After Tragedy, Searching for Liberation

David Scott in his new book Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014) achieves a number of objectives. First, he provides a fitting conclusion to a trilogy (though to my knowledge he has never described them together in this way) that starts with his earlier volumes Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (1999) and Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004). In the first of these, Refashioning Futures, Scott delves into contemporary Sri Lankan and Jamaican politics as he unveils his main tools of analysis, including modified Foucauldian notions of governmentality, leading to his own derivative approaches to democracy and freedom. These are deployed in order to explore the postcolonial, post–Cold War present of the late nineties but also, as implicit in the title, to suggest new approaches toward alternative futures. In Conscripts of Modernity, he engages with the formidable corpus of C. L. R James’s iconic study on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1961), and counterpoises what he considers as the revolutionary, romantic sensibility of the 1938 original with the “tragic” conclusions he suggests are raised by the “seven fresh paragraphs” (2004, 19) that James adds to the last chapter of the 1963 second edition. Scott’s argument, briefly stated, is that in the wake of the collapse of the Bandungian,¹ Third World progressive agenda, an approach to politics at both the practical and theoretical levels that is tempered by an appreciation of the centrality of tragedy might be a more useful direction for historical analysis than one that assumes a romantic enlightenment narrative of inevitable progress. This is taken to its logical conclusion in Omens, where the Grenadian Revolution, perhaps the most tragic political event in postcolonial Caribbean history, is given center stage and forensically explored. Seen together, all three volumes are a sustained effort to understand and come to terms with the postcolonial world, more particularly in its most recent phase since the collapse of “really existing socialism” and specifically the Third World radical nationalist Bandung Project.

Second, Omens sustains and carries forward a conversation on the appropriate theoretical tools and concepts that Scott considers essential in order to interpret the contemporary period. These include the notion of time and temporality and the concurrent importance of generational sensibility in any attempt to understand sociopolitical conjunctures; the aforementioned emphasis on tragedy and tragic outcomes as ubiquitous in politics and therefore the derivative need for temper and modesty in all political engagement; and finally and particularly in Omens, the introduction of forgiveness as an important element in any new ethics of political behavior in the foreseeable future.

Third, this volume is a timely and welcomed rereading of the Grenadian Revolution and an incisive attempt to recover and rethink not only the years of the “people’s revolution” (1979–83) but also the post-revolutionary period following the killing of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and his compatriots, quickly followed by the U.S.-led invasion and the arrest and trial for his murder of the remaining leaders of the revolution and the long years of incarceration and judicial jousting until their release from prison in 2009.²

For anyone familiar with Scott’s oeuvre, there is no need to rehearse the form, nor indeed the broad directions of this study. Among the most erudite and scholarly Caribbean intellectuals of his generation, the densely annotated prose takes us via a series of detours through Hegel to Benjamin and Agamben, Elias to Kermode, Arendt, Derrida, C. L. R James and Stuart Hall among many others, in order to reinforce a number of familiar conclusions as well as advance new ones. Thus, not necessarily in sequential order, Scott proposes that generations perceive time in fundamentally different ways; the collapse of Bandung, signaling the end of an era of “progressive” revolutionary upsurge, has led to a moment in which the generation that came to maturity in those times perceives the contemporary world as being “out of joint,” and this generation, of the time of socialism and revolution, as being set adrift, perhaps irretrievably...