UWI holds lecture to observe International Year for People of African descent

Persons attending last Thursday evening’s UWI Lecture were challenged to never allow the suffering of their enslaved ancestors to count for nothing.{{more}}

Jamaican Professor Carolyn Cooper delivered two lectures, as part of the University of the West Indies Open Campus SVG’s efforts to observe the United Nations Declaration of 2011 as the International Year for People of African Descent.

Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, reminded the audience at the first lecture, held at the Methodist Church Hall, “We cannot rewrite the past, but we can reconceptualize its meaning.”

Thursday evening’s lecture entitled: ‘No matter where you come from: Pan-Africanism in Caribbean Popular Culture’, addressed the issues of race, cultural identity, skin colour, beauty, and how reggae articulates a global African consciousness that transcends insularity.

Cooper also discussed popular culture and used reggae music as a medium in which the Pan African Movement is articulated.

“I charge us all to carry anew the moral and economic wars for reparation, with a capitalised R, plenty capital to compensate the race, if only in part for the centuries of cultural and actual genocide we have endured,” said Cooper.

The professor explained that Jamaican reggae artiste Peter Tosh’s iconic ‘African’ is the finest articulation in Jamaican popular music of Pan-Africanist ideals, with lyrics, ‘Don’t care where you come from, as long as you’re a black man, You’re an African’.

She said in Jamaica, as well as other parts of the Caribbean, people of African descent sometimes do not define their racial identify in terms that denote ancestral homelands.

“Europeans, Chinese, Syrians and Indians are all raced and placed in their very naming. It is only Africans who are so, so Black, as we would say in Jamaica: generically black,” said Cooper.

She said Tosh’s assertion of an African identity for Black Jamaicans immediately contests the racist devaluation of continental Africa in Jamaica and having established African as a racial category, he proceeded to affirm a quintessential, racial African identity that is not exclusively bound to a particular geographical space or national origin.

“All Black people come from Africa originally, so to be Black is to be African, but to be African is not necessarily a function of having been physically born on the continent. Africa is a continental consciousness… . And so White people born on the continent are not African in the racialised sense of the word,” said Cooper.

On another issue, Cooper said Africa has been so dehumanized in the colonial imagery that relatively few Jamaicans in the Caribbean with African lineage want to identify themselves as African.

“Many obviously pure Black Jamaicans routinely claim ancestors of other races, usually distant great, great, great grandfathers, who have left no visible traces on the body of their doubtful offspring. And, even in cases where some racial admixture is evident, the African element in the mix is always the half that has never been told. Mixed race Jamaicans are half-Indian, half-Chinese, half-Syrian, half-White, but never half-African,” said Cooper.

She said the unnaming of the Black half may signify that the term African is grudgingly conceded to be the default position, but the silence may speak of the unresolved question of race.

She also used excerpts from Trinidadian Calypsonian Kenneth ‘Lord Laro’ Lara’s song to strengthen her discourse.

Cooper’s second lecture, captioned ‘Addi Di Teacha: Lessons from the Lyrics of Vybz Kartel – A conversation with students and young people’, took place on Friday, May 13, at Frenches House.

Her research interests are in Dance Hall culture, Reggae Studies, Jamaican and Caribbean nation language, Caribbean literary works, and Caribbean popular culture.(HN)