Memory, Migration and (De)Colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond edited by Jack Webb, Roderick Westmaas, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and William Tantam INSTITUTE OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES Memory, Migration and (De)Colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond edited by Jack Webb, Rod Westmaas, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and William Tantam University of London Press Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2020 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/. This book is also available online at http://humanities-digital-library.org. ISBN: 978-1-908857-65-1 (paperback edition) 978-1-908857-66-8 (.epub edition) 978-1-908857-67-5 (.mobi edition) 978-1-908857-76-7 (PDF edition) DOI: 10.14296/220.9781908857767 (PDF edition) Institute of Latin American Studies School of Advanced Study University of London Senate House London WC1E 7HU Telephone: 020 7862 8844 Email: [email protected] Web: http://ilas.sas.ac.uk Cover image: The Bronze Woman, Stockwell. Photograph by Cecile Nobrega. This book is dedicated to the Bronze Woman Charity, who with the OLMEC Charity work tirelessly for the Children of the Windrush. The Bronze Woman Statue, located in Stockwell Gardens, and depicted on the cover of this book, was the brainchild of Cecile Nobrega, a poetess, who was relentless in her pursuit to honour Caribbean womanhood. With a symbolic statue of Bronze for her toughness, Uplifting her Child, Shaping the next generation. Contents Notes on contributors vii Prologue xi Rod Westmaas Introduction 1 Jack Webb, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and William Tantam 1. Loving and leaving the new Jamaica: reckoning with the 1960s 19 Matthew J. Smith 2. Why did we come? 31 B. M. Nobrega 3. History to heritage: an assessment of Tarpum Bay, Eleuthera, the Bahamas 37 Kelly Delancy 4. ‘While nuff ah right and rahbit; we write and arrange’: deejay lyricism and the transcendental use of the voice in alternative public spaces in the UK 57 William ‘Lez’ Henry 5. Journeying through the ‘motherland’ 79 Peter Ramrayka 6. De Zie Contre Menti Kaba – when two eyes meet the lie ends. A Caribbean meditation on decolonising academic methodologies 85 Nadine King Chambers 7. Organising for the Caribbean 107 Anne Braithwaite 8. The consular Caribbean: consuls as agents of colonialism and decolonisation in the revolutionary Caribbean (1795–1848) 117 Simeon Simeonov vi MEMORY, MIGRATION AND (DE)COLONISATION 9. To ‘stay where you are’ as a decolonial gesture: Glissant’s philosophy of Antillean space in the context of Césaire and Fanon 133 Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez 10. Finding the Anancyesque in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the decolonisation project in Jamaica from 1938 to the present 153 Ruth Minott Egglestone 11. Maybe one day I’ll go home 173 Rod Westmaas Index 183 Notes on contributors Matthew J. Smith is professor of Caribbean history at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica. His research interests include Caribbean migration, and popular culture and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries with special emphasis on Haiti and Jamaica. He is the author of Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (UNC Press, 2014), and Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (UNC Press, 2009). He is co-editor with Diana Paton of The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, forthcoming). Ruth Minott Egglestone grew up in Jamaica but has spent most of her teaching career in England and Scotland. She has a background in literature (English and Spanish), education, drama and cultural studies. Her seminal doctoral thesis mapped the development of the Jamaican Pantomime tradition as a model of national identity and a new theatrical form. She is currently working with children in the field of inclusive education, refining a manuscript about teaching with a reggae sensibility in Britain, and collaborating on a biography of Roger Mais. At present, there are also two Shakespeare-based writing projects in the pipeline. Peter Ramrayka, MBA, CIHM, FIHM, FRSPH, FIHEEM, is author of the acclaimed monograph Recycling a Son of the British Raj (Hansib, 2015), which highlights the cultural transformational changes and challenges he went through in his early life as an Indo-Guyanese migrant to the UK. He was an officer in the RAF, and rose to a senior management position in the National Health Service. His career was interspersed with national, international and voluntary consultancies in the UK (including being appointed a Justice of the Peace), Botswana, Pakistan and Tanzania. Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez is visiting professor of philosophy at Oxford College of Emory. His work focuses on the interconnection between history, politics, and aesthetics in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a philosophical attempt at approaching these topics collectively. He is particularly interested in aesthetic theories and practices (such as literature and film) of this world region that critique colonial forms of self-understanding and self-expression, and contribute to new epistemologies of resistance. His work investigates a vii viii MEMORY, MIGRATION AND (DE)COLONISATION European philosophical tradition of history and aesthetics as challenged by the existence of the Americas. Bruce Nobrega was born in Guyana and attended Queens College. He came to England for the second time in 1969, and settled, just in time to be included in what is now termed the Windrush Generation. He studied quantity surveying and up to his retirement worked on various projects including social housing. He is a long-standing treasurer of a BAME housing association, originally formed for women; he is a committee member on various organisations connected with the community; and he has been involved with the Adult Literacy Programme. He is an activist whose travels have enhanced his knowledge and understanding of black history, and the nuanced effects that the various western colonising powers have had on their subject–citizens. Kelly Delancy is from Nassau, Bahamas. She graduated in 2011 with a BA in anthropology from the State University of New York and in 2015 with an MA in anthropology from the University of Florida. She hopes the information generated during her studies will be of value to future generations of Bahamians and others interested in the history of south Eleuthera and the Bahamas. Delancy currently assists researchers tracing Bahamian histories and continues to share information collected on community histories through the ‘From Dat Time’: Oral and Public History Institute of the University of the Bahamas, and through the Finding Home Bahamas project, which can be found on Facebook and Instagram. Simeon Simeonov is a PhD student at Brown University interested in the history of extraterritoriality and its relationship to diasporas, empires, states, colonialism and decolonisation. His work historicises the creation of the modern nation state as a process shaped as much by ‘external’ as by ‘internal’ agents and institutions. Methodologically, his scholarship aims at transcending the inner-disciplinary boundaries separating cultural, social, political and diplomatic history. It is only by elucidating the role of marginalised groups as political and diplomatic agents that we can fully understand the stakes of creating colonial and post-colonial polities and the political-economic system of global capitalism. William ‘Lez’ Henry, born in Lewisham, London to Jamaican parents, is the British reggae deejay Lezlee Lyrix. He is an associate professor at the University of West London and is renowned as a first-class public speaker. He has lectured nationally and internationally and featured in numerous documentaries and current affairs television and radio programmes. He also writes about many of the concerns of the African diaspora in the UK, and is a keen martial artist. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix Jack Webb is a research associate in the School of English, Newcastle University, whose work focuses on the cultural history of the Caribbean and the British Empire. He is the author of Haiti in the British Imagination, 1847– 1904 (Liverpool University Press, 2020), and has published in the Journal of Caribbean History and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. William Tantam is postdoctoral fellow in Caribbean Studies, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, and directs the Centre for Integrated Caribbean Research. His work focuses on embodiment and agency in relation to class, gender and power in the Caribbean. His forthcoming publications include An Ethnography of Class and Masculinities in Jamaica: Letting the Football Talk (Bloomsbury, 2019). Maria del Pilar Kaladeen is an associate fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She works on the colonial history of the system of Indian indenture in Guyana (1838–1917). Maria is co-editor of We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture (School of Advanced Study, 2018) and a contributor to Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children (Headline, 2018). Her monograph on indenture in Guyana is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press. Anne Braithwaite is a Guyanese living in London for almost 50 years, who has worked extensively