Preface: A Postcolonial Avant-Garde?

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One of the interviews that I had imagined for my series with Caribbean writers and intellectuals but that did not take place was with Kamau Brathwaite. An enthusiast for the work of Small Axe (it was he, as I have said before, who coined the now ubiquitous moniker sx), Brathwaite nevertheless staunchly resisted being interviewed, at least by me. And, of course, his lamentable passing in February 2020 has now closed off forever any possibility of that conversation. Central among the topics I had intended to cover with Brathwaite, had I been able to conduct that interview, was the story of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM)—how to think about it as a postcolonial intervention into what he had later called the "social arts." I had pursued other avenues to the story, but to no avail. I had once telephoned Andrew Salkey in Amherst, Massachusetts, to see if he would talk to me about CAM, but he said that there was really nothing left to say because Anne Walmsley's important book, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972, had said everything that was needed. Salkey was to die in April 1995 without my having met him.¹ I had had the good fortune to meet with the remarkable John La Rose at his home in Finsbury Park, London, not far from the legendary New Beacon Books, but he was already unwell and, alas, he would pass away in February 2006 before I could arrange a more prolonged discussion. And so I do not know the story of CAM in exactly the way I would like, that is, as a story linked to the literary-intellectual biographies of its founding figures.

In a short essay (a kind of announcement, really) published in 1968, Brathwaite reflected on the circumstances that motivated the founding of CAM. When he arrived in Britain in 1966, he said, he found to his surprise virtually nothing of a sense of presence among West Indian literary and visual artists. Throughout the 1950s, these artists not only had produced a respectable body of work but also had attracted an impressive recognition. And yet here they were a decade later living and working in isolation—not only "exiled" from their respective Caribbean homelands but in isolation from each other and from the "cultural life" of British society.² This is a question—the relation between the artist and society—that preoccupied Brathwaite in the 1960s, and it is what motivated the founding of CAM. The "'format' of the Movement," as Brathwaite put it, was animated by three imperatives: one, the creation of an "artists' co-operative" to facilitate discussion and exchange among West Indian artists, in particular around the connection between their work and the Caribbean; two, the building of a dialogical relationship with readers, listeners, and viewers, a relationship with a relevant public; and finally, three, the stimulation of contact with writers and artists from outside the Caribbean.³ So one can discern in what Brathwaite was provisionally reaching after here an implicit theory of the literary and visual arts—an aesthetic theory—concerning the conditions not only for the flourishing of individual artists and their individual works of art but also, and more importantly, for the flourishing of critical contact both among artists (as an interpretive community) and between artists and the society in relation to which their work might be thought of as an intervention.

This is the origin story of CAM, or as close as we will have it. But what Brathwaite does not tell us is why Caribbean artists being brought together should understand themselves as a movement. Of course, memorably, in the United States, in the months following the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka had launched the Black Arts Movement with the founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem. Perhaps this was one of the models, though Brathwaite does not mention it as an inspiration in his essay. What conception of intervention or activism or criticism around the literary and visual arts was implied in this idea of a movement? What existing structure of the arts constituted the status...