...central issues the last century. One of those issues is self-emancipation, and James's contribution to this in particular is his history of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, written in the context of organised anti-colonial activism in the late 1930s. It is a history of the conscious organisation of the Caribbean nation, a history in which people showed themselves willing to destroy everything they had been forced to build in order to win their sovereignty.

At the beginning of The Black Jacobins, James described the contrast between the behaviour of the Haitian slaves during the working day and their conversations around the supper fire. (1) Using the notes of eighteenth-century travellers in the French colony, James contrasted the apparent docility of the slaves with their lively and intelligent exchanges among themselves. The slaves taught each other about new plants, told stories wherein skill defeated force and exchanged ideas about their future freedom.

Around the evening fires of the plantation barracks and the free mountain communities, the participants in such conversations created a common representation of their new situation, in a process of oppositional adaptation repeated across the region. Through such efforts, borrowed cultural materials were changed and reworked so as to ensure the survival and continuity of a shared critical consciousness. By bending and qualifying dominant ideas and ways of thinking--though without leaving visible traces of the process--the humanity and freedom of the enslaved were nurtured, despite persecution. According to Sylvia Wynter, this strategy of survival also succeeded in changing the slavers' mode of communication by injecting into it the tension of an opposition that was unpredictable. (2) That tension was felt in the daily activities of the slaves on the plantations and in the free mountain communities as well as in the subversive exploits of domestic servants. Their actions included destroying machinery, poisoning animals and wells, storing supplies for the Maroons, spying on slavers, forging travel documents for the messengers who connected subversive groups (including recaptured Maroons/runaways), purchasing weapons and executing masters.

The very meanings of European words were altered by the dominated, who used their newly learned languages to connect the opposition to slavery, dispersed among the slaves, servants and mountain villagers, into a social movement. Identifying the means of expression collectively developed by the dominated was continued by some writers and activists during the colonial period. By the 1920s, both European and North American representations of the Caribbean, as well as social theories and research methods, were being borrowed, 'translated' and incorporated into the region's radical traditions. (3)

The Caribbean is a region where, for centuries, capitalism assumed the form of colonial slavery. Each colony was a commercial enterprise that produced merchandise for the international market and in which production units were militarised so as to contain rebellion among waged and unwaged workers. The unwaged were recognised only as slaves; their humanity was denied. With the advent of humanist capitalism, according to Jesus Ibanez, the humanity of the waged was recognised but enslavement was denied. (4)

The Caribbean was also the region where the organised practices of pluralism and nationalism against the colonial state were pioneered by Maroon communities. According to George Lamming, all people from the Caribbean need to study that history to confront the consequences of bonded work, indentured labour and slavery. (5) C. L. R. James and other activist intellectuals worked in groups studying a history in which an examination of popular cultures was central, as was an understanding of the making of those cultures. Like the Maroons before them, they were protagonists of the region's political history.

My focus in this essay is on the processes of communication that take place in the midst of conflicts determined by unequal relations of force and challenge the dominant representation of the existing order. They stem from efforts to change the relations of inequality. For the non-assimilated colonised, who faced a fundamentally similar problem to the rebellious slaves, mastery of the dominant culture might not have explained local crises but it could be used to access metropolitan discussions about the exercise of sovereignty. (6) Communication as a social practice here means participation in collective actions, intended to question, understand--and transform--prevailing social relations. What held my attention in The Black Jacobins was James's description of popular movements becoming historical subjects as they teach each other, as they learn together. Participants teach each other while engaged in the redefinition of power relations. Part of that process is the constant updating of a shared way of thinking that distinguishes communities of liberation from the forces of domination. (7) Maroon communities represented the organised will to confront plantation society in terms that both parties could understand. More than just the product of resistance to the unequal relations of the day, Maroon communities represented the altering of those relations. In time, 'Maroon' became synonymous with the tradition of voluntary collective work for the community's benefit; work that could not be used against the social interest. The world of the Maroon communities was that of the escaped, who created new solidarities from the mixture of Africans, black creoles, aboriginals, escaped European convicts and Sephardic Jews who sought freedom. Since the time of those first 'new world' struggles for self-emancipation, the continuity of marooning has depended on the circulation of shared memories about the choices that can be created. (8)

The Maroon communities organised production in a way that negated plantation society, liberated territory and sustained a separate nation. As self-emancipated groupings, they also evinced a central quality of social movements; they were organised communities that sustained conscious actions over an extended historical period. For the small radical research-cum-activist groups of the 1930s, this was essential. Acknowledging the history of marronage in popular cultures represented an opportunity to re-orient Caribbean societies towards their own realities. This is one of the many levels at which The Black Jacobins proved successful. The historical investigations, undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s, into Maroon victories took the Maroons as a symbol of the co-operation needed to survive and as a means of examining the possibilities for colonial independence. (9)

The Maroon communities stood not only for courage and determination but were also a model of institutions that encouraged production for self-sufficiency and generated support for their ideas and approach. Symbolic of a cultural opposition whose existence called into question the dominant rationale, these effective demonstrations of sovereignty were a direct result of the historical conditions that obtained in the Caribbean. According to Sylvia Wynter, the fact that the region's cultural genesis was in the slave trade presented some very specific choices for ways of struggling. Either original cultural identities had to be denied if participants were to feature in the official 'story' of the region or the accepted, instituted conceptualisation of that story had to be redefined as a generalisation that did not fully express the interest or experience of the majorities. (10) This is what the Maroon communities represented; the collective rejection of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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