Melisse Thomas-Bailey
PhD. Candidate
Dept. of History
The University of the West Indies
St Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago

(Re)Writing Self: The Revisionist Writings of the Afro-Caribbean Intelligentsia, 1840s-1950s.

Many European and locally-based whites writing on the Caribbean in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, regardless of their fields, felt compelled to provide metropolitan readers with ‘insights’ into the “peculiarities of the Negro in the West Indies:” the nature of their relationships, cultural practices, work ethic, sense of identity and historical legacy— or perceived lack thereof. More often than not, blacks were derogatorily portrayed in these works. The spread of education among blacks after the abolition of slavery provided the confidence and wherewithal to challenge and revise these writings. This paper will examine some of the more outstanding, but lesser-known, rebuttals.

This was a period during which members of the intelligentsia were moving beyond being avid consumers of knowledge to being equally avid producers of knowledge. Through their writings, Afro-Caribbeans were pro-actively constructing and inventing counter-identities to the ones ascribed to them during and after slavery by the ‘knowledge aristocracy’—that is, those who were the dominant producers of knowledge, and whose ideas and writings were accepted as ‘The Truth.’ The black intelligentsia sought to debauch disparaging myths about their history and potential for progress. A ‘canon’ was slowly being created and recommended for “the well-informed Negro.” By the early Twentieth century they were interrogating the content of colonial Caribbean school curricula, and writing of the ways in which notions of inferiority about and among blacks were being fostered through the very texts that were supposed to enlighten. This study will look at writings by Afro-Caribbean people that sought to re-educate the black community out of notions of inferiority. It will look at both creative and academic writings, focussing on the central themes that preoccupied late nineteenth and early twentieth-century black Caribbean thinkers.