Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone

11. Circulations: Caribbean Political Activism

11 Circulations Caribbean Political Activism The work of a generation of Caribbean critical thinkers and activists provides us with an amazing body of material for understanding how they navigated international locations while always thinking about the Caribbean and related experiences in global context. In many discussions of issues related to the “black radical tradition,” the question of what generated or produced the range of radical intellectual activists from the Caribbean—the number far exceeding, proportionately, the relative small size of the Caribbean —persists. Glissant, in responding to this question, suggests that one experiences a range of challenges and their resonances in small countries before they move to larger ones—from the archipelagoes to the continents (2010). For C. L. R. James, as discussed in an earlier chapter, it was/is the visible fissures in Caribbean societies themselves that create/created certain conditions and therefore a consciousness of resistance. This chapter explores what I see as circulations among a group of definable Caribbean activists who widened Caribbean space in international encounters . It examines the movements of a selection of the most visibly representative figures largely from the Anglophone Caribbean in the formative period of black activism leading up to the Black Power period of the 1970s. In pursuing my earlier work on Claudia Jones focusing largely on the 1930s–1950s, I was able to see some patterns emerging in the surrounding intellectuals and activists with whom her work intersected and intersects, that is, the African American activists in the U.S. context and the larger Caribbean and PanAfrican and international contexts. Claudia Jones’s Caribbean left politics, I show in my earlier work (Left of Karl Marx), addresses this question of how caribbean political activism · 203 to “remake” inherited political positions for usability in black communities. Whereas in the United States she studied and raised issues of class, race, and gender and the particular condition of black women, within formal CPUSA contexts, in the United Kingdom she moved consistently to more practical applications at the level of community building. One of the places where one finds some definition and articulation of a specific Caribbean left is Brian Meeks’s concluding essay to his Narratives of Resistance: “The Caribbean Left at Century’s End” (2000). However, the Caribbean left that is Brian Meeks’s subject is the post-1970s version locatable with people like Walter Rodney, Maurice Bishop, and his colleagues (some of whom later became adversaries) and others in the eastern Caribbean who attempted to implement forms of left ideology into political machinery in the Caribbean state itself and whom Meeks identifies as defeated in this process. There is enough material now perhaps to study the relationships between generations of Caribbean left thinkers at the intellectual and theoretical level, not always reducible to a Marxist-Leninist framing. Cheryl Higashida, in Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (2011), has an interesting definition on this point. She indicates, “I use ‘Left’ to designate Communist and Communist-affiliated individuals and groups. I use ‘left’ to refer to the broader spectrum of radical movements beyond the Communist Party” (177). For her the distinction that she makes via the use of lowercase or uppercase letter was critical in the naming for her to signal “the Communist Left’s importance to these writers and to their Black internationalist feminism” (177–78). In my own sense, the designation between capitals is not as significant in identifying a political continuum along which several versions of radical politics that critique capitalist systems of domination as they are manifested through other modalities such as class, race, gender, sexuality. In my reading, Marxism is not the leftmost pole of articulation, as there are many Caribbean activists who studied and worked within the framework of Marxism-Leninism only to find it incapable of meeting the full extent of their realities (Left of Karl Marx). A variety of migratory movements for which the Caribbean has been legendary have also coincided with, or helped to produce, a series of radical political and cultural movements in different locations. These have created diasporic circulations that have been naturalized in Caribbean left practices. So, on the one hand, we have Frantz Fanon (1925–61) from Martinique anatomizing the black and colonial lived reality from France and Algeria and a Pan-Africanist George Padmore from Trinidad (1903–59) insisting on providing a dialectical argument for “Pan-Africanism” or “communism” in the 204...