Session 2: Culture Freedom (7/23/20)

Robin D.G. Kelley “Dreams of The New Land”; Claudia Jones

“American Imperialism and The British West Indies” and “A People’s
Art is the Genesis Of Their Freedom”; Donald Hinds “Claudia Jones
and the West Indian Gazette”

• Robin D.G. Kelley links contemporary notions of a fictively inflected African past to dreams of Black power:
over material resources, productive relations, and political systems. The African imperial past, while not
perfectly egalitarian, represents a level of political development (including governance) and cultural
production (at a national level) that is attractive to the post-Civil Rights Black Disapora that lives under
neoliberal domination.

• Kelley and his peers look to an African past to sketch a future in which Black autonomy is reclaimed and
exploitation is abolished. This is a response to ghettoized poverty and police repression. It is also a
refutation of European denials of Black creativity, productivity, social organization, and reason, as well as
the reduction of culture (and by extension the Black human) to a quaint curiosity or an instrument for
profit. The Black working class, across various Diasporic contexts, is bound in common cause against the
global exploitation of labor and the commodification of culture (even culture that proposes revolution)
made possible by imperialism.

• Claudia Jones argues for the political (Communist revolutionary nationalist) usefulness of culture, from a
context of coerced circular migration between US, UK, Caribbean (searching for work/deported for
revolutionary activity). The Diasporic predicament of working class Carribean peoples in the UK (jobs and
housing discrimination, racist vigilantism), and the cumulative history of maroonage and rebellion, informs
her analysis. Jones uses historical materialism to link the UK’s need for semiskilled West Indian laborers
(which stokes racist British nationalism against immigrants) to the USA’s interest in suppressing working
class revolutionary nationalist developments in the Caribbean.

• In response to the West Indian bourgeoisie’s alignment with US imperialism and their
inability/unwillingness to advance working class revolutionary mandates (paralleled in Kelley’s notes about
the Ethiopian monarchy’s opposition to peasant demands for land reform), Jones organizes material
solidarity around a unified West Indian working class culture that envisions the complete economic and
political liberation of all of humanity, and bears certain similarities to Garveyist Pan-Africanism.

• Prideful resistance and revolutionary art, inspired by the natural and social “vividness” of the Caribbean, are
bolstered by a print publication (West Indian Gazette) and a live event (Carnival) for the autonomous
enjoyment and enlightenment of working people. The work of creating this culture is liberatory, but the
patriarchal practices that Kelley observes in Garveyism are present in WIG/Carnival organizing. Jones faces
sexist pushback from her male peers and performs a disproportionate amount of organizing work,
endangering her health.

• We cannot analyze hip hop without exploring the efforts of Jones, Garvey, and others to organize liberatory
cultural activity. It is necessary for us to explore the contradictions of class, gender, and race that both
inform the radical impulses of these cultures as well as reactionary practices that undermine their
revolutionary potential. Hip Hop continues to eloquently critique the exploitative and destructive nature of
capitalist society and its culture industries; Sampa the Great “Freedom” is one excellent recent example.