Aaron Kamugisha

The Black Experience of New World Coloniality

“Black Metamorphosis,” Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished manuscript of the 1970s, is premised on the idea that the black experience of coloniality is crucial to comprehending the history of the New World. This essay traces the idea of black experience in “Black Metamorphosis” through the figure of the non-norm, a central category for Wynter throughout the manuscript. The black presence in the New World is subterranean but omnipresent, fugitive but hypervisible, condemned as the non-norm and nonperson but the foundation for the concept of free citizenship in the Americas. Black experience is crucial; without it the ideological fictions of the contemporary world order that consign the vast majority of its population to a subhuman status remain uncontested and grow every generation in weight and power.

On the Idea of a Caribbean Cultural Studies

This article critically appraises the wealth of cultural criticism and epistemological developments in the study of Caribbean societies now increasingly grouped under an emerging discipline termed Caribbean cultural studies. It advances the claim that the critical study of Caribbean culture is in many ways inseparable from a study of its intellectual traditions in their social, political, and aesthetic dimensions. While this may seem unremarkable, it bears emphasizing that the study of culture and the creation of a Caribbean cultural studies emerged in a manner quite distinct from the formation of cultural studies in Europe and North America. To this end, the author sketches a number of overlapping traditions of writing on culture in the Caribbean that take us from the late nineteenth century and considers the work of two Caribbean theorists, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, for their own sustained meditations on the question of culture in the Caribbean.

The Hearts of Men?: Gender in the Late C. L. R. James

It is not too much to claim that C.L.R. James is the individual who has exercised the most decisive influence on political ideas in the twentieth century Anglophone Caribbean. Central to any consideration of his lifework is his concept of the new society — a term recurrent in his post-World War II writings. This new society that James hoped to help usher in was dependent on a transformation in gender relations, and Jamess firm linkage of human freedom to the liberation of women, while a topic that appears and disappears across his texts, is a deeply poignant and, as of yet, a generally unacknowledged part of his legacy.

Review: African American Anti-Colonial Thought, 1917–1937African American Anti-Colonial Thought, 1917–1937 Edited by BerginCathy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 280 pp. Paper £29.99.

and symbolic importance’, a revelation that is as true around the world as it is in Germany today. And just as racial regimes, including their legal dimensions, operate globally, the Black German activists themselves figure in a global movement for Black liberation – one that incorporates a limited, pragmatic approach to certain engagements with the law as part of a broader programme of profound scepticism concerning the law’s liberatory potential. As the allure of racism and discourses of racial non-belonging open up opportunities to ever more tyrannical forms of governing in the US and Europe, readers might take heed from these Black German epistemologies. Their insights warn against mistaking liberal concessions of anti-discrimination law as a panacea for racism and instead advocate for retrieving deeper understandings of race – and racial justice – from beyond the edges of law’s shadow.

That Area of Experience That We Term the New World: Introducing Sylvia Wynter's "Black Metamorphosis"

This essay introduces Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World,” an unpublished 900-plus-page manuscript written by Wynter in the 1970s. “Black Metamorphosis” is a remarkable manuscript, and it deserves close study for a number of reasons. It is arguably the most important unpublished nonfiction work by an anglophone Caribbean intellectual and is the major guide to the transition in Wynter’s thought between her work mainly on the Caribbean and black America in the 1960s and 1970s and her theory of the human from the early 1980s onward. Not only does the manuscript clarify Wynter’s reflections on the process of indigenization and black cultural nationalism, it is her most sustained discussion of the politics of black culture in America. It constitutes a highly significant contribution to the black radical tradition and one of the most compelling interpretations of the black experience in the Western hemisphere ever written by a Caribbean intellectual.

The Life and Death of a Nation: The Mood on Immigration in Barbados

Physically burdened as I am, I feel impelled to overcome my difficulties to the extent that that is possible and tell you what are my political views in the present crisis. It is the most desperate that the WI [West Indies] have faced since the emancipation from slavery. The idea of a West Indian nation cannot dissolve… For me this is not a question of governments but of people, of what world the young people will grow up into, what spirit they will have… But what I fear is that the whole conception and organisation of a WI nation is on the way to being destroyed or corrupted… This is a matter of the life and death of a nation…—C.L.R. James, “Letter to Carl (La Corbinière)”, 6 November 1961