What is a West Indian?

Abstract

For C. L. R. James West Indian identity was something to be celebrated, associated as it was for him, with the whole of the Caribbean, from Cuba and Haiti to Martinique, Trinidad and Jamaica.1 Its distinctive character he saw as intimately linked to its particularly modern history, with the plantation at the centre of a global capitalist system linking slavery with finance, industry and European domestic consumption. The intellectual tradition which came out of this history was associated for him with ‘the struggle for human emancipation and advancement’. West Indian writers and social actors were ‘a particular social product’ producing a ‘particular type of social activity which we can definitely call West Indian’. The carriers of this tradition were men such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, hero of the San Domingue revolution, J. J. Thomas, the Trinidadian schoolmaster who took on the celebrated Oxford professor James Froude, Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist born in Jamaica, Aimé Césaire, the Martiniquan poet and theorist of négritude, Frantz Fanon, also from Martinique, who became a critical anti-colonial voice, and Fidel Castro. They shared ‘an ocean of thought and feeling’ which provided the roots of what it was to be West Indian.2 James wrote his history of the revolution in San Domingue, The Black Jacobins, in 1938, after leaving Trinidad to live in the metropole, the place where journalists and writers from the colonies could hope to make a name for themselves. James was steeped in Victorian English culture, and perhaps was expressing in this book a confidence about the future which was characteristic of much Victorian thought.3 Such a desire for progress was also a tenet of the marxism which, from this period, he began to espouse. The book was about a revolution which, he imagined, would happen in Africa, and told the story of the one which had happened in Haiti. Reflecting on the writing of The Black Jacobins in 1971, James noted that his aim had been