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'Where the Present is Haunted by the Past': Disarticulating Colonialism's Legacy in the Caribbean

University of Texas at Austin, USA

The complex theoretical and political formulations of the Caribbean historian and activist Walter Rodney (1942-80) were based on a strategy of bringing to light and thereby undermining the divisive influence of pejorative colonial-era constructions of the various racial diasporas in the region. His interventions in public life in Jamaica and Guyana in the late 1960s and 1970s which foreground race without essentializing it, and which refuse to submit to the false opposition of 'race or class' in social analysis and organizing, contribute to an understanding of how strategic and expansive uses of 'blackness' work within and across nation-states to articulate new forms of politics. Walter Rodney's life and work also has much to tell us about how to conduct an engaged, socially relevant academic praxis.

Key Words: Caribbean • class • colonialism • ethnicity • neo-colonialism • race • Walter Rodney

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