After the Postcolonial Caribbean: Memory, Imagination, Hope

by Brian Meeks

Examines the history, and possible futures, of radical politics in the postcolonial Caribbean

Across the Anglophone Caribbean, the great expectations of independence were never met. From Black Power and Jamaican Democratic Socialism to the Grenada Revolution, the radical currents that once animated the region recede into memory. More than half a century later, the likelihood of radical change appears vanishingly small on the horizon. But what were the twists and turns in the postcolonial journey that brought us here? And is there hope yet for the Caribbean to advance towards more just, democratic, and empowering futures?

After the Postcolonial Caribbean is structured into two parts. In 'Remembering', Brian Meeks employs an autobiographical form, drawing on his own memories and experiences of the radical politics and culture of the Caribbean in the decades following the end of colonialism. In 'Imagining' he takes inspiration from the likes of Edna Manley, George Lamming, and Stuart Hall in reaching toward a new theoretical framework that might help forge new currents of intellectual and political resistance.

Meeks concludes by making the case for reestablishing optimism as a necessary cornerstone for any reemergent progressive movement.

Genres: History

224 pages, Paperback

Published January 20, 2023

Reviews

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly important, moving book—as much intellectual journey as cultural critique, which asks important questions about the role of the Caribbean at the presumptive end of neoliberalism, in the face of an uncertain future. Meeks writes with literary, accessible prose that is sure to meet an audience eager for answers—to what lies ahead, to how to face it. These answers aren’t all there, particularly in the face of a current moment of political apathy which seems to have risen in the Anglophone Caribbean, but as social Justice groups form, and a rising anti imperialist movement in 2023-2024 emerges, Meeks’ case for optimism is both prescient, and ever more important.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Meeks’ analyses of Caribbean politics are always worth exploring, partly because he is a fine scholar and political analyst, but more because he brings an eclectic approach, weaving together popular culture with political theory, cultural insight with sociological sharpness to produce polysemous readings of colonial life, resistance, and postcolonial contradiction. In this book – not a single argument but a collection of essays – we can see this sharpness in an unpacking of the tensions and contradictions woven through Caribbean relations with coloniality.

The collection is built a series of discussions between remembering and pasts and imagining other ways of being, all turning around two essays exploring Stuart Hall. The first is insightfully counterfactual, asking what might have happened to the long Caribbean 1970s with their promise of a form of democratic, socialist life had Hall returned to Jamaica and not stayed in England. It is masterpiece of maybes, reading Hall’s humanist (post)Marxism against Michael Manley’s social democracy of the Jamaican 1970s, Maurice Bishop’s more orthodox Marxism in the Grenadian revolution of 1979-84, and Walter Rodney’s influence in Trinidad and Guyana as well as his assassination. Good counter-factual analysis relies on deep and detailed knowledge of the subject: in this essay Meeks shows his skill and grasp of the region’s pasts and politics.

This counterfactualism, wrapping up the ‘remembering’ section is juxtaposed to a close and careful exploration of one of Hall’s last major pieces, the co-written ‘Kilburn Manifesto’ from 2015, sketching a form of British social democracy. This close and specific reading of this project then sets up the ‘imagining’ section weaving together the condition we might think of as ‘after neo-liberalism’ – the title of the Kilburn Manifesto, the white supremacist authoritarianism of the Trump era, and the struggle for hope in bleak times.

This overall sense of optimism and hope is moderated by a sense that these are bad times, that for the Caribbean the era since the early 1980s has been one of set-back, of extraction and impoverishment, of a reassertion of colonialism, but Meeks finds hope in his analyses of the region. Much of this hope lies in the cultural world he explores in the opening section where essays discuss poetry, especially Dub, the work of George Lamming, and the cultural outlooks and art practice of Edna Manley. Against this he unpacks the contradiction that Caribbean independence was in many cases brought about by parties that opposed it – as was the case in Jamaica.

It’s not easy to give a collection of independently written essays the kind of cohesion seen here, and there are gaps in the narrative as we’d expect given that these were initially written for other purposes. Even so, Meeks unpacks the drive to a postcolonial world in the Caribbean, focussing mainly on islands formerly colonised by Britain, to build a coherent sense of shared pasts and grounds for hope and optimism. The focus on cultural outlooks and dispositions means that there is less attention to the material conditions of the contemporary colonial order than there might be a single analytical text, but the sense of the potential he paints means that whatever those material condition, hope for a better, democratic, egalitarian world in the region is not misplaced.

All in all this is a fabulous collection of essays that should resonate well beyond the region they focus on.

[Christian Gurdin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Offers wonderfully intimate, considered reflections, whilst retaining scholarly specificity.

I have to say I preferred the first half of the book, but that’s because of my own particular interests (1962-1983 anglo-Caribbean history. However, the final chapter on revolutionary optimism was much needed after reading so many books indulging in tragedy & pessimism.