Abstract
The creolised cultural and political space of the Caribbean extended during the Cold War as it became subject to numerous US interventions, to the revolutionary influence of Cuba and to continuing control by Western European empires. The chapter argues that figures such as Aimé Césaire, René Depestre, C.L.R. James and Nicolas Guillen, although not often considered ‘Cold War intellectuals’, offer unique insight into Cold War intellectual currents by virtue of their direct engagement with all three ‘worlds’ of the era. This chapter surveys the writings of these and other progressive Caribbean intellectuals as they sought to articulate emancipatory projects both specific to the material conditions of their own people and in solidarity with other small nations caught up in the superpower struggle.
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Notes
- 1.
Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. by James E. Maraniss (1989; Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 1–3.
- 2.
Césaire, ‘Preface to Daniel Guérin, Les Antilles decolonisées’, in A. James Arnold, ed., Aimé Césaire: Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours (Paris: CNRS/Planète Libre, 2008), p. 735. Césaire is making an ironic reference to a comment by Charles de Gaulle, who said while visiting Martinique that ‘[b]etween Europe and America, I see only dust’ (quoted in Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), p. 7, my translation).
- 3.
Laclau, Emancipation(s), new edn (1996; New York: Verso, 2007), p. 3.
- 4.
Pietz, ‘The “Post-Colonialism” of Cold War Discourse’, Social Text, 19/20 (1988), pp. 55, 58.
- 5.
The Cold War deeply affected the careers of these founders of Légitime Défense. Ménil would go on to lead the Martinican Federation of the French Communist Party in the 1950s, around the same time that Césaire quit the Party. Monnerot renounced his affiliation with communism after the war and became a far-right ideologue, authoring an anti-communist polemic Sociologie du communisme (1949).
- 6.
Wilson, Red, Black, Blond, and Olive. Studies in Four Civilizations: Zuni, Haiti, Soviet Union, and Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 88.
- 7.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (1961; New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 38.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 43.
- 9.
David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 3.
- 10.
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), pp. 1–8.
- 11.
See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, new edn (2005; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 4.
- 12.
See David Scott, ‘The Sovereignty of the Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming’, Small Axe, 6: 2 (2002), pp. 86–7.
- 13.
Dalleo, ‘The Ideology of the Literary in the Little Magazines of the 1940s’, in Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell, eds, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, new edn (2011; Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 614.
- 14.
See Darrell Newton, ‘Calling the West Indies: The BBC World Service and Caribbean Voices’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28: 4 (2008), pp. 489–97.
- 15.
For an account of Bandung’s importance to emergent Third World movements, see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), pp. 31–51.
- 16.
See Philippe Verdin, Alioune Diop, le Socrate noir (Paris: Lethellieux, 2010), p. 255.
- 17.
Baldwin, ‘Princes and Powers’, Encounter, 8 (1957), p. 52. Baldwin wrote in the same article that the Congress seemed constantly on the verge of ‘drowning in the sea of the unstated’ (ibid., p. 59).
- 18.
For a discussion of the Haitian Revolution of 1946, see Matthew J. Smith, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change 1934–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 71–102.
- 19.
Depestre, ‘Lettre à Charles Dobzynski’, Optique, 18 (1955), pp. 46–50.
- 20.
Condé, ‘Fous-t-en Depestre laisse dire Aragon’, Romanic Review, 92: 1–2 (2001), pp. 177–84.
- 21.
See Anon, ‘Un débat autour des conditions d’une poésie nationale chez les peuples noirs’, Présence africaine, 4 (1955), pp. 36–8.
- 22.
Césaire had made his own attempts at socialist poetry in the post-war decade, including an ode to PCF chairman Maurice Thorez. For a reprinting and thorough discussion of Césaire’s ‘poèmes maudits’, see David Alliot, Le Communisme est à l’ordre du jour. Aimé Césaire et le PCF (2007).
- 23.
Césaire, ‘Réponse à Depestre, poète haïtien’, in Arnold, ed., Aimé Césaire, p. 725 (my translation).
- 24.
Ibid., p. 725.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 725.
- 26.
Anon, ‘Conclusion’, Présence africaine, 11 (1956–57), pp. 100–2.
- 27.
Alexis, ‘Où va le roman?’, Présence africaine, 13 (1957), p. 90 (my translation). Though he defends canonical works of Soviet culture, Alexis takes care to distance himself from official Soviet literary policy, citing Stalin and Zhdanov as ‘errors’, that is, as misapplications of Marxist theory that will one day be corrected (ibid., p. 91).
- 28.
See especially Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003) and Bennetta Jules-Rosette’s Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (1998).
- 29.
Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 23.
- 30.
Jones was imprisoned for violation of the Smith Act of 1940, which criminalised speech calling for the overthrow of the government, and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which targeted for deportation immigrants suspected of ties to communism. In a correspondence she wrote while detained on Ellis Island, Jones refers to her wing of the prison as the ‘McCarran wing’ (see ibid., p. 106).
- 31.
Quoted in ibid., p. 124.
- 32.
James arranged for each member of the US Senate to receive a copy of the book.
- 33.
See Christopher Gair, ‘Beyond Boundaries: Cricket, Melville, and C.L.R. James’ Cold War’, in Gair, ed., Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies (London: Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 89–107.
- 34.
See Josephine V. Arnold, ‘Guyanese Identities’, in A. James Arnold, ed., A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998), II, 102.
- 35.
Carew, Moscow Is Not My Mecca (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964), p. 192.
- 36.
See Paul B. Miller, ‘¿Un Cubano Más?: An Interview with René Depestre about His Cuban Experience’, Afro-Hispanic Review, 34: 2 (2015), pp. 157–75.
- 37.
Euzhan Palcy, Aimé Césaire: Une voix pour l’histoire (1994), https://youtu.be/jOUQ4RPRSQA (accessed 24 May 2019) (my translation).
- 38.
Césaire, ‘Lettre à Maurice Thorez’, in Arnold, ed., Aimé Césaire, p. 1505.
- 39.
See Pierre Schallum, Rassoul Labuchin se souvient de Jacques Stephen Alexis (2014), https://youtu.be/076PhnRKVn8 (accessed 24 May 2019).
- 40.
González Echevarría, ‘Criticism and Literature in Revolutionary Cuba’, in Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk, eds, Cuba: Twenty-Five Years of Revolution, 1959–1984 (New York: Praeger, 1985), p. 154.
- 41.
Piero Gleijeses, ‘Cuba and the Cold War, 1959–1980’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 2: Crises and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 329.
- 42.
Castro, ‘Words to the Intellectuals’, Castro Speech Database, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1961/19610630.html (accessed 19 January 2019).
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
See Adriana Méndez Rodenas, ‘Literature and Politics in the Cuban Revolution: The Historical Image’, in Arnold, ed., History, I, 283–4.
- 45.
For an overview of Soviet cultural influence on Cuba, see Jacqueline Loss, Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary (2014).
- 46.
Che Guevara himself wrote in 1965, ‘why pretend to search for the only valid formula in the frozen stiff forms of socialist realism?’ Quoted in Seymour Menton, Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 132.
- 47.
See Méndez Rodenas, ‘Literature and Politics’, p. 285.
- 48.
See Menton, Prose Fiction, p. 94.
- 49.
See Ignacio López-Calvo, ‘Factography and Cold War Ideology in the Cuban Detective Novel’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., Global Cold War Literatures: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 30–42.
- 50.
Quoted in Menton, Prose Fiction, p. 51.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 52. See also Marike Janzen, ‘Messenger Writers: Anna Seghers and Alejo Carpentier in the Cold War’, Comparative Literature, 62: 3 (2010), pp. 283–301.
- 52.
Méndez Rodenas, ‘Literature and Politics’, p. 283.
- 53.
See Jean Franco, Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 91.
- 54.
See Miller, ‘¿Un Cubano Más?’, pp. 168–9.
- 55.
Ibid., pp. 165–6.
- 56.
James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, new edn (1938; New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 391.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 391.
- 58.
For a discussion of literary representations of the Galíndez affair, see Ignacio López-Calvo, ‘God and Trujillo’: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), pp. 59–84.
- 59.
See Alex Von Tunzelman, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), p. 174.
- 60.
See J. Michael Dash, ‘Engagement, Exile, and Errance: Some Trends in Haitian Poetry, 1946–1986’, Callaloo, 15: 3 (1992), pp. 747–60. Although English novelist Graham Greene provides a helpful account of the impact of Cold War geopolitics upon Haiti in The Comedians (1965), Dash has justly criticised the novel for its racist portrayal of the country as a savage ‘heart of darkness’ (Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (New York: Palgrave, 1998), p. 110).
- 61.
Césaire, ‘Une saison au Congo’, in Arnold, ed., Aimé Césaire, p. 1136 (my translation).
- 62.
For a broader discussion of Césaire’s Cold War geopolitical vision in his poetry and drama, see Christopher T. Bonner, ‘The Ferrements of Poetry: The Geopolitical Vision of Aimé Césaire’s Cold War Poems’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 19: 3–4 (2016), pp. 275–300.
- 63.
Césaire, ‘Une saison au Congo’, p. 1141 (my translation).
- 64.
See Bonner, ‘Ferrements of Poetry’, p. 295. Though Césaire writes specifically of the Democratic Republic of Congo, similar covert interventions in the Caribbean toppled the democratically elected governments of Guyanese Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan and Dominican President Juan Bosch.
- 65.
Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 164.
- 66.
Other literary writers who have portrayed 1970s Jamaican politics include Margaret Cezair-Thompson, Michelle Cliff, Rachel Manley and Brian Meeks.
- 67.
RaeNosa Hudnell, ‘A Conversation with Marlon James’, Booth, 20 October 2017, https://booth.butler.edu/2017/10/20/a-conversation-with-marlon-james/ (accessed 2 February 2019).
- 68.
Casamayor-Cisneros, ‘Floating in the Void: Ethical Weightlessness in Post-Soviet Cuban Narrative’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 31 (2012), p. 41.
- 69.
Scott, Omens of Adversity, p. 14.
- 70.
Glissant, La Cohée du Lamentin (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 141.
- 71.
Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 3.
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Bonner, C.T. (2020). Islands Between Worlds: Caribbean Cold War Literatures. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_22
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