"TALKING ABOUT A LITTLE CULTURE": SYLVIA WYNTER'S EARLY ESSAYS Author(s): Norval Edwards Source: Journal of West Indian

Literature, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Sylvia Wynter: A Transculturalist Rethinking Modernity (November 2001), pp. 12-38 Published by: Journal of West Indian Literature, Department of Literatures in English, University of
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A LITTLE "TALKING ABOUT WYNTER'S CULTURE": SYLVIA EARLY ESSAYS

Norval Edwards

Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican writer and cultural theorist, emerged in the first decade of independence as a significant Caribbean intellectual whose early essays substantively intervened in the contentious cultural and aesthetic characterized allusive practice cultural of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In these essays, theoretical referential and acumen, by sophisticated density, and a blistering polemical style, Wynter challenged debates of Caribbean grounded relations, literary criticism and called for a critical in a dialectical understanding of the historical and and structures that Caribbean categories, produced and The criticism. writing, significant impact of her

extant norms

societies, culture, work on her peers can be gauged in Kamau Brathwaite's ringing endorsement of her first major essay, "We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing

and Criticism." For Brathwaite, this essay exemplifies an "This piece is one of our great critical indigenist critical practice: landmarks: a major essaiin literary ideas, and the first to be written in the Brathwaite's of ideas in West Indies."1 emphasis on the importance Wynter's work is reiterated in Paget Henry's description of Wynter as an intellectual diva whose of very serious ideas can "playful elaborations be to the decorated notes of Sarah Vaughan's only compared exquisitely "2 singing. She is in so many ways "the Divine One" of Caribbean letters. Despite these plaudits, Wynter's cultural criticism has received scant critical attention over the years. While there are welcome signs of a

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renewal

of interest in her work, the relative neglect of this formidable of a serious intellectual has deprived Caribbean literary scholarship engagement with a provocative and original body of ideas ranging from nationalism to Foucaultian-inflected postmodernism. is a itinerary fascinating example of both a rich intellectual and the larger narrative of the relationship between local and

cultural Wynter's

In fact, Wynter's turn toward postmodernism is marked with the of her the strategic requirements engagement by founding of modernity and our contemporary discourses Like global order. Antonio Benitez-Rojo and Edouard postmodernist strategies affinities recall Foucault to "read" Glissant, the Caribbean she Her uses explicitly but her theoretical focus is on the

biography global theories.

rather than Deleuze.

politics of knowledge and the instrumentality of cognitive and cultural categories in effecting regimes of truth. This focus pervades all of her from the early cultural nationalist interventions writing, culture, and criticism, to the later attempts and deconstructive genealogical critique of humanism. essays, on Caribbean to theorize a

of Regardless a consistent theoretical goal, her subject matter, Wynter maintains of the conceptual foundations of Western namely the dismantling the of the and humanism, disruptive deciphering epistemological the West's global cognitive categories that initiated and legitimized dominance. For Wynter, the West's hegemonic self-conception, as the veritable form of human reality, constituted as "the globalized Word of Man", and inscribed within the body's own neural circuits as goal inducing affective stimuli, becomes a meta-narrative that traps the an ordained logic of cultural, political, and This thesis (explicated in detail and buttressed marginality. an erudite and of from a dizzying array of by original synthesis concept disciplines) is reiterated in all of Wynter's post-1976 essays, and it is her economic thought. a Paget Henry Wynter's poststructuralist bridge between contending approaches to history in Caribbean philosophy, but his focus on her later poststructuralist phase precludes detailed scrutiny sees ideas as of the early essays which established Wynter's reputation as a distinctive contribution to Caribbean intellectual West's "Others" within

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formidable

partisan in the contentious culture wars of the late sixties and seventies. Given the growing recognition of Wynter's contribution to Caribbean and Africana early writings which Western humanism. cultural criticism, it is necessary to revisit the the later poststructuralist anticipated critique of At the end of the millennium, in an academic

climate that is sceptical if not averse to the heady cultural nationalism of the era of decolonization, afford us into Wynter's early writings insight the theoretical possibilities as well as the pitfalls of West Indian nativist criticism in the first decade interventions, approaches, categories nationalism essentialist The of independence. The scope of Wynter's her synthesis of a variety of theoretical and disciplinary and her systematic emphasis on the historicity of cultural counter the contemporary to regard cultural tendency as invariably wedded to revanchist and ahistorical

ideologies. early essays evince a concern with clearing the ground for a Caribbean critical practice that engages with the historical and cultural the social framework, and the systemic categories that literature, culture, and criticism. This categorical imperative throughout the five major essays published in the period 1968 and it 72, lays the groundwork for the rigorous philosophical critique of humanism that characterizes her later essays. Wynter's major concepts relations, underpin resonates Western such as the advocacy of a poetics of disenchantment, the emergence of humanism in the context of colonial expansion and plantation slavery, and the power of cognitive models to structure societal and historical processes, are first formulated in this period, but they lack the and the philosophical systematic conceptualizing density of the second essays. In this first phase, Wynter assaults a range of conceptual pieties extant in Caribbean society: for example, in a Jamaica Journal article on Lady Nugent, she attacks the post-independence myth of phase racial harmony as a symptom of the society's refusal to confront its history and to accept the African cultural presence which "provided the "3 This idea of a repressed historical syncretic mixing force of the society. and cultural relation, whose retrieval is a prerequisite for critical

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the point practice, becomes critical explorations. A common aesthetic theme autonomy and

of departure

for Wynter's

subsequent

Wynter's impatience of "We must learn to sit down from the literary-critical concerns on West Indian talk about a little culture: Reflections and together

in all five essays is the critique of notions of the disinterested of criticism. objectivity underwrites her move with aesthetic idealism

to her ethnological study," Jonkonnu Writing and Criticism" (1968/69) in Jamaica," which reads the Jonkonnu folk dance as a cultural site which New registers the various strata of cultural encounters, adaptations, of Africans in the and re-inventions attendant on the indigenization World. The critical concerns A Critique", seminal of "Reflections" are rehearsed in "Creole Criticism:

a blistering polemic directed at Kenneth The West Indian Novel and Its Background. study, outlines the relationship "Novel and History: Plot and Plantation" between history and fiction in the Caribbean in terms of the relation Ramchand's and a and the rise of the novel, modernity the between the elite ambivalence structuring generated by opposition of this and the folk worldviews. The last major essay (plot) (plantation) phase, "One Love: Rhetoric or Reality?- Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism" between Caribbean (1972) is a frank critique of the co-opting of popular cultural styles and argot by an emergent Black middle class. Wynter warns against the power dangers of this class exercising a false populism to consolidate within the old framework of colonial values. "One Love's" excoriation of racial romanticism reveals Wynter's commitment to understanding culture and history in terms of the foundational concepts and cognitive Her focus on axioms that determine cultural and historical outcomes. her rejection of a facile racial cultural production.4 solidarity From the outset, therefore, Wynter's work highlights the systemic factors that can enable or prevent particular forms of historical agency. cognitive underscores as the touchstone for evaluating The making of history, as she subsequently argues, cannot be separated from our culturally produced models of history and the nature of the liminal categories that define and demarcate the horizons of thought determinism

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her oeuvre in a series of concept recurs throughout the instrumental formulations and rhetorical figures that emphasize function of rhetorical and signifying conventions in producing cognitive models. All of the above concerns mordant polemic, "We little culture: Reflections and concepts are apparent in Wynter's must learn to sit down together and talk about a

and

act.

This

on West Indian Writing and Criticism." The is a to the critical norms a essay polemical riposte expressed by variety of Indian and West English critics associated with the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. In particular, Wynter takes issue with the Wayne Brown's article, "The Novelist in an Unsettled Culture", Louis of critical essays on West Indian anthology literature, The Islands in Between, and Bill Carr's essay on Roger Mais, From a Legend." Brown, James, Carr, and "Roger Mais: Design several contributors a "branch to The Islands model perpetuating plant" imitation of English critical norms. mimicry per se but on the systemic connections, and the ideological in Between, are castigated for of criticism characterized by its Wynter's focus is not on colonial historical categories and cultural that shadow James edited

factors, and conceptual

seemingly objective judgments. For Wynter, the colonial relation, articulated in terms of exile, is the writing and criticism. The systemic ground and context of Caribbean branch universal norms as metropolitan plant model of criticism, in espousing see its own historical and socio-cultural fails to truths, writers, to their

that link Caribbean formations, the interwoven connections critics, and institutions like the University of the West Indies, metropolitan

of a technique counterparts. Wynter uses Fanon's of the critical to give a symptomatic reading "sociodiagnostic" and she augments the manifestations of branch plant blindness, that excluded folk and with declarations to point prescriptive diagnosis Caribbean popular cultures as sources and possibilities of a postcolonial aesthetics. develop from a synthesis of Wynter's premises, in "Reflections", a constellation of unlikely alignments and various theoretical positions,

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encounters

that sees her blending George Lammmg's Calibamc Frankfurt School of The Tempest with Theodor W. Adorno's

reading culture

The Pleasures of Exile underpins her reading of the critique. Lamming's colonial relation, while Adorno's dialectical critique of culture provides a conceptual map for charting a non-positivist rethinking of the concepts of culture, criticism, and the aesthetic.5 Wynter uses Adorno, as well as Bertolt tradition Brecht and that Walter is absent hermeneutics Benjamin, from the The to articulate a critical Anglo-American Frankfurt School technique of allows premises and assumptions inherited

of literary scholarship.

continually founding questioning to what she sees as the aestheticism and formalism that dispute Wynter of James, Carr, and Brown. the critical pronouncements underpin Wynter, in fact, reads literature and criticism as merely aspects of a a critical practice that larger discourse of culture, and she champions moves analysis. Wynter's introduction readings beyond conventional literary criticism toward socio-cultural

arguments, m this lengthy two-part essay, move from the of major concepts and concerns in Part One to the critical and criticism in Part Two. Part One's

general propositions overtly challenge the extant orthodoxy of criticism issuing from the University of the West Indies, whereas Part Two illustrates Wynter's criticism own critical practice. as a social practice the essay, Wynter defines Throughout to cultural, and (subject ideological, But rather than as an exercise in aesthetic evaluation.

of fiction

historical claims) the real power of her argument lies in her repeated call for a dialogue and Caliban, and plot, metropole and between Prospero plantation writer and as a for elite and folk, critic, meaningful prerequisite colony,

criticism. Her injunction that "we must learn to sit down together and talk about a little culture" provides a major trope of culture as a about culture. In this and of criticism as a conversation conversation, trope, dialogic before Mikhail like other Caribbean she proposes, critics, and long an analytical paradigm Bakhtin became fashionable, that can recuperate all of the Caribbean's conflicting relations, cultures, of rethinking culture and criticism. and histories, for the purpose

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becomes the site for staging a series of conflictual and creative Dialogue and relations encounters that constitute the cultural grammar of

Caribbean writingand criticism.

Wynter's

model is theoretically indebted to George dialogic assertion of dialogue as the enabling precondition of psychic Lamming's and cultural awareness for all the parties involved in the colonial relation. honours The Pleasures especially intellectual constituted argument. contrapuntal The dialogic, relational, and revisionist design of Lamming's the highest of Exile impels Wynter to accord Lamming as a critic. Her repeated references to his fiction and criticism, in the first part precursor. by exile The of the essay, Lamming's reading also becomes a central and exilic acknowledge of the colonial him as an as relation

dialogic

debilitating framed within Tempest: the

thus relationship; exile of the colonial the terms insistence and on

in Wynter's concept are deployed in a paradigms offers a out of the dialogue way condition. assertions are Wynter's of The and

of Lamming's revisionist reading the reciprocity of decolonization

the injunction that "Caliban must, in a demythologization; re-define the relation."6 dialogue, re-invent, For Wynter, such dialogic redefining of the colonial relation involves of the Caribbean within the history of re-positioning Like Eric and C.L.R. James, Williams, modernity. George Lamming, Wynter reads colonial exile as a historically constituted condition that is with the onset of capitalist modernity. Caribbean exile is thus "the original model of the twentieth-century disruption of man." The enslaved African populace in the Caribbean was also "the first labour We anticipated force that emergent capitalism had totally at its disposal. that would begin in Europe with the by a century the dispossession Industrial Revolution. We anticipated, by centuries, that exile, which in our century is now common The above statements Caribbean colonialism, modernity intellectual to all."7 affiliation with a highlight Wynter's tradition which has consistently located features of race, and empire as constitutive of the West. This is James's theme coeval a conceptual

slavery, and the very notion

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throughout his wide ranging oeuvre, and it is also the conceptual premise of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery. Wynter's particular contribution lies in her extrapolation of the material and economic entanglements of European capitalism and the enslavement of Africans into the cultural cognitive, and symbolic domain, the very arena of self invention. The concrete historical and social realities are read as the material for the emergence of new cognitive modes and is evident in her castigation This formulation of identity categories. Louis James and Bill Carr as English critics of Caribbean literature who precursors fail to recognize the common historical process that has resulted in both their presence at the University of the West Indies, and the exile of Caribbean writers in the metropole. By positing mutual connections within a historical and Caliban, mediate writer and critic. To refuse to see this mediation to the colonial historical relation that simultaneously produces both Prospero Wynter highlights the ways in which history and culture

is to acquiesce status quo; to see it is to question the imputed fixity of determinants, and thus offer a vision of transformation. of a critic's choice

polarities, starkly that criticism's relation to highlight opposed perspectives of acquiescent versus challenging the status quo. The dichotomy distinction between "transcendental" criticism is indebted to Adorno's and practices criticism is synonymous with criticism.8 Acquiescent and whereas criticism aesthetic formalism, challenging plant" a or authentic criticism is a means to the desired end of launching "branch assault" against the distorted and inauthentic reality of "revolutionary commodity capitalism. Wynter uses a rhetoric of insurgency and crisis to define challenging criticism. Hence her assertion that to "write at all for the West Indian does sweeping Caribbean Wynter's premised was and is a revolutionary not start from this very real recognition prescription act. Any criticism that is invalid" (31). This and "immanent"

Wynter's essay stresses the conceptual importance of model. Her argument sets them up as manichean

clearly excludes most of the extant criticism of but it is ultimately a position statement about literature, own perception of her emergent cultural theory. The latter, on conceptual insurgency as a precondition for a Caribbean

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an engagement with the folk and popular cultures, poetics, advocates the repressed relation in the colonial dialectic, in order to dismantle the inherited cognitive norms of empire. and Wynter designates the cognitive norms derived from colonialism western culture as forms of enchantment, and cultural bewitchment, This appellation is derived from three sources: Lamming's sorcery. to Prospero's reading of Western culture as analogous magic; Adorno's culture fed to "a of commodified mass critique humanity which has been enchanted and transformed into clientele by the suppliers"; and Sartre's The Wretched of the Earth, regarding statement, in his preface to Fanon's recurs the "witchery" of Western culture. The motif of enchantment in and it becomes a all of this signature concept throughout essay, work. In fact, Wynter contends that the writers Wynter's subsequent as V.S. Naipaul, Brown, and others, are Wayne of On the other hand, "the brilliant myth Europe." by its to disenchant the illusory criticism is marked by attempt challenging awareness leads reality. Such disenchanted spell cast by a commodified and critics such enthralled to a reinterpretation of reality which can subvert the racialized ordering of the latter. This focus on the inscription of race in the colonial relation constitutes a crucial strategy for Wynter's poetics of disenchantment. It is in this early essay that Wynter initiates a reading of race as a in relational construction that is experienced terms. Her in terms of influential is framed Lamming's reading of The argument cultural James's epic Tempest as a metaphor of the colonial relation, C.L.R. and Fanon's rendition of Afro-Caribbean nationalism, revolutionary Wynter reads race in terms of the propositions on race and colonialism. material that and cultural practices of colonialism and and the cultural the inferiority legitimize European as "natives." designated inflect West Indian superiority These cultural myths of those

myths, Wynter argues, also critical literature, hence the need for a challenging and culture in nature of that the deterministic history highlights practice For Wynter, the exemplary critic is George the colonial experience. Lamming quo: who, unlike Louis "Lamming, the questioning James and Bill Carr, contests the status critic cannot take fixity as his stance;

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himself and his perspective moulded by a historical process imposed on his being. He writes from a point of view inside the process. He knows that he does. Awareness is all" (27). By insisting on the entanglement of writer and critic in the material, cognitive, and cultural practices of the society, Wynter redefines writing and criticism as modes of socio-cultural definition with far reaching "I believe that this definition is the beginning of cognitive consequences: awareness: the 'taking of consciousness' of being, as modern Latin American writers express it" (24). This insistence on demystified awareness of social reality permeates "Reflections", and underscores from orthodox Marxist base Wynter's departure superstructure models material conditions of production. which subordinate to For ideology are predicated on particular and social models Wynter, economic cultural and ideological norms, hence her unrelenting focus on culture As she argues, as the means of both enchantment and disenchantment. following Adorno, "the twentieth century revolution must be a cultural one" (42). She also chastises Caribbean intellectuals, particularly the with the New World School, for failing to social scientists associated address the "cultural distortion" imposed on the region, a adequately failure highlighted by the fact that these same intellectuals had attacked economic domination of the the distortion caused by metropolitan Caribbean. "Reflections" ends cognitive insurgency of our paradox", which should be diffused awareness an awareness she through praxis rather than sermonizing rhetoric. Such awareness, academic and avers, demands a recognition of the need for Caribbean cultural institutions to provide a space for writers and creative artists to and the popular cultural imaginary, bridge the gap between academia "the invisible heart of the nation" (41). in Jamaica", Wynter follows her own to link with "the heart of the nation." She invisible attempts theory of cultural adaptation that she terms indigenization creolization. is defined as the cultural Indigenization In "Jonkonnu advice and proposes a rather than process of clarion call for a veritable with Wynter's that can awaken Caribbean intellectuals to a "new

he knows

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that partial retention, re-invention, and transformation, adaptation, natives in the New World. enabled enslaved Africans to become a on the other hand, is defined as a mode of assimilation, Creolization, form of incomplete indigenization that is marked by the tacit acceptance norms. Jamaican culture, as represented in the Jonkonnu of European and its related invention. of folk dances is thus a primarily complex various syncretisms of Jonkonnu sees the Wynter African and the

Afro-Jamaican

Jamaican of a common religion, Myal, as evidence African cultural is culture inputs. Myal forged from different first genuine folk religion, and the pre characterized as Jamaica's registers, performative in which of transformation of a history they are Her approach simultaneously agents and products of indigenization. signals a shift from literary criticism to a mode of cultural criticism that Wynter modalities equivalent of Haitian voodoo. reads these folk forms as cultural

Emancipation

For Wynter, history and culture. posits a meta-theory of Caribbean of Caribbean history is largely the cultural history of the process to cultural the of and she susceptibility history indigenization, suggests determination. enterprise, indigenous Caribbean imperatives that drove the colonial resistance also required that anti-colonial Wynter argues between cultural modes. She maps the relationship Given the cultural

history and culture on to the asymmetrical relations of power and hierarchy that shape Caribbean societies. As she eloquently argues, "even history has been partly trapped in the conflict between the official and the unofficial and excluded culture" (35). culture of the Caribbean, Hence the exclusion of the popular cultural forms from the mainstream histories which superstructure by mainstream This notion with "the are largely concerned European of civilization". Folk and popular cultures are confined historical discourse to the "interstices of history".

cultural process with an alternative of a marginalized in Wynter's later work as a full and worldview recurs epistemology blown theory of liminality. The latter is an important concept because, that are those categories it represents as Paget Henry observes, "diametrically opposed" to the foundational categories of the West's

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discourse. Thus Jonkonnu, outside of the official discourse ideological of the plantation, articulates an interstitial history that is performed rather than written and derived from the plot rather than the plantation by the latter, a situation which results in the inescapable paradox and contradiction of the slave being "part-slave in relation to the European plantation, and part peasant in relation to the although subordinated plot of land on which he fed himself and his family" (35). It was this that fueled the process of this liminal condition, paradox,

indigenization.

of the slave's involvement Wynter sees the fundamental ambivalence in "two contradictory processes" as essentially the history of folk culture in Jamaica. She formulates an unequivocal proposition that the history which the is the history of a categorical ambivalence of indigenization slaves sought to resolve via resistant cultural practices embodied in their folklore. Wynter's emphasis on creativity and resistance as definitive for her dismissive accounts features of indigenization undoubtedly definition Brathwaite resistant whereas of creolization notes, as a mode of assimilation. both creolization encompasses Brathwaite argues that Wynter creates construct in order to serve her analytical But, as Kamau assimilation and

indigenization. distinctions unnecessary "the problem ambivalent based For

and reality of Caribbean culturation its syndrome; psycho-cultural acceptance-rejection Jonkonnu/Carnival folk expression

lies in its

... The whole

plurality of the Caribbean is

on this creative ambivalence."10

is a two-pronged creolization Brathwaite, totality, whereas Her anti in of a reductive defines it terms singularity. Wynter bias stems from her emphasis on the power of cognitive creolization hence any categories to determine historical and cultural processes, with the plantation is viewed as superstructure surrender to the colonial world view, rather than as pragmatic for survival strategies.11 This somewhat reductive view is compensated accommodation wholesale by the clarity of her analysis of the historical accounts of Jonkonnu in Jamaica. Her painstaking reconstruction of the historical and cultural evolution from the seventeenth factors that influenced Jonkonnu's

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century to the last quarter of the twentieth century reveals Wynter s study along the lines of Jean Price ability to undertake an ethnological Mars' seminal study of Haitian folk culture. Wynter's ethnological work is based primarily on archival retrieval and speculative elaboration of the lineaments of a historical process from the documentary records, left by Europeans who were often biased against their subject and oblivious to its cultural meanings. In order to retrieve these meanings, schema to weigh accounts of Jamican Wynter uses a comparative of similar cultural in the Jonkonnu complexes against descriptions Americas and Africa. Given the unreliability of the primary texts, resorts to a methodology that analyses transformations in the Wynter Jonkonnu masks and dance movements as indices of indigenization. The mask "an as Brathwaite observes, becomes, astutely image/ikon/event through which she could symbolize the folk".12 Indeed, Brathwaite's interpretation is borne out by Wynter's own of the mask as a reading complex totality of costume, the dancer, dance, and music. The mask mediates worlds - the supernatural and the - and it is a human, the living and the dead complex cultural code: "it speaks a complex and symbolic language by the initiates" (38). Dancer and dance movements grammar of the dance. Wynter articulate which can only be interpreted this language in the in the

charts the transformations

of this symbolic language through intertwined etymologies of of rituals, festivals, masks, and responses, to show the transmutation African ancestral spirits into "the devils of Afro-Christian Jamaica, and the acquiring of European elements such as sword fights, doctor plays, and recitation discussion, creolization dominating Jonkonnu worldview of extracts from Shakespeare" her (39). By periodizing shows that the nineteenth scale Wynter century, large by of Jonkonnu had occurred as a result of Creole slaves the festival. Despite some this creolization, Wynter argues that of its links to an African religious

still retained

that played a central role in slave resistance. Jonkonnu is thus the public, more secular face of a syncretic cult religion (which constituted the matrix of Jamaican folk culture), and it is one expression of a generative cultural grammar.

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Wynter s use of the mask as complex cultural trope is an innovative gesture that suggests certain analytical possibilities for nativist cultural criticism. Brathwaite and conceptual grasps the methodological significance of Wynter's trope in his description of its deployment: "The African mask in Jamaica is slowly transformed in form and meaning under the pressure adaptation/survival, authentic possession reflector of local of slavery and becomes a paradigm of the slave comes into through which means of the landscape and so can be taken as the true

and (art)-forms."13 Wynter's use of the mask enables connections to be made between the public performance of Jonkonnu and the repressed Myal religion which had been driven As she succinctly notes, "Jonkonnu is linked to Myalism through meaning, song, and dance" (40). Her formulating of this linkage is enabled by her interdisciplinary mix of ethnological and historical underground. the disciplinary convergence which results in a mode of approaches, cultural archaeology that merits Brathwaite's praise of the essay as a masterwork. she Wynter sifts through details to reveal connections; posits instances and events within larger cultural configurations as she searches for the grammar and syntax that govern cultural expressions. Her predilection is toward finding the deep structures of meaning that determine cultural manifestations and outcomes. In her tabulation of the folk complex of Jamaican Jonkonnu, she outlines a morphology of transformation that recalls the work of Vladimir Propp, but mercifully bereft of the latter's sterile terminology and measuring stick approach.14 Wynter's morphology is anchored in the ambitious proposition that Myal evolved out of the need of enslaved Africans to present a unified front via "a general Jamaican cult religion as opposed to tribal ones" out of a (41). She cites historical accounts to show that Myal developed series of syncretisms of tribal cults and rituals in order to engender large scale cultural and political solidarity. The proscription of Myal resulted from the plantocracy's fear of the insurgent potential of such solidarity, but Jonkonnu was tolerated, especially its creolized versions which were seen as innocuous fun. Wynter points out however that the African world views do not polarize the sacred and the secular, hence "Myalism

values

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and Jonkonnu and Jonkonnu dances

contained transmitted

elements

of each other" (41). Both Myalism elements to a continuum of surviving folk

and religion, and this continuum secretes the history of cultural in Jamaica.15 syncretism and indigenization is primarily a secularizing in Wynter's account, Indigenization, to emerge out of the cultural that enabled Jonkonnu process Creolization resulted in the of plantation contestations society. progressive Emancipation Jamaican peasantry cultural of African elements, marginalization and the transformation of African slaves into an rescued Jonkonnu from wholesale but Afro

creolization.

Jonkonnu, in its creolized form, mirrored the social relations and power but it also provided a mocking of plantation structure society, critique in its satirical portrayals of the society. Wynter, carnivalesque Jonkonnu's while however, liminality, argues that acknowledging assimilationist than they were and represent still - rather culturally hybrid, since "they represented another." the attempt to shed one culture and achieve Wynter's Creole browns and blacks were is part and parcel of her rejection of damning indictment of assimilation creolization as the paradigm for nativist intellectual work. Creolization, "since it was not a in her reading, is imitation, not real acculturation, its status power" (43). culture that was responded to, but its techniques which often wisdom on creolization In contrast to the conventional conflates primarily syncretism racial and cultural unmixed racially of the Jamaican all influences hybridity, Revivalists cultural Wynter argues that it was who "produced the true tradition, the culturally mixed, more

matrix." within the basically Afro-Jamaican accepting towards the reveals a notion of scepticism indigenization Wynter's notion of creolization: essentially, she assumes that Creole discourse is still caught within the institutional and semantic categories of the West. which Simon During defines as a mode of Unlike indigenization, and for Wynter, results in phenotypical radical alterity, creolization, expressive hybridity, epistemological other secretes and not alter the cognitive it does colonial of however, society. Indigenization, hierarchy and different cognitive perspectives cosmologies, but

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of the human that can challenge the "global" norms. representations "Jonkonnu" intimations of Wynter's later explanatory provides - the template epistemic rupture coeval with the discovery of the New World, a rupture that enabled the birth of the West, and the founding categories of humanism. Wynter's alertness to the use of culture as a of colonization, weapon particularly the cultural ascriptions accorded to writing, is evident in her analysis of the process of repetition which with Europeans, and European represented humanity as "synonymous culture" (35). This notion evolves into the anti-humanist tenor of poststructuralist essays such as "The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism" (1984), but it also underpins the three essays that follow "Jonkonnu". It is in these essays that Wynter returns to the project of in "Reflections", but the literary literary criticism that she announced critical insights are buttressed by the cultural and historical propositions Whereas "Reflections" deployed in "Jonkonnu". provides a model for dismantling "Jonkonnu" provide "Novel aesthetic and formalist positions in literature and criticism, these with a model of. interdisciplinary supplements

cultural studies, a repertoire of cultural and historical formulations that heuristic frames for interpreting literary and critical texts. and History", "Creole also mix Criticism', and "One Love" caustic polemic and theoretical propositions in often uneven but always that evoke the ideological and intellectual

arguments and the often personal rancour that infused Caribbean oppositions, cultural debates of the early 1970s. With hindsight, one recognizes that the acerbic and overly polemical style of these essays is a function of the provocative of battle, the perception that fundamental cultural and issues regarding Caribbean epistemological identity are at stake. Wynter resorts readily to a rhetoric of struggle and crisis which is congruent with her definition of criticism, and this rhetoric relies on exigencies stark oppositions, polarities, dichotomies, agonistic that the confrontational tone. figures heighten These and manichean

are evident in "Novel and History, Plot and oppositions Plantation" the published text of Wynter's at the presentation memorable ACLALS conference, which was held at the Mona campus

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of the University of the West Indies in 1971. This conference, like the critical responses to The Islands in Between, and the publication of Savacou 3/4, became one of the flashpoints of the aesthetic debates of the period. concerns dominated the conference, other regional literatures to the margins. Kamau event as a moment of confrontation between Caribbean effectively relegating Brathwaite recalls the

the "cultural gorillas and the establishment, and Laurence Breiner offers a /guerrillas" account of the and cultural involved in this battle riveting literary politics aesthetic.16 Wynter, whose over defining a Caribbean theoretical positions aligned her with the "cultural guerrillas", weighed in with this paper several large questions and propositions, conceptualized the between history and the novel, the politics of namely relationship historical the status of the novel in the history of representation, which emergence of the novel form and New modernity, and the simultaneous World plantation societies. She reads Vic Reid's New Day and H.G. DeLisser's Revenge in light of these larger questions as two novels which reflect the contending perspectives of folk and elite world views respectively. Wynter begins by defining her operative terms within the context of an experience shaped by the the colonial experience in the Caribbean, She extrapolates of the plantation. George ubiquitous presence Beckford's definition of the Caribbean as the classic plantation area into a foundational cause and proposition. Caribbean societies, she argues, were "both of the market economy." The effect of the emergence moment of modernity is described in terms of its sorcerous of such world historical still magnitude, deformed that we are all, and

founding effects as "a change without exception

'enchanted', imprisoned, in its bewitched reality" (95). schizophrenic This bewitched state of affairs is coeval with the rise of the novel, hence the novel and Caribbean plantation societies emerge via the same

Goldmann's from Lucien Wynter derives this argument process. between structuralist Marxist theorizing of the relationship literary It is this transformations. and socio-economic relationship that genres enables her declaration that history in the Caribbean is fiction: "a fiction

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by forces external to itself' (95). Only of the colonized produces facts, and Vic Reid's New Day represents two such moments of resistance that write new facts into written, dominated, collective resistance controlled being. Wynter implies that fiction is more valid as a mode of articulating history than the discipline of history itself.17 Hence her concern with in Reid's novel, exploring the importance of historical representation the negative in light of Garth's concerning question sees the "evasive and of and Gordon. Wynter Bogle representation as the fictive parallel to the answer of Pa John Campbell ambivalent" particularly middle class nationalism of of the Jamaican ideology gradualist PNP. Garth's question points to the Manichean Norman Manley's schema of colonial history : "Yet, from the way Garth representational asks the question we see that the history taught in the schools is a history based around a saint. a Manichean myth. Bogle and Gordon are devils. Eyre is This was the version of history taught by the forces that upheld

notion of typicality to designate Bogle, and Eyre as world historical characters representing historical, forces - the clash between plantation and plot. cultural, and ideological is dominated The plantation by the external forces of empire driven by Gordon, market and exchange value imperatives; the plot represents indigenous, world views oriented toward use value. In this light, she autochthonous, between Goldmann's theory of the relationship to the and economic structures contradictory highlight literary genres situation of novelists who, by the fact of their craft and genre, are Hence oriented toward both use and exchange values. simultaneously effect of the novel, a product of the market economy, the paradoxical draws on Lucien

the plantation" (96). Wynter uses Lukac's

The novel as a form of resistance to "market society". developing facilitates "a critique of the very historical process which has brought it to such heights of fulfilment"(97). For Wynter, this critique is exemplified in Reid's New Day which, in its portrayal of the terror unleashed by British colonialism against the peasant insurgents, shows the logic of colonial power: its ability to

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and its readiness to crush any threat corrupt even liberal temperaments, to its existence. Revenge as a fiction of the Wynter reads DeLisser's history of the plantation, a fiction challenged by Reid's counterfactual plot. This discursive confrontation she argues becomes a metaphor for both the history of Caribbean society and also the cultural debates raging conference: "I suggest that the conflict and clash that at the ACLALS those has taken place between two defined groups in this conference, between who defend 'the autonomy' of the 'civilized' highly educated artist; and those who defend the claims of the community and the folk, has little to do with racial division and everything to do with those who, and those who like Bogle,

like Joyce, defend the values of the plantation represent the values of the plot" (99).

"Creole , "Reflections", Wynter avers, here, as in "Jonkonnu that the silent majority of Caribbean and "One Love", Criticism", the narrator-hero of like Pa John Campbell, subjects are ambivalent, as a force New Day. She recognizes the complexity of such ambivalence for creativity as well as alienation. Ambivalence, of the Caribbean characteristic response primary she argues is the to the conflicting values of plantation and plot: "For if the history of Caribbean society is that of a dual relation between plantation and plot, the two poles which between the two originate in a single historical process, the ambivalence characteristic of the Caribbean is the distinguishing of our alienation; is at once the root cause This ambivalence response. and the possibility of our salvation" (99). has been and This notion of ambivalence of historical humanist factors beginning heresy and the discovery in terms of a sequence with the simultaneous emergence of the is contextualized of the New World, followed by of culture in terms of the

and the redefinition imperial expansion, of nature. The latter concept subordination legitimise slavery allowed ground cultural which the worldview

of culture helped to of the plantation, but the plot system under the slaves both a subsistence space and conceptual of African facilitated the retention and adaptation

"Novel and History" thus reiterates "Jonkonnu's" legacies. within the language of structuralist Marxism. conceptual propositions

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plot represents a system driven by use values, and it resists the order of the plantation. Given the exigencies of the hegemonic the slave ended up being ambivalent order, however, plantation The between both systems. of the folk enables Wynter s reading of the categorical ambivalence her cultural nationalism to abjure the romantic myths of blood and soil essentialism.

Instead, she posits folk culture as a point outside of the order of the plantation, a conceptual site which can provide hegemonic critical insights to disenchant "the impossible reality in which we are and History", 100). This is the assumption of a ("Novel rather than an atavistic return to "But there liminality, origins: strategic is no question of going back to a society, a folk pattern whose structure has already been undermined by the pervasive market economy" (100). The folk culture exists, not in terms of unaltered legacies, but rather in in folk songs, kumina the resistant, "secretive history expressed resistant that folk a counters the negative ceremonies, history memory", in the plantation's of Bogle and Gordon "myths of representation Both plantation and plot constitute different ways of reading and history, Wynter appropriates the dichotomy as a salient symbol of the different claims, perspectives, and interests that constitute the fault history". lines of extant Caribbean literary and cultural debates. division of criticism into camps is explicitly Wynter's unequivocal Ramchand in "Creole Criticism: A out in her attack on Kenneth spelt This essay is probably the most polemical ofWynter's works, Critique." critical positions still and its no holds barred attack on Ramchand's evinces, three decades later, a tone of personal acrimony, partly due to the fact that Ramchand had taken Wynter to task for devaluing the "Concern for function of criticism. Ramchand's Criticism" takes article, issue with what he terms "a tradition of enthusiastic and naive/pretentious socio-political for in the West Indies."18 criticism literary thatpasses together with Gerald Janheinz content summary and racial-cultural generalisation and Wynter is lumped Edward Kamau enmeshed"

Jahn, Moore, a "neo Brathwaite, as an exponent of this brand of pseudo-criticism, Aftican theory" that reduces criticism to socio-political In commentary.

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contrast, modeled

Ramchand on F.R.

advocates Leavis's

a practice of literary criticism that is focus on the text, on the "organisation of critical positions in "Concern for Novel and Its Background to a searing his Leavisite approach as sheer colonial

words on the page."19 Wynter subjects Ramchand's Criticism" and The West Indian

critical scrutiny that dismisses Ramchand is accused mimicry. legerdemain, to Fanon's

of ideological and duplicity and of harnessing Fanon to promote interests antithetical own project. Given own investment in the Wynter's

ideas to her own work, her critique of Ramchand centrality of Fanon's seeks to uncover him as a poseur who adopts a stance of disinterested objectivity in order to surreptitiously denigrate the African cultural of race Wynter points to the antagonisms presence in the Caribbean. and culture that underlie criticism". standards Caribbean Ramchand's concerns of "creole the apparently consensual formalist criteria and concern for critical

sensibility of metropolitan norms. As who is blinkered by the uncritical acceptance the exemplar of creole criticism, Ramchand is scathingly dismissed as an illusionist, a sorcerer's apprentice who is himself enthralled by the Creole criticism is the cultural expression of the politics spell of Europe.

simply mask his antipathy to the centrality of Africa in critical societies. In short, Wynter avers that Ramchand's of the "creolist" cultural critic the ambivalence exemplifies

into a neo-colonial "translated of "creolism", liberal humanism which substitutes the appearance of a of rhetoric structure", politics Such rhetorical change for the actual reality of transformative action. that politics excises conflict in order to produce a verbal consensus forecloses alternative readings ("Creole Criticism", 14). The West Indian Novel and Its opus, Wynter reads Ramchand's Contrary to his claims of race Background, in light of the above. transcendent objectivity, Wynter asserts that his criticism is informed by a principle of ressentiment that is rooted in Indo-Caribbean identity politics and claims of belonging, claims that have been often overlooked on national claims in the context of Afro-Caribbean identity. drama of the socio-cultural therefore, merely parlays Ramchand,

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Indo-Canbbean unacknowledged subjectivity into a critical stance that asserts his own status as a "native". Hence the fallacy of his Leavisite since his criticism is as contaminated prescriptions, by sociological, determinants as the proponents of the neo historical, and ideological Aftican school. For Wynter, Ramchand's refusal to acknowledge his and political cards typifies the duplicity of Creole ideological criticism, a duplicity which she attacks from the outset as a symptom of the intellectual malaise of creolist discourse. Behind Ramchand's proclamations, Wynter sees only the same enchanted myth of Europe, the same categories of thought that represent the African as the negation of the human, the negation of culture and reason. The blindness of Creole criticism to the African connection in Caribbean literature results from what Wynter describes as "a grid of misconceptions prepackaged in the cornflakes of a colonial education" (12). Wynter's acerbic critique of Ramchand essentially accuses him of deploying presence, the conceptual categories and her sustained reading of criticism to efface the African of his book serves the polemical of Caribbean literary of the African own

of showing state purpose up the derivative criticism. But her primary argument is that the denial reinforces

the myths of African cultural barrenness, hence presence the of the as standard bearer of leaving unchallenged image European Reason and Culture. Her technique of highlighting both the details of individual texts and the cultural, philosophical, and global implications of textual particulars, constitutes her own variation on the dialectical method, a method which enables her recurring concepts to accumulate semantic and semiotic densities with each new deployment. By the end of "Creole process has heresy, contain the seeds of contemporary popular cultures of the Caribbean alternative epistemologies that can breach the conceptual grid imposed of Western humanism. She argues that the by the false universalism socio-economic transformation of the Caribbean demographic from primarily agrarian and peasant societies to urbanised, capitalist oriented ones merely transmutes the "Afro-Christian cult religions... and Criticism", Wynter's dialectical led her to another theoretical interplay of system and namely that the

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into new forms... Folksongs are transformed into urban jazz, calypso, Caribbean culture thus inherits the ska, reggae" (33). popular alternative cosmologies of Jonkonnu, Myal, and other related forms. vernacular forms as the conceptual posits the popular, for the and the paradigms conceptual sorcery of humanism countering exchange values of capitalism with the use values of the plot, "a web of Wynter beliefs" (34). Continuity and change are thus for in Wynter's of folk culture and cultural reading she these and onto the literary transformation, processes transposes accounted situation by arguing that the novelists also write out of the same circumstances of exile and "psychic trespass" that give rise to and ska, calypso, reggae (33). Wynter's acerbic critique of the limitations of Creole criticism is existential reiterated what in "One Love", her final essay of this period. She pillories she perceives writers to to be inauthentic Black attempts by the of Afro-Caribbean challenge negative representations subjects. to the "Word and of its literary models of inherited and reinvented

Although she regards Negritude as a genuine challenge she castigates the discourse of Black Power Man," offspring as mere inversions of the Eurocentric

conceptual negation. "Literary Blackism", as she terms it, is to be shunned since it is still imprisoned within the cognitive and conceptual structures that Like Fanon, she diagnoses produce racial hierarchy and domination. Black Power and the modish cant of Afrocentric pathologies afflicted by the same racial Wynter reads the rhetorical poems Black as literary populism as their white counterparts.

of race in the essays and representation in the 1971 anthology, One Love, as symptomatic of an emergent that she terms "Afro middle-class nationalist discourse whose conceptual sins mirror the flaws of

a discourse Jamaicanism", creolist discourse.

In fact, Wynter sees Afro-Jamaicanism as marked by the categorical Her reading ambivalence of Creole criticism and cultural politics. focuses on Andrew of introduction and the contributions Salkey's King, and she situates the anthology within the context of the burgeoning Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Audvil

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the need for anthologies like One Love, given the Wynter acknowledges aftermath of the Rodney riots in Jamaica, the Black Power revolt in Trinidad, and Michael Manley's People's National Party sweeping the of "Power to 1972 general elections on a populist campaign the People". Hence the importance of providing "an outlet for the new wave of consciously experienced black feeling" which originated in the of United States and touched responsive chords in the Black population Jamaican Love," ("One 64). True to form, however, Wynter's is marked acknowledgment by a profound concern with understanding that underlie the the historical and cultural relations and processes in the Caribbean. and of race and racial experience expression solidarity In a sweeping overview of the Jamaican historical and social scene, social and economic Wynter uses race as a template for understanding In this light, the emergence of Black consciousness takes on categories. both racial and class dimensions, socio given the nature of Jamaica's economic structure. discusses the different Wynter attempts by generations of nationalist writers to explore these social realities, but while she approves of the efforts of the first wave of writers such as Vic third wave Nettleford Reid and Roger Mais, she is scathing of writers and intellectuals in her critique of the second and such as Andrew Salkey and Rex the Caribbean

The latter are described as oriented toward respectively. appropriating folk culture within the mode of fraudulent representation that she terms "literary blackism" , an exoticising of folk culture typified in Nettleford's choreography and cultural criticism (70). Salkey's fiction is excoriated failure to pathologies insists on the need to locate particular underdevelopment. Wynter effects within the structural matrices of colonialism, monopoly and While the capitalism, persistent poverty, underdevelopment. and contentious into tone her of her polemic introduces an her fundamental arguments, of for its undeveloped relate individual understanding of folk culture, and the to the structure of

tendentious

unnecessary acrimony centre on substantive issues that affect the protocols propositions cultural expression and commentary in the Caribbean.

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"One diasporic

like "Jonkonnu", the politics of African Love", explicates cultures in terms of a subversive syncretism that produces an

a liminal cultural space, replete with all the creative "intrahistory", of the borderland. notion of possibilities Wynter uses Amiri Baraka's the "frontier zone" conceptual and to posit the liminality of folk culture as a site of intellectual renewal for the Caribbean intelligentsia.

Whereas, in "Reflections", Wynter states the necessity of such renewal as a polemical call to arms, "One Love" presents this proposition as a historical fact. For Wynter, the assertions of black identity and native culture Caribbean are inseparable intellectuals from the to connect social upheavals with the "frontier that zone" enabled of folk

culture (66). Anti-colonial political anti-colonial cultural nationalism. underlies the Wynter's reading discourse emergent Jamaica.

nationalism

is thus inseparable from It is this Fanonian position which

postcolonial shortcomings

of the anthology as a representative text of around race and national in identity the As such, and artistic conceptual

of the anthology derive from both the failure of and the failure of of social realities imagination adequate apprehension that characterize the middle-class contributors to One Love. In "One ranging Love", discussion Wynter's early concerns are crystallized in a wide She focuses on the of race and its representation. between socio-economic and cultural deprivation

relationship

a marginality, and argues that a radical rethinking of race necessitates critique of global capitalism, since the racial classification of Africans as on material and economic the zero-sum of humanity is predicated practices. The revaluing of black humanity is inextricably tied to the destruction of capitalism, hence the shortcoming of "blackism" which between the black struggle and the global makes no connection on the relation economic context. Wynter's unremitting emphasis between thematic structures of power and cultural articulations constitutes the principle that "One Love" reiterates with stark clarity. Wynter's critique of the pieces in the anthology is ultimately not centred on their literary merits but rather on the effectiveness of their and conceptual articulations of "a liberated black and human experience of

rhetorical

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Being"

Her affinity with Fanon resonates (93). the gist of Wynter's statement, and it summarizes

this throughout early intellectual

project of articulating a heretical critique of humanism that revalues the black subject by using the marginalized cultures of the diaspora as of subversive and departure. conceptual epistemological points later post-structuralist turn merely and Wynter's incorporates transforms facilitate these insights into more systematic inquisitorial tools that her original and challenging of Western reason, critique and authority. epistemology,

Notes
Kamau Brathwaite, "The Love Axe/1: Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic 1962-74," Part Two, Ban 16.62 (December 1967):101. Paget Henry, Caliban's Reason: IntroducingAfro-CaribbeanPhilosophy. New York: Routledge, 2000, 118. Sylvia Wynter, "Lady Nugent's Journal,'' Jamaica Journal 1.1 (December 1967):34. Sylvia Wynter, "We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism," Jamaica Journal 2 (December 1968):23-32; 3 (March 1969):27-42', cited
hereafter Interpretation as "Reflections"; of Folk Dance "Jonkonnu as a Cultural in Jamaica: Towards Jamaica Journal the 4 Process,"

(1970):34-38, cited hereafter as "Jonkonnu"; "Novel and History, Plot and Plantation," Savacou 5 (1971):95-102, cited hereafter as "Novel and History"; "Creole Criticism: A Critique," New World Quarterly 5.4 (1973): 12-36; "One Love: Rhetoric or Reality? - Aspects of Afro Jamaicanism," Caribbean Studies 12 (1972):64-99, cited hereafter as "One
Love."

6 7

George Lamming, The Pleasures ofExile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960); Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967, rpt. 1981). Wynter, "Reflections", 31. Ibid, 6. See Adorno's opening essay in Prisms, "Cultural Criticism and Society", in which he argues that transcendent criticism assumes a pseudo objectivity, "an Archimedean position above culture and the blindness

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9 10 11

of society" (31). Immanent criticism, on the other hand, is a dialectical procedure which recognizes that culture and criticism are embedded within society, hence it seeks to lay bare the workings of ideological conventions (32-33). Paget Henry, Caliban's Reason, 124. Kamau Brathwaite, ContradictoryOmens, Kingston: Savacou, 1974. 16. Richard Burton's recent study of Caribbean creolization, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play, in the Caribbean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1997), also reads creolization in terms of assimilation, although Burton concedes that resistance is an element of creolization.

12 13 14' I5'

Brathwaite, "The Love Axe/1", 102. Ibid., 103. See Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folk Tale. Wynter's assertion of a cultural continuum resonates with extant ideas of the linguistic Creole continuum as well as Brathwaite's model, in
Contradictory Omens, of a variegated creolization.

16

See Brathwaite's "The Love Axe/1" and Barabajan Poems (Savacou, 1994) for his insider's recollections of the event; and Laurence Breiner's An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge, 1998). Gordon Rohlehr's
seminal conference not merit paper, which "Literature also saw and a keynote the Folk", address was by delivered at as well this as Brathwaite

V.S. Naipaul's 17

dismissal of the whole matter as parochial frenzy that did

a response.

18 19

Wynter's position regarding the imaginative recuperation of history is similar to those held by Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. As Paget Henry argues, her philosophy of history bridges the historicist positions of Lamming and James and the poeticist stance of Walcott and Harris. Kenneth Ramchand, (1970): 155-. Ramchand, "Concern for Criticism," The LiteraryHalf-Yearly 1.2'

"Concern for Criticism," 157.

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