Emancipate the World: C.L.R. James and Black Power in the Caribbean Postcolony

• In Event: Decolonizing Black Power

Abstract

In his 1967 “Black Power” lecture in London, C. L. R. James identified a problem that persisted into the twenty-first century, the tendency for many to “see Black Power and its advocates as some sort of…sudden apparition.” Black power radicals worked in the train of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, and Frantz Fanon, which gave it is geographical sweep and rendered black power “the high peak of thought on the Negro question which has been going on for over half a century.” To James, the principle issue that black power confronted was the nature of political power and the possibilities for humanity that issued from anticolonial and antiracist struggles. As such, the question of power sat alongside one of the new world that black power might bring into existence. In a 1960 speech in Accra, Ghana, James praised Kwame Nkrumah’s call for a unified Africa, and noted in particular that his willingness to relinquish national sovereignty would serve as “a beacon light in the political development of the modern world.” In James’s view, black political struggles to end western colonial rule held the potential to “emancipate the world.”
Taking James’s two speeches together suggests something of the potential for new lines of inquiry into black power if we disentangle such studies from the U.S. African American frame — in other words, if we decolonize black power. James’s 1960 remarks in Ghana, and his 1967 lecture in London, reflect his involvement in and thinking about West Indies Federation, which he believed held the potential for a new political form beyond the nation-state and liberal democracy. Drawing on the fields of Caribbean philosophy, modernity/coloniality theory, and black political thought, I argue that questions of power, democracy, sovereignty, and political rule were issues that confronted equally anticolonial and U.S. black power radicals. The Caribbean highlights what we might understand today through conceptual lens of coloniality—the modes of governance that render colonial rule and national liberation, Jim Crow and full citizenship forms of rule available to modernity. James approached these questions in an emergent Caribbean postcolony, which allowed him to see the links to those concerns raised by U.S. black power radicals. In shifting toward the Caribbean, the study of black power takes up its two central referents, the vernaculars of blackness and nature of political power framing how those vernaculars take shape, that present coloniality and decolonial thought as essential questions for any history of black political thought.

Author

• Minkah Makalani, University of Texas at Austin