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.