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3. An International African Opinion: Amy Ashwood Garvey and C. L. R. James in Black Radical London
- University of Minnesota Press
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77 An International African Opinion: Amy Ashwood Garvey and C. L. R. James in Black Radical London MINKAH MAKALANI 3 Late in summer 1935, as Italy began amassing its forces in Eretria along the Ethiopian border, activists, intellectuals, and laypeople throughout the African diaspora voiced their protest against this most recent act of European imperialist aggression. Alongside protests throughout the African diaspora, black anticolonial activists in London joined the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) to address what was quickly becoming known as the Abyssinia crisis. Founded by the storied Trinidadian activist–intellectual Cyril Lionel Robert (C. L. R.) James, together with Amy Ashwood Garvey (a central figure in the early Universal Negro Improvement Association [UNIA] and Marcus Garvey’s first wife), the IAFE aimed “to assist by all means in their power, in the maintenance of the territorial integrity and the political independence of Abyssinia.”1 At a mid-August rally in Trafalgar Square, Ashwood, noting the failure during World War I to extend Wilsonian self-determination to Africa, declared that although “no race has been so noble in forgiving,” it was “now the hour . . . for our complete emancipation.” Ashwood’s prevailing concern with black liberation did not stop her from highlighting what many considered the broader significance of Abyssinia, that black people now stood “between [Europe] and fascism.” When James spoke at this rally, he assured the largely white crowd that they were not attending “an antiwhite demonstration,” though he was clear that it was “pro-Negro.” More provocative, though, was his claim that “Abyssinia is a backward nation” in need of “Western civilization,” just not the barbaric civilization of Italian fascism.2 Students of James will note the dissonance between his declaration of backward Ethiopia’s need for Western civilization and his relentless critique of imperialism over the span of his lifetime. James later described his 1932 arrival in London as a case of “the British intellectual . . . going to Britain.”3 His political activities in Trinidad had been limited to writing in local periodicals and working with Arthur A. Cipriani’s Trinidad Workingmen’s Association. He came to 78 MINKAH MAKALANI England with a manuscript for a biography of Cipriani, a portion of which was published as the pamphlet The Case for West Indian Self-Government. As a moderate appeal for British Caribbean autonomy rather than complete independence, James presented Caribbeans as a uniquely modern people compared to those in colonized Africa and India. “There is in these colonies today,” James noted of the West Indies, “no conflict between freshly assimilated ideas of modern democracy and age-old habits based on tribal organisation or a caste system.”4 However, by 1938, when he published his history of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, his intent, as he recalled years later, was “to stimulate the coming emancipation of Africa.”5 Within a brief six-year period, James had come to see Caribbean modernity less as a testament to its fitness for self-governance than as a mark of its limited revolutionary potential. It would seem that the Caribbean’s problem, indeed, was that it was thoroughly rooted in Western civilization—that Caribbeans were, in fact, a thoroughly modern people. Political organizing among Caribbeans and Africans in 1930s London provided a context in which James could break with this modernist notion of New Negroes as a race vanguard. The years between James’s arrival in England and the appearance of The Black Jacobins represent a shift far more complex than merely an evolving radicalism. In coming to see the Caribbean’s limitations and stressing Africa’s importance to global emancipation, James turned toward coloniality as a basis from which to theorize liberation. Modernity as a regime of knowledge and rationality orders social life according to a European social model and is “presented as a rhetoric of salvation,” but it “hides coloniality, which is the logic of oppression and exploitation.” James explored the self-activity of the colonial masses as a response to oppression and exploitation, which provided him an angle from which to initiate a critique of modernity, even though he remained committed to modernity through his (heretical) engagement with Marxism.6 Such a tension, such an unresolved element in his thinking in 1930s London, should not obscure that James was at odds with his contemporaries, who believed that Western blacks, because of their proximity to Western power, were a vanguard who would redeem the race and civilize Africa. Alain Locke, in his anthology The New Negro, called American...