At Sea: The Caribbean in Black Empire

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

Increasingly over the past decade, scholars have steered away from provincial versions of United States history. Whereas stereotypically stodgy diplomatic historians could once anticipate isolated labor in the field of "American foreign relations," they have suddenly found themselves crowded with quintessentially cool cultural critics. Indeed, as the "American century" appeared headed for a second tenure, it became almost axiomatic that tracing America's past required a cognitive map that extended way beyond the territorial boundaries of the republic. This insistence on internationalizing the study of US history provides an essential backdrop for considering Black Empire, Michelle Stephens's examination of the ideological principles underlying the work of "certain" British West Indian male intellectuals who resettled in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Two fields, furthermore, help frame the book, for in fixing most of the attention on the famously influential trio of Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay and C. L. R. James, Stephens joins an academic discussion long initiated in African American and Caribbean studies. Reckoning with the plural character of the audience for this text is critical in justly considering its merits. Works with such admirably inclusive ambitions often pay the unfair price of going underappreciated by readers whose own limited purviews blind them to much of their value. Thus from the outset, in the interest of situating what follows, let me disclose that I approached the book primarily as a Caribbeanist trained in history.

The publication date of Black Empire, I imagine, imposed an especial burden on its author. Focused on individuals who, as Stephens admits, have inspired "a substantial body of scholarly literature," the book almost necessarily assumed a revisionist stance. As a piece of scholarship, accordingly, it would be judged by its capacity to substantially and persuasively unsettle received wisdom. To this hovering challenge of originality, Stephens responds by foregrounding the study's conceptual venturousness. Unlike the existing literature, this text, she explains, ranges across conventional disciplines and fields, from literary topics in African American studies to historical themes in Caribbean studies to cultural themes in American studies. Such a purposefully undisciplined perspective, the author argues, gives Black Empire the distinct advantage of capturing in concert figures rarely viewed as belonging in the same intellectual boat. Garvey, McKay, and James appear in this work, as fellow travelers, as shipmates—so to speak—"engaged in a common enterprise."

Placing and parsing this "enterprise" is the book's most basic objective. Thus although Stephens organizes the central chapters around the writings (fictional as well as nonfictional) of the book's protagonists, she is not interested in these men in the manner of a critical biographer. Operating on a more abstract level, the author hones in on the political and ideological questions that moved these West Indian males and, moreover, the philosophical and conceptual journeys they took in arriving at answers.

In the aftermath of the Great War, according to Black Empire, as the black intelligentsia across the West embarked on a mission to locate "home" in a world set on estranging black people, "certain" British Caribbean intellectuals stood out as singularly bold adventurers. Title notwithstanding, this book reveals Garvey, McKay, and James undertaking explorations that looked nothing like the conventional logs of expansion and control; twentieth-century conquistadors they were not. Indeed, their voyages, this work demonstrates, landed them in radically anachronistic (even futuristic) spaces. Guided by remarkably transgressive conceptual compasses, Stephens's West Indian intellectuals navigated past received wisdom to end up at formulations of peoplehood freed from the constraints of national mandates and mappings. In a post-Versailles world that presumed settled citizens, they idealized antithetical figures: drifters, vagabonds, and fugitives, non- and anti-national types deliberately disrespectful of state-drawn boundaries and their attendant state-sanctioned social relations (in particular, heterosexual domesticity). Important for this study, the maverick mindset of these...