writing caribbean intellectual history

small axe 26 • June 2008 • p 168–178 • ISSN 0799-0537
Writing Caribbean Intellectual History
Anthony Bogues
Abstract: Arguing that An Intellectual History of the Caribbean is an important text in the emerging
field of Caribbean intellectual history, this essay suggests that missing from this important
text is the working through of an intellectual history that grapples with black religious practices
as modes of thought. It also argues that if Caribbean thought gets knotted up in the trope of
Caliban, it will not decolonize itself and begin to wrestle with what Kamau Brathwaite has called
the “inner plantation.”
The writing of Caribbean intellectual history is a tricky matter. There are not only conventional
linguistic divides that balkanize Caribbean thought but also the more critical matter of
what constitutes Caribbean ideas and thought, and thus a Caribbean intellectual tradition.
Is this tradition constituted primarily of political ideas, literature, economic thought, or the
historical knowledge of the region? In this mix, where do Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean
religious practices fit? Do these religious practices not invoke, as Joan Dayan argues, a “project
of thought,” with the “intensity of interpretation” that is allowed by such practices?1 And if
they do, then what does this mean for an intellectual history of the region and for the category
of thought itself?
There is also the matter of popular culture as one of the ways in which subaltern classes
both represent and produce, in Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, “ways of seeing things and acting.”2
And finally, there is a thematic problem. In what ways can we characterize Caribbean intellectual
history? In other words, what are the critical preoccupations of this history, not an
intellectual laundry list of writers, thinkers, and practices, but rather preoccupations that
allow us to reflect upon our historical experiences—historical experiences that at first blush
1. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xvii.
2. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(New York: International Publishers, 1987), 333.
SX26 • June 2008 • Anthony Bogues 169
oftentimes seem impossible to represent and in which official memory circulates as mnemonic
spectacle. These are knotty issues that, although present at the “inauguration” of Caribbean
intellectual history, assume today a vital centrality.
In thinking about these issues while reading Silvio Torres-Saillant’s An Intellectual History
of the Caribbean, one recalls Elsa Goveia’s 1956 observation: in writing Caribbean history,
we should “seek [to go] beyond the narrative of events, [to get] a wider understanding of the
thoughts, habits and institutions of a whole society.”3 Writing before the formal political independence
of the British Caribbean colonies, Goveia urged us on to a possible way in which
we should consider history not just as the narrative of events to be recounted but instead as
perhaps the most important frame for a postcolonial society understanding itself on its own
terms. Almost twenty years later, Kamau Brathwaite in what has become a seminal essay in
Caribbean thought, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” attempted to provide an answer to
Goveia’s observation when he constructed two typologies for studying the Caribbean. One
typology, the “outer plantation,” congealed itself into a disciplinary field calling itself Caribbean
Studies. Arguing that historical study was the major preoccupation of this field in the
early twentieth century, Brathwaite suggests that historical work cleared the way for “the concept
of the plantation in Caribbean scholarship.”4 The concept of the plantation Brathwaite
suggests draws on the 1927 writings of Gurrea y Sanchez. The plantation has been a central
leitmotif in Caribbean thought, becoming a conceptual marker for the work of Lloyd Best and
what eventually became known as the New World Group.5 Although appearing at a critical
moment in Caribbean intellectual history, the theoretical framework of the plantation did
not have full explanatory power. The reason for this, Brathwaite argued, was that plantation
theory, although it claimed to be a theory of totality, did not “contain all that was planted.”6
For Goveia’s call to be properly answered, Brathwaite suggested that Caribbean writers and
theorists needed to turn their gaze to the “inner plantation.” In this inner plantation, he
says, “we are concerned with cores and kernels: resistant local forms: roots, stumps, survival
rhythms; growing points.”7 Brathwaite’s call was not a narrow linguistic one.
What does it mean to examine the inner plantation? I would suggest that this requires first
and foremost the recognition that one of the key defining historical moments of Caribbean
3. Elsa Goveia, Historiography of the British West Indies (1956; reprint, Washington D.C.: Howard University Press,
1980), 177.
4. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” Savacou, nos. 11–12 (1975): 3.
5. For a set of essays reviewing the intellectual history and work of the New World Group, see Norman Girvan, ed.,
The Thought of the New World (Kingston: Ian Randle Press, 2008).
6. Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man,” 4.
7. Ibid., 6.