Blackwell Reference Online

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Walter Rodney grew up in Guyana in the wake of the labor uprisings of the late 1930s when national independence via constitutional decolon ization was on the agenda and political parties and trade unions were organizing the Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean masses. As a child of working-class activists in the leftist People's Progressive Party in Guyana, the young Rodney's involvement in distributing party literature gave him a sense of the dawn of a new historical force. Rodney then was part of a new generation which, by the 1960s, would come to question the attitudes of the post-independence governments toward the plight of the Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean working classes. Caribbean political novelist George Lamming lamented the manner in which the world division of labor, complicated by colonialism, has created an educated group that is contemptuous of the ordinary people of the Caribbean's adherence to non-western cultural forms, despite their otherwise anti-colonial stance ( Bogues 2003 : 127–8). While studying at the University of London, Rodney had been a member of a Marxist study group led by C. L. R. and selma James . From the Jameses, Rodney took the urgent necessity to pay attention to the concrete historical context and its nuances, and the need to grapple with human creativity in the political domain ( Bogues 2003 : 129). After graduating from the University of ... log in or subscribe to read full text