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  • A Long Story Cut ShortCarl Campbell’s Contributions to History Teaching at UWI, Mona
  • Matthew J. Smith (bio)

It seems entirely fitting, given his personality, to open this reflection on Carl Campbell’s impact on History teaching at the UWI in Jamaica with an anecdote. When Carl taught the graduate seminar Historiography and the Emergence of West Indian History, he was wont to pepper his insightful lectures with gems about the subjects of the class. One evening Carl delighted the students with a wonderful account of a highly respected historian who, on a faculty retreat at an out of town former estate, spent some time walking the grounds, turning over in his mind images of the space and what it might have sounded and looked like in the era of plantation slavery. Onlookers might have marvelled at the sight. Was the historian not sufficiently exhausted from the day’s retreat? Did he not want to relax his mental labours so that he could arise the next day freshened and ready to discuss curriculum planning? His mind would not allow for that. Instead he plotted the space around them with his feet and spent time thinking deeply on the profound relationship between the spatial and the social and how it defined the oppressiveness of the plantation regime.

As Carl told it, it brought something to life, at least for me. That while we learn how to search for the stories contained in the archival records, the writing of those stories, by the women and men we have come to rely on, has its own stories. Put another way, the writing of Caribbean History is an active process of what happens inside the archive and inside the mind of the historian. It is even more telling that Carl remembered the anecdote and chose to share it with his class so that they could appreciate more deeply how that process operates.

I cannot state whether the students got the intention. For me, it was enlightening. Such moments were a major reason I looked forward each week to be in the classroom with Carl. He had taught a version of that [End Page 117] course for many years and it was a mandatory seminar for all MA and PhD students in History. I was not one of the graduate students. In fact, during my student years at Mona in the 1990s, I only encountered Carl in the large lecture hall when I took his course on Caribbean History since 1804. In those bygone days of large enrolments, I was one of nearly two hundred students in the class who only saw him from afar.

My presence in the historiography seminar was as a faculty colleague. In 2013 I was fortunate to have been appointed by then Head of Department, Kathleen Monteith, to assume responsibility for the teaching of the Emergence of West Indian History course which had been joined with another course on West Indian historiography. In her wisdom, Kathleen decided to have the first year of the amalgamated course team taught by Carl and myself. I was especially grateful for that because I would be able to learn from Carl in a close and collaborative way. The three-hour sessions each week would have the sort of healthy balance between a junior scholar rattling off bibliographies, and a senior one who knew several of the people we studied, and was able to depart from titles and book reviews to reveal the purpose of Caribbean history-writing at various moments in time. This was a valuable part of my ongoing education on Caribbean history-writing which was improved by my working with Carl.

The experience was particularly important for me given Carl’s reticence in discussing himself. Carl is fond of saying that historians have at least two books in them: the book they write on a historical subject to which they devote years of committed labour and their autobiography. Carl has written more than two books and none of them is his autobiography. This is because, to a fault, he has never trumpeted his legacy. To discover the extent to which he has influenced the field one has to pay close attention...

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