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What Is Afro-Caribbean Philosophy?a
Temple University
AFRO-CARIBBEAN philosophy is a subset of Africana philosophy and Caribbean philosophy. By Africana philosophy, I mean the set of philosophical reflections that emerged by and through engagement with the African diaspora, and by Caribbean philosophy, I mean both philosophy from the region and philosophies about the unique problems of theorizing Caribbean reality. The latter could also be characterized as the discourse on the convergence of reason and the New World.
The etymology of the word “Caribbean” points to the Caribs, a group of Native peoples, in addition to the earlier-arrived Taínos or Arawaks, among others, living in the region at the time of Columbus’s landing. The term “cannibal,” by the way, also has its roots in Carib, and the name “Caliban,” which refers to the villain in Shakespeare’s Tempest, is also a variation of the word Carib. “Taínos” and “Arawaks” were not the names of the earlier people; those names were ascribed to them by European archaeologists in the first half of the twentieth century. As we will see, the etymology of cannibal betrays the colonial logic that rationalizes much that happened in the region, and that logic contextualizes the philosophy there as well.
Afro-Caribbean philosophy is a form of philosophy rooted in the modern world and that takes the question of modernity as one of its central concerns. It is modern because the Caribbean itself is a modern creation. Although the indigenous people preceded that creation, its convergence with the African diaspora, marked by the consequences both of exploration and slavery, is indigenous to the modern world.
Afro-Caribbean philosophy, then, consists of the philosophical meditations on the question of African presence in the Caribbean and the modern questions of blackness raised by that presence. The latter, however, raise additional questions since “blackness” is, as Frantz Fanon points out near the end of his introduction in Black Skin, White Masks, “a white construction” (p. 14). By this, he means that the people who have become known as black people are descendants of people who had no reason to regard themselves as such. As a consequence, the history of black people has the constant motif of such people encountering their blackness from the “outside,” as it were, and then developing, in dialectical fashion, a form of blackness that transcends the initial, negative series of events. Again, paraphrasing Fanon, this time from A Dyiny Colonialism, it may have been whites who created the concept of the Negro, but it was the Negro who created the concept of negritude.
Although other groups have been yoked to the categories of Negro and blackness in the modern world in such places as Australia and the Polynesian islands, it is the descendants of the people kidnapped and enslaved from the coasts of the Atlantic and along the Arabic and East Indian trade routes who are most commonly linked to those terms. Thus, when Las Casas, the famed priest who sought salvation for the indigenous peoples of the Americas and to ward off their impending genocide through recommending the enslavement of West Africans, began his reflections on the New World predicament, the categories were already being formed as those inherited by generations into the present. It should be borne in mind, however, that these early formulations did not necessarily refer to the crystallized, reductive notions of blackness that dominated racial consciousness into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After all, the early, founding moments were also those of a complex war of hybrid populations. In January 1492, for instance, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile had managed to drive the Moors, who had ruled the region for nearly eight hundred years, out of the Iberian Peninsula, but that achievement was not regarded as the end of that war of several hundred years, and the expectation of its continuation meant that the Age of Exploration was also the continuation of, in the minds of the Spaniards and the Portuguese, their war against their former colonizers. Ironically, then, modern colonialism was founded on a particular kind of anticolonialism—namely, against the colonization of Christians, which was later qualified as against Europeans, who were presumed to be only Christians. This fact is no doubt a lesson that many efforts at decolonization in the twentieth century did not learn from the past. Crucial, then, is for us to understand that there is a history of the formation of modern blackness that is missing in contemporary discussions. The Muslim, Jewish, as well as Berber, Arabic, and other North African dimensions of the societies that became known as Portugal, Spain, and even Italy should be understood in the collisions they had with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. That hybrid population in the midst of war in the Mediterranean came to the New World expecting to meet a mediating Arab community that stood between them and India, and that misunderstanding forged a philosophical anthropology marked as much by orthodoxy and infidels as by expectations of meeting friends and foe in the dynamics of war. Such expectations and fears guided as well the Age of Exploration from the Mediterranean along the costs of Africa, a continent about which, given the demographics of the Mediterranean communities, they knew a bit more than is presented in historical narratives that lay claim to ignorant travelers. That so much of central Africa was located along trade routes that extended to the eastern coasts of the continent meant that at least various forms of Arabic—in addition to the creolized languages they used for trade, such as, eventually Swahili—stood as the lingua franca between groups of indigenous peoples.
Caribbean philosophy, then, was already being formed by the reflections of these early encounters of so many divergent communities, and in its core it was as it had to have been: a reflection on humanity through a robust realization of human difference and similarity—in short, philosophical anthropology. The profound divisions that occurred over time between the various groups, however, led to a phenomenon of denied inferiority to the subjugated populations, to the point of there being a single narrative of reality as the perspective of domination. In effect, indigenous and black perspectives suffered the loss of their ability to appear.
The “reappearance” of black reality in the New World, in the form of resistance in the face of near-overwhelming white encirclement, was the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth into the early nineteenth century, through which perhaps the greatest intellectual effort to articulate the humanity and dignity of black people in the nineteenth century emerged in 1885 in Anténor Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races. Firmin was born in Haiti during the forty-sixth year of its independence. His life in many ways brings to the fore the side of the Haitian Revolution that is not often written about in the constant stream of denunciations of its history: There was much innovation as the former slaves experimented and attempted to build what they knew was a beacon of hope for enslaved people worldwide. Firmin’s entire education was in Haiti. He studied at the Lycée National du Cap-Haitien and the Lycée Pétion in Port-au-Prince. He chose law as his profession and became a successful politician, which took him to Paris in 1883 as a diplomat. He was invited to join the Anthropology Society in Paris in 1884, where he was appalled at the racist anthropological theories espoused by his colleagues in the face of his presence as their clear contradiction. Although more serious in their methodological approaches than the extremely popular Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, 1853-1855), their conclusions revealed clear convergence with that racist diatribe—the supposed superiority of the Aryan race; the innate inferiority of the Negro; the search for a polygenic account of the emergence of different races, in effect, a collapse of race into species differentiation; and more. De Gobineau’s text was translated into several other European languages, which included five editions in German, and it is included in the Oxford Library of French Classics. The influence of de Gobineau’s work brings home one of the features of modern civilization that is the brunt of much criticism in Afro-Caribbean and the wider Africana philosophy: Influence in the white world is not a function of being correct, truthful, or excellent; it is a world, unfortunately, that asserts its superiority through the luxury of rewarded mediocrity.
The logic of the situation begged as many questions as it was supposed to answer. The presence of Firmin as a member of the Anthropology Society should have contradicted the thesis of black inferiority, but he was rationalized into the logic of exceptionalism, where he achieved as an exception to the rule but would fail as an instance of it. Firmin’s response was to write his own account of race in direct response to de Gobineau. The result was The Equality of the Human Races. The scale of Firmin’s achievement in that work, and its near absence of notoriety save for specialists in the Afro-Francophone world, is perhaps one of the great travesties of the impact of racism on the history of ideas. Nearly every contemporary debate in race theory and Africana philosophy is touched upon in an insightful way in that great work of more than a century past. Firmin returned to Haiti in 1888, where he eventually became foreign minister in 1891, during which he successfully prevented the United States from acquiring the Mole of St. Nicolas, the deep-sea harbor in which Columbus first entered the island. The incident led to the American ambassador, Frederick Douglass, who had not trusted his white American colleagues because of the humiliations he suffered from their ignoring the significance of his position, to be relieved from his post, and Firmin was held in ill repute for agreeing to negotiate with the United States in the first place. He was made minister of Paris in 1900, the year in which he attended the First Pan-African Congress in London as ex-président légitime of Haiti, but was drawn into conflict with Haiti in what became known as the Firmin Insurgency of 1902, which led to his seeking exile in the island of St. Thomas. He continued writing on social and political matters, especially Pan-Africanism and Pan-Caribbean politics, before dying shortly after attempting to secure his presidential leadership of Haiti in a 1911 insurrection.
This synopsis of Firmin’s life reveals much irony, for his political thought located him in the tradition of black republicanism, exemplified by commitment to a domination-free society governed by nonarbitrary laws, as this quotation attests:
The wish I formulate for the people of my race, wherever they may live and govern themselves in the world, is that they turn away from any thing that smacks of arbitrary practices, of systematic contempt for the law and for freedom, and of disdain of legal procedures and distributive justice. Law, justice, and freedom are eminently respectable values, for they form the crowning structure of the moral edifice which modern civilization has been laboriously and gloriously building on the accumulated ruins of the ideas of the Middle Ages.1
Although Firmin wrote The Equality of the Human Races as a scientist and defended what he called a “positivist” conception of science, which he claimed was in the spirit of August Comte (1798-1857), his achievement in the text is also a magnificent example of philosophical anthropology and philosophy of human science. There is not enough space here to provide a detailed account of his thought, but an illustration by way of his critique of Kant should provide an indication of his importance to philosophy. He begins with a reflection on method. One cannot study the human being as one would ordinary natural objects, he argues, because the human being is a contradictory subject. “Man can lower himself to the lowest depths of ignorance and complacently wallow in the muddy swamps of vice, yet he can also rise to the resplendent heights of truth, goodness, and beauty.”2 Philosophers and scientists have attempted to resolve these contradictions by splitting the human subject into either an overly formalized idealism or a reductive naturalism. To illustrate his point, Firmin argues that Kant’s moral philosophy illuminates his anthropology more than his Praymatica Anthropology. In the former, Kant separates morality from what he calls moral anthropology, where the former is rational and the latter is simply empirical. This division leads to Kant using the term “anthropology” in a way that is very different from the scientists of his day, who regarded it as the natural study of the human being. Kant regarded their work as properly “physical geography,” and his theory of human difference is, in many ways, a geographical theory of intelligence. Hegel, Firmin argues, is an heir to Kant in this regard, since he, too, sees race ultimately as geographical. In effect, Kant and Hegel were engaged in a form of geographical idealism.
Yet as the scientists criticized the philosophers for their idealism, they failed to see the errors of their naturalistic reductionism. The scientists of the eighteenth century simply presupposed that the human being could be studied in the same manner as plants, other animals, and other natural phenomena. What is missing in their analysis, Firmin argues, is an understanding of the implications of social life. Natural history must give way, then, to a form of unnatural history since the human being makes his or her own history. The human being, as Firmin proposes, emerges in a human world, which leads to anthropology as “the study of Man in his physical, intellectual, and moral dimensions, as he is found among the different races which constitute the human species.”3 Although Firmin refers to the “different races,” it is important to notice that he added “which constitute the human species.” His criticism of his colleagues is that they sought, in their effort to articulate a great distance between the Caucasian and Negro, to advance a theory of species differentiation instead of racial differentiation. Racial differentiation could only make sense for members of the same species. To advance his case, Firmin took on many of the racist claims propagated by mainstream naturalists of his day, such as those against race mixing. The fertility of mixed-race offspring dispels the notion of species difference. As well, the claims of polygenesis—that whites and blacks evolved from completely different animal ancestors—is a variation of the species difference argument, which is not only proven wrong by racial mixture but also by the fact that contemporary versions of each group are manifestations of even older mixtures. Here, Firmin’s argument precedes much of what was found in critical race theory by the last quarter of the twentieth century.
What should also be noticed is that although Firmin allied himself with the positivist science of his day, his thought clearly transcends positivist reductionism. For instance, he focused on the historical question of classification not in terms of individuals, although he offers analyses of their thought, but in terms of systems of knowledge. He understood, and was in fact explicit, about the limits involved in constructing an anthropology and of how the orders of knowledge of the nineteenth century were in fact constructing the very subject they had set out to study. Readers familiar with the thought of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) could easily recognize Firmin’s reflection as in stream with an archaeology of knowledge and its role in the constitution of subjects of inquiry: That he recognized the role of racial impositions on the subject matter and the underlying investments involved in geography and natural history meant that he was aware of the genealogical organization of thought on human subjects. More, his understanding of social life and the question of moral imposition or the impact of rules on the organization of human subjects means, as well, that he was a precursor in the area of philosophy of social science that examines problems of the constitution of social reality. Firmin understood, in other words, as Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) later pointed out in his Phanomenolo-gie des inneren Zeitbewusstsein (phenomenology of the Social World, 1928), that social life is an achievement, not a determined reality. This made him a precursor, as well, of social constructivism, but his version is rooted in a very thick conception of history.
Firmin also introduced a concept in Africana thought that was later taken up by the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney (1942—1980)—namely, the concept of underdevelopment. Firmin writes throughout the text of what he calls the “regeneration of the black race.” By this, he means that it was not the natural condition of blacks to be in an inferior position to whites and that the actual history of blacks in Africa is much different from what has been perpetrated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eurocentric writings on Africa and Haiti. He offers a history of ancient Africa that predates the writings of the Senegalese Cheikh Anton Diop (1923-1986). The Europeanizing and Asianizing of Ancient Egypt is one instance of the exceptionalist rule, whereby an ancient African nation is literally taken out of Africa because of an analytical reduction of civilization into things European and Asian. That the history of Africa is one of a rapid change and spiraling degeneration during the slave trade suggests that a process of underdevelopment led to the question-begging situation of black inferiority. This is what Rodney ultimately argued in his classic work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).
The concept of regeneration brings to the fore a problem of modern historiography, namely, the notion that the European qua European lacks a primitive past. It is an analytical notion in which, for example, when Neanderthals are discovered by recent archaeological and anthropological evidence to have been white skinned, the discussion of their intelligence shifts and a greater effort to articulate their humanity unfolds in the research. In short, a white primitive becomes an oxymoron, and, in effect, the ascription of intelligence functions retroactively from the present to the past and returns to the present. Whites thus function as the telos, as the aim, of the human species. It is, in effect, the reassertion of an old logic, namely, Aristotelianism, where there is a search for the telos or aim of living phenomena. Darwinism, properly speaking, should not make any teleological claims. But social Darwinism falls into this trap, and the logic from race to racism follows. The concept of regeneration suggests that the past was not one of any human race being inferior to another but that historical forces come into play to subordinate, by force, some groups of human beings over others. Regeneration suggests that every individual member of each group of human beings, as living beings, is in a generative process of achieving his or her potential, but that potential is not a metaphysical external Prime Mover. It is in what individuals in each group may strive for in the absence of domination. We see here the basis of Firmin’s republicanism.
Firmin’s ideas, however, fell upon deaf ears. This was so primarily because of the strategic isolation of Haiti by the United States and its allies in the region. For Firmin’s thought to have “appeared” beyond the borders of Haiti required the Haitian people themselves to have appeared beyond the stereotypes and disavowals of their humanity, poignantly analyzed by Sibylle Fischer recently in Modernity Disavowed (2005). How could such thought have its day in a world that could only see such people as violent usurpers in ragged clothing with pitchforks and torches held high?
Firmin was not the only nineteenth-century Caribbean thinker to see the importance of bringing nuance to the understanding of Africa in the modern world. A scholar of great repute from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, George Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) migrated to Liberia where he launched a stellar career as a teacher, researcher, and statesman. Blyden’s work was more social scientifically focused in the areas of linguistics, history, and sociology than Firmin’s work, which focused on philosophical and empirical anthropology. Blyden’s insights along the way offered much for the philosophy of culture. For instance, he was critical of Alexander Crummell’s project of Christianizing Africa, arguing, in African Life and Customs (1908), that it is much easier to change a people’s theology than their religion. Blyden saw the effort to change the normative basis of how people lived as having a damaging effect, although one could engage them at the level of rational reflection on the implications of their customs and thoughts. Central in this regard is his study of the Muslim populations of Western Africa, where he observed the difference between the impact of Christianity and Islam on blacks. The former, he concluded, had a negative effect of demanding subservience in the psychic and social life of blacks, which he considered demoralizing, whereas the latter afforded more dignity since it was more aligned with traditional African conceptions of self-assertiveness. With regard to modernization, he was a pioneer of the view that modernization need not only be European and that it was possible to develop a distinctively African form of modernity.
The question of formulating a black form of modernity was taken up in the next great effort at Afro-Caribbean appearance through the political genius and the grand effort of Jamaican-born Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940). After traveling through the islands in his adolescent years, he was struck by the seeming universal status of blacks at the lowest level of each society. After spending time in London, he was invited to the United States by Booker T. Washington in 1916, but Washington had died by the time of Garvey’s arrival. He stayed in the United States and was so successful in organizing the black masses that he was for a time the undisputed most influential individual among the people of the black world. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Community League under a program of race pride and economic self-reliance. An extraordinarily gifted speaker with an understanding of the organizing force of spectacles, Garvey understood that black populations needed symbols that represented possibility in their lives in addition to the material infrastructures he was arguing for. Since there are many studies of Garvey’s life that chronicle his conflict with W E. B. Du Bois, his eventual arrest in 1925 for tax evasion, and his deportation from the United States in 1927, I will not explore the details of those matters here. What is crucial is that along the way Garvey set the framework for a form of black nationalism of a prophetic and philosophical character. The prophetic side emerged from his political argument that black liberation rested upon the liberation of the African continent from colonialism. Prophesying the emergence of a royal liberator in Ethiopia, Garvey became the major prophetic figure for what became Rastafari in Jamaica. That movement came into being at the crowning of Emperor Tafari Makonnen in 1930, the avowed 111th emperor in the succession of King Solomon. Ras (King) Tafari adopted the name Haile Selassie (“Might of the Trinity”) on that occasion, and some of the followers of Garvey in Jamaica regarded those series of events to be the fulfillment of Hebrew messianic prophecy. The name they adopted, Rastafari, exemplify his name, and their subsequent philosophical and religious thought has had an enormous impact on the representation of black pride to this day.
Garvey’s philosophical thought focused on the affirmation of the black self. For Garvey, it was crucial for black people to value themselves, but this thought was linked to his political philosophy, where such value was not simply at an individual level but required, as well, a nation through which such value could emerge as historical. In short, black pride required black nationhood. The imperative of liberating the African continent and the many ethnic groups there returned, but the concept of nation advanced here undergirds the many ethnicities through the concept of race. In other words, the African states had to be founded on the black nation, which, given Garvey’s argument, was diasporic.
The next significant moment of black appearance in the Caribbean was the return of Aimé Césaire (1913- ) to the island of Martinique in 1939 and the publication of his classic Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), published in 1947. Although there were other Caribbean writers exploring similar themes, what was unique about Césaire was that he inaugurated this stage in the Caribbean itself. Trinidadian-born C. L. R. James (1904-1989), for instance, had published The Black Jacobins, his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, in the United States, and it took time for the text to be understood as a contribution to Caribbean historicism instead of only Caribbean history. James’s writings were, as well, regarded more as work in Marxism and what could later be called Afro-Caribbean Marxism. Césaire and his wife Suzanne Césaire had returned to Martinique after playing their role, along with Léopold Senghor and Léon Gontian Damas, in the development of what Aimé Césaire coined as “negritude,” whose basic tenet was to affirm being black and being proud of it. In his essay, “West Indians and Africans,” in Toward the African Revolution, Fanon testified to the “scandal” created by Césaire, a dark-skinned Martinican, expressing pride instead of shame in his appearance. Césaire’s thought, most exemplifed in his poetry, argued for positive black identification with Africa and for an aesthetic that subverted the notion of Eurocentric/white superiority over the African/black.
Césaire’s thought had an extraordinary impact on perhaps the greatest Afro-Caribbean thinker—Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). I will not focus in detail on Fanon’s biography since he is unquestionably the Afro-Caribbean thinker who is best known and on whom the most biographies have been written. The short version is that he fought in the French Resistance in World War II, returned to Martinique briefly after the war, and then went to France to study psychiatry (with FrançoisTosquelles) and philosophy (with Maurice Merleau-Ponty). As the head of psychiatry at Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria, he developed a series of revolutionary innovations in humanistic psychiatry and challenged the “primivitist” school of psychiatry that was influential in the study of colonized subjects at the time. He eventually joined the Algerian National Liberation Front in the Algerian War but died from pneumonia while seeking treatment for leukemia in Bethesda, Maryland.
The impact of Fanon’s thought on Afro-Caribbean philosophy cannot be overestimated. Nearly all of the central issues in this area of thought for the next half of the twentieth century emerged from his ideas. Although for a time he was more known for his ideas on decolonization and post-colonization in Les Darrmés de la terre (The Damned of the Earth, but available as The Wretched of the Earth), published in 1961, it is Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), published in 1952, that outlines most of the problematics of contemporary African philosophy. In that work, Fanon takes on the theme of Prospero and Caliban through raising the question of epistemological colonization. He argues that race and racism are functions of the social world, but the social world often hides its own dependence on human agency. He also challenges the ethical system that dominates modern thought—namely, liberalism and its promise of assimilation of all human subjects. Fanon points out that many black people attempt to enter that sphere of recognition in good faith only to find a distorted image thrown back at them in the form of an alien and alienated subject. Whether through the resources of language, sexual relationships, or the constitution of dream life, the black subject always finds himself or herself struggling with the dialectics of recognition, in which the white world always serves as the standard for the truly human mode of being. The dialectics of recognition mean that blacks stand in a strange relation to theoretical work such as philosophy, whose idol is Reason itself. They faced the phenomenon of Reason taking flight whenever blacks attempted to enter the equation. Fanon also challenged several influential tropes in the study of race and racism. The first was the self—other dialectic. For Fanon, colonialism and racism placed whole groups of people below that dialectic, which meant that they could only live it between each other. At the interracial level of black and white, there was no such dialectic. There was, simply, such a relation between whites, but beyond whites there was neither self nor others. In short, the human minimum was denied by the systems of colonization and racism. The result of Fanon’s analysis was that one could not simply apply the Western human sciences to the study of racialized colonial subjects. Their logic often broke down. Lacanian psychoanalysis, for instance, did not work for the Martinican subject because both the Martinican female and the Martinican male sought recognition from white males, which, in effect, meant that Martinican males did not exist as Lacanian men. How could this be so if sex were ontologically basic, as presupposed by psychoanalysis? Fanon showed that colonialism—a social phenomenon—intervened and disrupted the patriarchal order of Lacanian categories. He showed the same for Hegelian categories, in which recognition is also sought by the master in the ordinary Hegelian schema, but it is not so in the racialized schema faced by Afro-Caribbean subjects. And Fanon showed that the resources of language faced similar limitations. The semiotic limits occurred in the regional transcendence of “blacks.” In short, the Afro-Caribbean often attempted to master the colonizing language in order to transcend racial difference, but he or she often found the contradictions emerging from such mastery itself: (1) There seemed no way to be black and a master of the colonial language, yet (2) there being blacks who mastered it meant that there was something wrong with those blacks. They had, in other words, illicit use of licit grammar and words. The structure was, in other words, deeply neurotic, but it was so on the level of a lived reality of constant failure. Thus, Fanon raised the question of an Afro-Caribbean philosophy as one that posed a philosophical anthropology premised upon the need to formulate an alternative social world.
Ironically, although Fanon wrote those reflections in 1952, Black Skin, Wlrite Masks was not immediately recognized in the Caribbean. In France, it was somewhat of a scandal since the official French view was that there was no racial discrimination in France and that French colonialism, in effect, offered colonial subjects access to the (French) universal. But in the islands, the process of decolonization began to reach through the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone worlds in ways that brought the question of black emancipation to the table of international affairs as many African nations gained independence. Crucial in this regard was the Cuban Revolution in 1959. For Fidel Castro placed, among his objectives, the question of racial justice since the overwhelming number of poor Cubans, especially those that worked the sugarcane fields, were black. Eric Williams had earlier argued, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), that the causes of such historical circumstances were primarily economic, and such a case offered much for efforts at social emancipation premised upon Marxist-centered thought.
Added to these developments in the 1960s was the growing discourse of underdevelopment as a new stage of colonial assertion or “neocolonialism,” which meant that black emancipation gained a new formulation through more historical-minded scholars and activists. Central among them was the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney (1942-1980), whose How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) and earlier pamphlet Grounding with My Brothers (1969) brought a fusion of historical themes under a new stage of Afro-Caribbean historical consciousness in the notions of underdevelopment and lumpen-proletariat politics of social transformation through Rastafari. Although Firmin was the first to raise the problem of underdevelopment, the concept has been mostly associated with Rodney because of the influence of Marxism on twentieth-century African and Afro-Caribbean political economic thought. Orthodox Marxism argued that the proletariat—the working-class consequences of industrialism—held the universal dimensions of the next stage in the ineluctable movement of history. A problem that emerged for Third World peoples is what to do in places where there was no infrastructural development, where there was no industrial working class. In effect, the response from orthodox Marxism amounted to telling colonized and racialized subjects to wait for their turn. In effect, the response of James in Black Jacohins, that of Fanon in Les Damnés de la terre, and that of Rodney was to offer alternative models of revolution with shared premises but different conclusions. Revolution in the Third World, in other words, required a different logic because of the fact of racial oppression. In other words, the struggle that was being waged from the Afro-Caribbean was not simply a matter of class membership but human existence. Thus, the place of philosophical anthropology and the logic of recognizing “lumpen” populations took a more central role. The Rastafari movement, in its symbols of recognizing “natural” blackness such as dreadlocks and its cultural links with music and rituals around marijuana that led to direct conflicts with the Jamaican (and other Caribbean) governments, brought these questions to the fore.
Afro-Caribbean thought for most of the 1980s was heavily locked in discussions of political economy and history. A change emerged in the 1990s, however, when African American academic philosophy began to gain influence on African American studies in North American universities. African American academic philosophy began to formulate a set of problematics that conjoined the world of black public intellectuals with those of academic professionals. A group of Afro-Caribbean intellectuals surfaced who were a mixture of the developments in the United States and those in the Caribbean. Some of them were predominantly Caribbean in their orientation, and others were predominantly U.S. black in their upbringing. The effect was similar to rap and hip-hop culture, where Caribbean musicians, vinyl aficionados, dancers, and poets fused with the Hispanophone and Anglophone Caribbean with U.S. black Anglophone culture. The Committee on Blacks in the American Philosophical Association at first consisted of such a matrix: Blacks from the United States and those from Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Barbados met under one, racial rubric (“Black”) to discuss philosophical issues most relevant to them. The early meetings of that group were primarily focused on the intellectual identities of Anglo-analytical philosophy and American pragmatism. It is perhaps safe to say that the two exemplars of those models by the early 1990s were Bernard Boxill (Barbadian) in terms of the former and Cornel West (U.S. black) in terms of the latter. Ironically, the committee itself was originally organized by William R. Jones (U.S. black), who inaugurated his career with a dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical anthropology and who developed his own brand of humanism that served as a foundation of that stage of black existential and phenomenological philosophy. Others in that group included Lucius Outlaw (critical theory and phenomenology), Howard McGary (analytical philosophy), and Leonard Harris (pragmatism). By the mid-1990s, that group included Charles Mills (Jamaican analytical philosopher), Robert Gooding-Williams (U.S. black and specialist in European continental philosophy), and Naomi Zack (U.S. proponent of “mixed race” and analytical philosophy but with existential sympathies). That was the context in which my own work came on the scene in 1993, at first through a series of presentations and articles, and then in 1995 through the publication of my books Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism and Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. Crucial here, however, was also the work of organizing the U.S. history of African-American philosophy through the interviews and anthologies put together by George Yancy (U.S. black who concentrates in African American philosophy and critical race theory). Also, in terms of organizing the U.S. history of African American philosophy, Yancy’s Cornel West: A Critical Reader is significant as it brought together for the first time in American history a critical cadre of philosophers to reflect upon the work of a living black philosopher. All of this posed the question of whether such a correlate could emerge in the Caribbean context.
Much was happening at the same time in Caribbean literature through such writers as the Barbadian George Lamming, whose contribution to Anglo-Caribbean existentialism was contemporaneous with Fanon’s in the Francophone Caribbean; the Guyanese Wilson Harris, whose concerns of consciousness place him in the phenomenological wing; the Cuban-born but Jamaican Sylvia Wynter, who represents the poststructural development; and the Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid, whose novels and essays raise the question of the political geography of the “island” dimension of Afro-Caribbean consciousness. As well, there was a sociological wing of writers thinking through questions of freedom and consciousness, although they were not working in concert. The work of the Jamaican Orlando Patterson raised the historical-Hegelian formulations, but no writer exemplified commitment to the philosophical dimension of the sociological wing more than the Montserrat-born Antiguan sociologist and philosopher Paget Henry, who took on the editorship of the C. L. R. James Journal in the late 1980s. Henry had already made a name for himself as the father of Antiguan political economy in his classic work Peripheral Capitalism and Development in Antigua (1985), and his coedited work, C. L. R. James’s Caribbean (1992), had served as an exemplary fusion of black British cultural studies and Caribbean historicism. Under his editorship of the C. L. R.James Journal, the historicist dimension of that journal began to explore developments in African and African American philosophy. It was, however, the publication of Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism that signaled a decision for Henry to delve more deeply into philosophy at the level of embedded work in the sociology of philosophy, which, in this case, meant doing philosophy instead of simply studying it.
Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism announced the existential phenomenological wing of African American and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. The text argued that a renewed reflection on the role of the theorist in the study of race and racism was necessary, and this reflective movement raised the question of bad faith. The reality of bad faith meant that any philosophical anthropology faced its own metastability, by which is meant that thought as an object of consciousness placed itself outside of an identity relationship with itself. This meant, further, that any reflective human endeavor always encounters its own incompleteness. For Henry, this meant that the question of the modern black consciousness was being posed and, with that, the question of the black self. Moreover, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism argued that the historicist turn was limited in that it reflected only part of the problem. Colonialism and racism were not only matters of historical events, they were also questions about the constitution of new kinds of beings. In other words, they raised new, ontological problems and problematics. Henry’s historicism up to this point took the form of a fusion of the archaeological poststructuralism of Michel Foucault and the Marxist historicism of C. L. R. James. In both, however, he found it difficult to find an Afro-Caribbean self. The existential phenomenological posing of the creation of new kinds of beings and of how they live the consciousness of who or “what” they are offered the possibility of analyzing such subjects. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism and Fanon and the Crisis of European Man put forward the thought of Fanon as foundational for this stage of African American and Afro-Caribbean thought, and, combined, the two books played their part in the case for the now-canonical place of Fanon in postcolonial and Caribbean studies, which in turn led to Henry thinking through the categories of his organization of Afro-Caribbean thought.
The results of Paget Henry’s research came to the fore in the benchmark year of 2000. There, Afro-Caribbean philosophy was marked by the publication of Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy and my Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought, which, although not explicitly on Afro-Caribbean philosophy, is a contribution to that area by virtue of its being heavily informed by the thought of Fanon. I will here focus on Caliban’s Reason, however, since it is the text that placed this stage of Afro-Caribbean philosophy into its current schema.
The title Caliban’s Reason points to the ongoing theme of Shakespeare’s Tempest as the primary metaphor of modern colonization and racialization. Here, however, we see the theme of double consciousness come to the fore. First, there is the form of double consciousness in which one sees oneself only through the eyes of others. For Caliban, reality emerges through Prospero’s eyes. In Eurocentric scholarship, reality is solely a function of what emerges through European perspectives. So, an Afro-Caribbean that subscribes to that view will only see himself or herself through Eurocentric eyes that regard the Caribbean as marginal at best and, at worst, primitive or inferior. That, argues Henry, was the way the Caribbean regarded itself. There is, however, another stage of double consciousness, where Caliban realizes the contradictions of the world as presented by Prospero. That stage is able to issue a critique of Eurocentrism and pose the possibility of seeing the self beyond the negative versions constructed by European modernity. This form of double consciousness involves recognizing how the Caribbean self (Caliban) was misrepresented. But this representation does not mean reinscribing Prospero’s normativity; it does not, that is, require showing that Caliban is “as good as” Prospero. It requires understanding the problems of a Prospero-centered logic in the first place. Henry’s response, then, is not to deny the achievements of European thought. His response is to demand an examination of the contributions from Africa.
Raising the question of the intellectual contributions of the Afro-Caribbean to Caribbean life brought Henry to a tradition that goes back to Césaire. By raising this question, he brought to the table of ideas a different understanding of Africa in the Caribbean. There, Henry argues that what Africans brought to the New World were their unique visions of time and the distribution of values. Concerns of predestination governed (and still govern) the lives of many traditional African societies. The existential problematic thus focuses on problems of agency and human-centered action. How were these concerns affected by colonialism, slavery, and racialization?
Henry argues that a repression of the African self emerged in the historical process of its dehumanization. Afro-Caribbean philosophy therefore faces an important mission: the liberation of the Afro-Caribbean self from the yoke of its dehumanization. Such a task was twofold. First, it takes the form of the constructive arguments toward such self-recognition. Second, it involves the historical reconstruction of the intellectual history of such efforts. Culiban’s Reason takes on both tasks, although most of the text does so through presenting a careful discussion of the variety of thinkers and ideas that constitute the body of Afro-Caribbean thought. The presentation is done through a taxonomy of what Henry considers to be the major groups of Afro-Caribbean philosophy: (1) the historicists and (2) the poeticists. The former are primarily concerned with problems of social change and political economy. The latter are primarily concerned with the imagination, the conceptions of the self as represented by literature and poetry. Prime examples of historicists for Henry include C. L. R. James and his followers, which include the Antiguan Leonard Tim Hector (1942-2002) and the later Fanon. The poeticist wing includes Wilson Harris and Sylvia Wynter. The categories are not meant to be exclusive, however, so there are historicist contributions by poeticists and vice versa. Fanon and Wynter, as well as the Martinican Edouard Glissant, for instance, made both historical and poetic contributions. Wilson Harris’s call for the primacy of the imagination in the Caribbean is also linked to his Hegelian-like notion of a supraconsciousness over and through all living things, which, although poetic, is also historical. Henry then examined how different movements in the Afro-Caribbean were affected by these categories.
One movement that seemed to defy these categories was African American philosophy and its impact on the development of Afro-Caribbean philosophy. Many of the problematics formulated by African American philosophy are faced in Afro-Caribbean philosophy. For instance, in his discussion of prophetic pragmatism, whose chief proponent is U.S.-born Cornel West, Henry points out that a major shortcoming is the failure to recognize the African dimensions of the hybrid “African American.” It is as if the African American were born in North American modernity without an African continued presence and an African past. Henry points out the importance of the phenomenological turn in African American philosophy, which raises the question of the unique forms of consciousness posed by African America. To that, he adds the value of a historicist dimension to phenomenological treatments of the constitution of African America, one that historicizes the African and other dimensions, and the importance of such an approach to the study of the constitution of the Caribbean self. Another category is Afro-Caribbean analytical philosophy, or what he sometimes calls Afro-Caribbean “logicism.” There, through the work of Bernard Boxill and Charles Mills, he sees the Afro-Caribbean proponents of logical analysis of language. In relation to the analytical group, he also examines what he calls “the linguistic turn” in Afro-Caribbean thought, whose chief proponents are U.K.-born Paul Gilroy’s Birmingham School form of cultural studies and Jamaican-born David Scott’s Foucauldianism, wherein there is the poststructural appeal to the basis of the self in the linguistic formations of modern societies. Henry offers a critique of this turn, pointing out that it leads to a form of linguistic structuralism that evades the inner life or lived reality of the peoples of the region. The problem of language, after all, is central for the philosophical enterprise. The body of literature he explores, for instance, constitutes the discourse through which Afro-Caribbean life and problems can be understood. At the close of the text, Henry points out that there are unresolved historical questions in the Caribbean and that they could benefit from a dialogue with the poeticists, who demand a role for political imagination. But more, Henry raises—there, later in a series of articles in the C. L. R. James Journal, and for the volume (After Man—the Human) in honor of Sylvia Wynter edited by B. Anthony Bogues—the crucial role of transcendental reflection in Caribbean philosophy. By transcendental, he means the move from poetic interpretation and historicist examinations of temporality to the self-reflective analysis of preconditions and conditions of possibility. In short, Afro-Caribbean phenomenology, in addition to its historical and poetic dimensions, raises the question of Afro-Caribbean transcendentalism. For Henry, this means taking seriously the question of creolization in the Caribbean, wherein sources of transcendentalism are offered not only in the phenomenological writings from the 1990s and since 2000, but also in the past, through the elements offered by the Indo-Caribbean tradition and its creolization with Africa and Europe. In addition, the clear role of double consciousness in Caribbean thought requires an explicit engagement with the work of W E. B. DuBois and its relevance to the Caribbean in the form of what Henry calls “potentiated double consciousness,” the form of double consciousness that transcends the first stage mired in the dialectics of recognition.
There has been an array of works from a new generation of Afro-Caribbean philosophers since 2000. These writers have expanded the meaning of the Caribbean philosopher to take on the historic legacy of the Caribbean writer, whose goal is a set of issues that includes philosophy but is not limited to it. Such writers include the Barbadian Clevis Headley, the Jamaican B. Anthony Bogues, the Puerto Rican and U.S. Virgin Islander Gertrude James Gonzalez de Allen, Jamaican-descended political theorist Neil Roberts, Puerto Rican—born Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Jamaican-born classicist and philosopher Patrick Goodin, as well as a group of African philosophers who have joined the discussion such as Nigerian-born Nkiru Nzegwu, Ayotunde Bewaji, and Lawrence Bamikole, as well as the great Ghanaian philosopher Kwazi Wiredu, whose pragmatist writings are also now being read in the Caribbean context, and the Kenyan cofounding father of sage philosophy, Frederick O’Chieng Odhiambo. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Gertrude James Gonzalez de Allen, Jorge Garcia (Puerto Rican), Jorge Gracia (Cuban), Ofelia Shutte (Cuban), and Linda Martin Alcoff (Panamanian), among others, have been producing work that could be labeled “Latin Caribbean philosophy.” Maldonado-Torres has, however, been the most active in developing the Afro-Caribbean aspects of this philosophy and in taking the Fanonian side to a new dimension into what he calls a “postcontinental” philosophy. Here, Maldanado-Torres raises the question of the differences between the kinds of consciousness developed for continental formulations versus those governed by the logic of islands. Maldonado-Torres raises questions of going beyond such logics at the linguistic levels as well as the regional levels—especially in terms of how one formulates the notion of “America” and the “Americas”—in the constitution of liberated selves. Maldonado-Torres, through the work of the Lithuanian Jew Emmanuel Levinas and the Argentinian philosopher, historian, and theologian Enrique Dussel, also raises the question of ethics in Caribbean struggles for liberation. Unlike Fanon’s work and my own, which question the role of ethics after colonialism, Maldonado-Torres has attempted to reconcile ethics with postcolonial liberation.
Henry’s reflections on phenomenology have also been joined by groups of North American scholars in dialogue with Afro-Caribbean philosophy. These include the philosopher and therapist Marilyn Nissm-Sabat, who had already began exploring the postcolonial phenomenological dimensions of Afro-Caribbean philosophy on developmental questions of maturation from Fanon and the Crisis of European Man onward, and the philosopher and poet Janet Borgerson, who has extended the treatment of embodied bad faith from Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism to feminist critical discussions in philosophical treatments of marketing, power, and gender performance. Stephen Haymes, the award-winning philosopher of education and cultural critic, has also taken the existential phenomenological route in his recent writings, which explore problems of memory and trauma and how New World black slaves developed unique forms of pedagogies through which to assert their humanity. Kenneth Knies has also taken on these questions of the constitution of the self in phenomenology, but he raises the question of the disciplinary underpinning of such questions in what he calls “post-European science.” My own work is also in dialogue with this development in the field as efforts at what I call “shifting the geography of reason.” In effect, this research asks the question of what happens when reason no longer runs out the door when the black walks in the room. The argument here takes several turns. First, it addresses the metatheoretical question of theory itself. Critics of Afro-Caribbean philosophy take the position that building new theory is an imperial project and that properly postcolonial thought, as Afro-Caribbean thought should be, should focus on criticism, on tearing down the master’s house, so to speak. The response to this approach argues that being locked in negative critique collapses into reactionary thought and politics. The aim should not be about what to tear down but what to build up. The role of theory is to use all of its resources—from its many genealogical trends (creolization)—to build livable homes. This means, second, understanding what disciplinary formations could offer such a domicile. The error in most disciplinary formations is that they treat themselves as “closed,” “absolute,” or “deontological.” The result is disciplinary decadence, which involves the closing off of epistemological possibilities of disciplinary work. This form of decadence is particularly acute at the level of method, where a methodology does not emerge since such questions are closed. In effect, the discipline and its method become “complete.” Life returns to disciplinary practices, however, through being willing to transcend the discipline itself. I call this “a teleological suspension of disciplinarity.” What this means is that the thinker concludes that there are issues so important to pursue that method and disciplinary commitment must fall to the wayside if they inhibit exploration of those issues. In the case of philosophy, disciplinary suspensions—that is, the decision to go beyond philosophy—enable the emergence of new philosophy. Afro-Caribbean philosophy, from this point of view, is the construction of new philosophy through Afro-Caribbean philosophers’ willingness to go beyond philosophy, paradoxically, for the sake of philosophy.
At the institutional level, what has resulted since 2000 is that there are now philosophy departments at the universities in the Anglo-Caribbean, and there are now institutes and centers for Caribbean thought, as well as a Caribbean Philosophical Association. Richard Clarke and his colleagues at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill in Barbados held a conference on philosophy and Caribbean cultural studies in 2001, which stimulated discussions of ideas on that island in the form of continued, annual symposia, and the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, held a series of large, public seminars honoring such people of letters as Sylvia Wynter (2002), George Lamming (2003), and Stuart Hall (2004). Discussions initiated at the onset of these seminars led to the founding of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2003. Taking on the motto of “shifting the geography of reason,” the Caribbean Philosophical Association meets annually at countries and provinces that vary linguistically—that is, Anglophonic (Barbados, 2004), Hispanophonic (Puerto Rico, 2005), Francophonic (Montreal, Quebec, 2006)—and has begun production of a series of volumes, through the editorship of Clevis Headley and Marina Banchetti, in which problems in the philosophy of science, language, religion, gender, and aesthetics are explored in the Caribbean context. There are now also students pursuing master’s degrees and doctoral degrees in the Caribbean with a focus on Afro-Caribbean philosophy. Within those ranks, there is much interest in the thought of Caribbean women writers, and there is growing engagement between Afro-Caribbean feminists and U.S. feminist philosophers for the emerging area of Afro-Caribbean feminist philosophy. Recent developments include work on historical figures, such as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s work on the role of the Nardal sisters and Suzanne Césaire in the development of negritude and Kristin Waters’s work on the Jamaican Mary Seacole, as well as the growing scholarship on such women as Jamaica Kincaid and the Haitian writer Edgwin Danticat, and there is feminist constructivist work by philosopher Jeanette (Jan) Boxill on contemporary problems ranging from social justice to philosophies of sport.
To conclude, then, Afro-Caribbean philosophy has placed the question of the Afro-Caribbean self as a primary concern of the identity dimension of its philosophical anthropology, and it has placed explorations of how such conceptions of the self relate to historical questions of social change as its teleology. Afro-Caribbean philosophy is also concerned with a variety of questions in other areas of philosophy, such as the relationship of European philosophical categories to the creolized ones of the Caribbean, as well as the historical task of constructing Caribbean intellectual history. It is not, however, a philosophy that is obsessed with similitude or the pressures to be philosophy as understood in the northern hemisphere. In seeking its own path, Afro-Caribbean philosophy exemplifies the paradox of becoming more philosophical through the effort of going beyond philosophy itself.
Notes
Anténor Firmin, Equality of Human Races: A Nineteenth Century Haitian Scholar’s Response to European Racialism, trans. Asselin Charles with intro. by Carolyn Fleuhr-Lobban (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999), Ivii.
Firmin, Equality of the Human Races, 3.
Firmin, Equality of the Human Races, 10.
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