous black institutions like Tuskegee; famous black philosophers like W. E. B. DuBois; famous black writers like Langston Hughes. Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery occupied many a bookshelf in the colonial Caribbean, including that of young V. S. Naipaul.³ African American thought had produced the artifacts of civilization: books, art, institutions. When we think about the impact that this would have had on black West Indians, especially those who migrated to the United States, it is curious that the link between Caribbean and African American ideas of nation has not received more attention among Caribbeanists.

Black Empire breaks new ground in establishing the importance of the African American experience, and of African American thought, to black thinkers of the anglophone Caribbean. Although Caribbean studies is now attentive to the influence of contemporary African American culture on the Caribbean, epitomized by such recent work as anthropologist Deborah Thomas's Modern Blackness, we Caribbeanists have paid far too little attention to the historical relationship between the two.⁴ Black Empire brings together and builds upon two heretofore separate fields of inquiry. On the one hand, because of its engagement with the history of black West Indian thinkers in the United States, Black Empire belongs in the same group of history studies as Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, Winston James's discussion of the influence of Caribbean political radicalism in American politics. On the other hand, its unflinching focus on the masculinist ideas imbricated in the construction of the black nation bring it more into line with literary and cultural studies such as Hazel Carby's Race Men.⁵ Where it departs from either group is in its argument that the Caribbean desire for freedom, writ as...