Decolonial Writings on Epistemology

I just stumbled across some interesting readings by prominent decolonial thinkers from Latin America published in the Danish online journal KULT. Enjoy

2013 A PhD's Year in Review

So I made it...barely. The first year of my doctoral programme is coming to an end and it was quite a year. For those of you thinking of starting a PhD, I will encourage you to do so but there are a few caveats.

A PhD is a full-time job.
I thought I would read and make notes then complete a 8-10,000 chapter on what I've learnt through reading and making notes and this would take no more than 25-30 hours a week, enough time to have a part-time or freelance job and 2 days for a social life. I was sadly mistaken. Being a part of a doctoral programme takes an incredible amount of time and discipline. Tip: go to the nearest library. Do not think its convenient to say home and write, there are so many distractions: laundry, television, gossip blogs, etc. By the time you realise its 3pm and you have accomplished absolutely nothing.

Make time for yourself
Following on the previous point, it is crucial that you ensure a day (and usually you can only have ONE) where you DO NOT work, think, remember or consider your PhD. Get out of the house and the library and enjoy spending time with loved ones or friends. You can easily forget to make time for others (and yourself) and this can add strain and make the doctoral programme a very lonely and disengaging experience. Do not lock yourself away for 3-4 years...it's not worth it.

Take part in the process
A doctoral programme opens you up to a plethora of new experiences. Being a quasi faculty member you have opportunities to teach, organise and participate in seminars and conferences, chair panels, join editorial boards and the holy grail of academia PUBLISH in high quality respectable journals. This might be somewhat difficult for some doctoral candidates who have transport constraints, as travelling to these events do add up especially if your location is not very central. However some departments do offer travel grants to facilitate faculty members and doctoral candidates to participate in conferences at home and abroad. These events are a great way to network, meet others interested in your own research, broaden your research interests or just to acquaint yourself into the world of academia outside of the library. Additionally,  many faculties may have additional funding for PhDs to organise academic events such as conferences, workshops,  and seminars so if transportation is not an issue, get out there and join in the fun.

Write
I was terrified to write. I didn't know where to begin, if what I was writing made any sense to anyone, include myself. These fears are natural but must be overcome -the clock is unfortunately ticking. The best way to overcome the fear of writing? Write (Yes, it was a trick question). The only way to improve your writing is to begin the process of writing. Do not be afraid that your style of writing may be inadequate, you would not have been accepted into the programme if that was the case. The fact that you are a PhD candidate is inherently a sign of your ability to not only write but write to a standard that your department deems acceptable.

Read
But how much? And who? Well that definitely is a trick question. Your writing should be commensurate with your reading. Do not read for a year eschewing all writing and expect to simply write the following year. Your brain doesn't work that way. I see it more as a symbiotic relationship, between reading and writing. Your writing improves that more you read and your reading becomes more targeted and selective the more your write. Which goes to the former question of how much reading is necessary to complete a doctorate. The answer: ALOT. My PhD supervisor was a great help on this question and this is especially for persons who 1) Are entering a PhD after working outside academia 2) Undertaking a topic outside of your Masters or prior academic work. It is tremendously easier to being a doctorate having your prior studies in the same or similar field of study. It is not impossible but question why you would want to take such a leap out of your academic comfort zone to engage in a different field of inquiry. For others such as myself who took a break from academia to enter the workforce it might appear a bit difficult to transition back into the swing of things so quickly. So reading becomes twofold: you learn both context (what it is you want to discover) and construction (the acceptable way to structure what you've learned) which are required to complete your doctorate. Your supervisor, who is an expert on your topic, will be the first to direct you onto the major readings, authors and research agendas but afterwards it is up to you to follow up and to explore the vast knowledge in front of you, remember it is your PhD.

Listen
To my final point for the year 2013. Once you have gotten into the process of graduate school it is important to be quiet. Yes, as a former journalist I have learnt that you learn the most when you keep your mouth shut. Not all the time but especially as a junior. Take the opportunities with your supervisor and other faculty members to listen to what they have to say, it may be on your topic, it may be on your methodology, it may be on neither but listen and learn and enjoy.

Best of luck in 2014

Who is the Radical Caribbean Intellectual?

Prof Anthony Bogues 
Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University

I recently attended a seminar by Caribbean scholar Professor Anthony Bogues of Brown University entitled 'Reflections on the Radical Caribbean Intellectual: From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Walter Rodney' at the University College London, University of London.

Prof Bogues sought to review some of the main elements of the different practices of the radical Caribbean intellectual through discussions of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Marcus Garvey, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter and Walter Rodney. Below are some of my notes from the seminar.

On the question of the 'human'

According to Bogues, Wynter represents an important figure within Caribbean scholarship. In particular, she was a key intellectual figure who sought to critique the theory of Creolisation which was popularised in the Caribbean during the 1970s. For Wynter, her opposition of creolisation derived from what she described as a domination/resistance paradigm which places an unduly emphasis on the relationship between power and powerless. As a result, she proposed the theory of indigenisation, the key concept of which resided within the 'humanizing of the landscape'. This was a departure from the Marxist 'mode of production' towards a preoccupation with the 'mode of being human.'

On the Caribbean as global

For Bogues, Caribbean intellectual tradition has global relevance as it is fundamentally concerned with the question of freedom and the human. Bogues sees neoliberalism, a de-humanising force, not an economic system, rather a way of life, having saturated the human, ultimately creating the terrain for political discourse.  For Bogues, neoliberalism constitutes a bourgeois preoccupation to re-create the human being through the re-articulation of the self as a consumptive being.

Closing Remarks

By the end of the seminar, Prof Bogues made some poignant concluding remarks, of which he:

Lamented the narrowness of political discourse and terrain.

Called for an analysis of imperial power in the forms under which it operates, positing that current analysis is lacking and crude.

Suggested approaches of intervention through an inquiry into contemporary 'epiphanies' or ruptures which the international system; acts of national resistance, disobedience. 

Major Caribbean Ideologies Defined

Background 

The twentieth century the Caribbean region continued to be characterised by inequalities of races, class, poverty and general economic backwardness.

Formal independence and political sovereignty was rendered null and void in large part by the economic sovereignty exercised by the metropolitan business forces.

The Caribbean under formal independence remained as slums of empire, only now with a new cast of actors.

Where do you belong?

The crude system of classification of the Caribbean society (as identified in Jamaica) was that of:

-          European e..g absentee English landowner

-          Euro-Creole e.g. born in the Americas of European ethnicity 

-          Afro-Creole e.g. A colored intellecutal 

-          African e.g. the worker

Whose National Identity?

As with all slave societies, there was never a unified national identity, rather there existed an ideology of narrow interest.

Questions remain as to concepts of national character, i.e. the assumption that every national group possessed certain idiosyncratic and peculiar features making it different from others –concept borrowed from 19th century English thought.

‘National character’ is no more than a series of stereotypes arising not out of national cultures as a whole, rather from selected mini-cultures of the ruling elites. For it is always the character type of the dominant class segment that presents to the outside world and thus sets the yardstick of analysis.

The transition of the 'national-character' mythology:

Affluent West Indian Planter

The Slave

The Labour Unionist

Affluent West Indian planter –The Slave –Independent Peasant Proprietor –Lower Class Carnival Reveller –The Man/Woman of the Caribbean Street –Selfeducated Proletariat –Labour Unionist

Caribbean Ideologies Defined

The proslavery ideology –this was essentially pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist. It was a rationalisation of white supremacy and its implicit correlate, non-white inferiority.

The antislavery ideology –was in part anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist. Intrinsically revolutionary; an ideology of protest on the part of the Caribbean masses against an exploitative economic and political system seeking to justify itself in terms of a pseudoscientific doctrine of race.

The nationalist ideology –a product of the 19th century; it was not necessarily anti-colonialist, possessing its own internal doctrinal contradictions. Interesting to note, the nationalist ideology was not always anti-slavery either. 

The federalist ideology –a system whereby a unified Caribbean would combat the artificial boundaries and irrational loyalist psychologies imposed by colonialism; a New World geographical determinism in which the Caribbean was perceived as the appropriate centre of the Americas.

Cultural Philistinism – a system based on excessive materialism unconcerned with ethical or spiritual matters. Such an ideology was the formation of the Caribbean society under European colonialism.

Caribbean (American) Humanism –the formation of Caribbean thought, values, attitudes and belief system involving the process of interpenetration of civilisations giving birth to a society that is multiracial, multilinguistic, multicultural, multireligious living in relative peaceful coexistence.

[Notes from Lewis, G. K. (1983). Main currents in Caribbean thought: the historical evolution of Caribbean society in its ideological aspects, 1492-1900. Unp-Nebraska Paperback.]

Making Notes: What is Caribbean Dependency Thought? Part Three

Where does CDT stand?

For Greene (1984) it is classified among the main theoretical streams in Caribbean social science which include cultural pluralism, plantation, and Marxism.

For Bernal, Figueroa, and Witter (1984) it is placed within the “critical tradition” in Caribbean economic thought, locating it as the stage that followed W. Arthur Lewis’ work on Caribbean industrialization and preceded Marxist political economy.

It has also been characterized as:

-An ideology of epistemic and economic decolonization and of economic nationalism. But which values and interests were served by the new ideology, those of the nation as a whole, of the validating elites, or of the dispossessed black masses?

-     

-An ideology of the first post-colonial generation of Afro-Caribbean males intent on taking political power from the “Afro-Saxon” elites who inherited political power from the colonial authorities, and on wresting the levers of economic control from white expatriates.

-A model of intellectual “creolization” as proposed by Lewis (1983) “whereby [metropolitan] modes of thought were absorbed and assimilated and then reshaped to fit the special and unique requirements of Caribbean society … [giving] birth to an indigenous collection of ideas that can properly be termed Caribbean sui generis.

-An element in a wider global process of counter-hegemonic resistance to Eurocentric thought.

-A connection with broader intellectual currents in the era of decolonization by which the people of the global South asserted the right to their own interpretation of their history, reality, and vision of the future. It is a source of intellectual capital in providing alternatives to the universalistic, context-free, ahistorical, asocial, and apolitical neo-classical economics that underpins neoliberal globalization.

- One of various manifestations of resistance in the behavioural, religious, ideological, and philosophical spheres that such an experience engendered among those who were the objects of that history but who sought to become the subjects of their own history.

-A critical and counter-hegemonic thought in the region and in the global South.

[Notes from Girvan, N. (2006). “Caribbean Dependency Thought Revisited,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies. 27, 3: 328-352.]

References

Amin, S. (1974) Accumulation on a World Scale,New York: Monthly Review Press

Beckford, G.L. [and K. Polanyi Levitt] (2000a) The George Beckford Papers: Selected and Introduced by Kari Levitt, Mona, Jamaica: Canoe Press, University of the West Indies.

Beckford (197/) (1972) Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World,London: Oxford University Press.

Beckford, G.L. and M. Witter (1982) SmallGarden, Bitter Weed: The Political Economy of Struggle and Change in Jamaica,Morant Bay, Jamaica: Maroon Publishing House.

Bernal, R., M. Figueroa, and M. Witter (1984) “Caribbean Economic Thought: The Critical Tradition,” Social and Economic Studies33:2,5–96.

Best, L. and K. Polanyi Levitt (1969) Externally Propelled Industrialization and Growth in the Caribbean,4vols. Montreal: McGill Centre for Developing Area Studies, unpublished MS.

Blackman, Sir C.N. (2003) “Lloyd Best and the Plantation Model: Afterthoughts,” in S. Ryan (ed.) Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Essays in Honour of Lloyd Best,St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, 397–404.

Frank, A.G. (1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Girvan, N. (1970) Multinational Corporations and Dependent Underdevelopment in Mineral-Export Economies, Social and Economic Studies19:4, 490–26.

Greene, J.E. (1984) “Challenges and Responses in Social Science Research in the English Speaking Caribbean,” in H. Goulbourne and L. Sterling (eds.) “The Social Sciences and Caribbean Society (Part 1),” special issue, Social and Economic Studies 33:1, 9–46.

Lewis, W.A. (1954) “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” in Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies22 (May):131–91.

Lewis, G.K. (1983) Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in its Historical Aspects, 1492–1900, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Odle, M.A. (1975) “Public Policy,” in G.L. Beckford (ed.) Caribbean Economy: Dependence and Backwardness, Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 130–46.

Prebisch, R. (1950) The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems, New York: United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs.

Thomas, C.Y. (1965) Monetary and Financial Arrangements in a Dependent Monetary Economy, Mona, 
Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies.

Wallerstein, I. (1979) The Capitalist World Economy,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press