Reprising the Past, Imagining the Future

Abstract

In 2014, the author published a volume of essays, Critical Interventions in Caribbean Politics and Theory, which Small Axe editor David Scott proposed might form the basis for a discussion around Meeks's work and its broader contribution to debates surrounding contemporary Caribbean politics and society. Obika Gray and Maziki Thame contributed review essays, tackling many of the issues explored in the book, including the Caribbean black power movement, the Grenada Revolution and its demise, the contemporary state of Jamaican politics, Caribbean intellectual traditions, and the possible directions for Caribbean politics in the near future. While largely sympathetic to many of their comments, Meeks engages with Gray specifically around what Meeks considers Gray's minimalizing of the distinctions between radical activists of the 1970s and contemporary “Dons,” the role of Cuba in the Grenada Revolution, and Gray's underestimation of the importance of the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s for contemporary Caribbean social sciences and the humanities. Meeks then engages with Thame's proposal that there is potential for renewal in what Meeks describes, in Critical Interventions and elsewhere, as a moment of hegemonic dissolution. Meeks argues that this notion must be handled with care, since there is no easy road back to renewal and recovery from a genuine state of societal collapse.