Commonwealth History From Below?:Caribbean national, federal and Pan-African renegotiations of the Empire project, c. 1880- 1950

In: Drayton , R 2020 , Commonwealth History From Below? Caribbean national, federal and Pan-African renegotiations of the Empire project, c. 1880- 1950 . in S Dubow & R Drayton (eds) , Commonwealth history in the twenty-first century . Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Studies Series , Palgrave Macmillan , London , pp. 41-60 . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41788-8_3

Abstract

What might a Commonwealth 'history from below' look like? On what terms did subordinate stakeholders, those on the underside of that system of economic, political and cultural power we call 'empire', invest in ideas of Britain, the Empire, and the Commonwealth? What did such a claim of Britishness, or membership in the Empire or Commonwealth, mean for those racialised as black or brown? This essay proposes that we should see the political postures of those in a subordinate colonial location in terms of what Glissant called 'forced poetics', that is to say as occurring in an illocutionary context in which meaning was constrained not, per Quentin Skinner, by past usages, but rather by the pressures of present power on the speech act. This problem of the tug of interests operating on any system of political signifiers which sits between interlocutors who meet on unequal terms has vital methodological importance in global intellectual history. British imperial power was not just a political and economic system, it was also a social and cultural order, to which white supremacy and the cognitive centrality of Europe were central. Those on the underside of were compelled to negotiate their interests, as best they could, in its ideological currencies. This essay explores how Caribbean intellectuals and political actors, operating in a field of power dominated by white British and Dominions actors, used the ideas of the British Empire and the (British) Commonwealth in service to their own national and transnational ends. It pays particular attention to Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean projects which sought to negotiate themselves against and with the Imperial and Commonwealth ideas and their political logics.