Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives on Women in the Discourses of Radical Black Caribbean Men

Introduction

At work in the deliberations of black radical thinkers in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Caribbean was the age-old strategy of constructing male subjectivity (and, by extension, the black world ¹ as its superstructure) by treating women as object and as Other. That such a construction was heavily indebted to an ideological framework best understood in terms of a European patriarchy intersected by race and class vectors (what Patricia Hill Collins calls a "matrix of domination") ² is a central concern of this paper. Even in the nineteenth century, black Caribbean male thinkers who could discern the class, race, and colonial dynamics of the classist, racist, and imperialist societies in which they flourished could not similarly discern the patriarchal structures of those same societies. Because of this epistemic blind spot, their otherwise enlightened attitudes toward women were infected by latent contradictions that resulted in the consignment of women to virtual political paralysis. ³

Indeed, underneath their well-meaning gender-liberalism toward women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a subtle philosophy of exclusion precluded women from occupying significant positions within the intellectual division of labor ⁴ requisite for the discursive construction of a black world. Major European thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and their disciples, collectively expressed, influenced, and reinforced the exclusionary, masculinist ethos by which the gender analyses of Caribbean male intellectuals were deeply informed. The predominantly androcentric discourse of these Caribbean radicals was therefore ultimately consistent with, formulated within, and articulated through the philosophical terms of reference of the prevailing (gendered) imperialist epistemology and ontology from which those radicals never entirely escaped, and revealed how their bid to establish a black world against the cognitive and material structures of colonialism was geared to proceed apace without significant input from black women.

In examining representations of women in the texts of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century black Caribbean male radicals, the burden of this paper is that the making of a black world in this period unwittingly necessitated the intellectual subjugation of black women, and this through the medium of a liberal rhetoric. By way of illustration, this paper examines the output of two relatively obscure black male radicals of the period, Baron de Vastey, from Haiti, and Theophilus Scholes, from Jamaica. Both were important, if under-recognized, doyens of a critical tradition of African reclamationism that foregrounded African history as a mechanism for the reconstruction of black cultural identity. This was a recuperative strategy evoked by Europe's geographical amputation of Africa from world history, ⁵ a strategy that sought to reinstall Africa as the site of an originary world culture. Despite their low profile within Caribbean intellectual history research, these unheralded thinkers ⁶ deserve to be examined, since their narratives demonstrate just how deeply mainstream patriarchy penetrated the liminal spaces of the Afro-Caribbean diasporic world. Operating from a westernized orientation, therefore, these black radicals simply reinscribed, by default, a subjugated womanhood, en route to their vision of a black world.

But in order not to essentialize patriarchy so that, for instance, one thinks that radical black male thinkers in the Caribbean were inherently sexist, it is necessary to appreciate the socially constructed and historically contingent nature of patriarchy. Such a perspective facilitates avoidance of abstract generalizations and allows for close readings of the different texts associated with these radicals. This localized perspective permits deconstruction of the monolithic category of black male sexism and reveals fissures and fragmentation in black male relationships with black females, especially with regard to class positions and education, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Caribbean. The assumption at work here is that general theoretical models about male texts and perspectives cannot be applied wholesale to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century black male writing about women without being modified for the particularities of the Caribbean situation. ⁷ This...