Mona, Jamaica, 1959: A University Campus at the Heart of the Independence Movement

In this context, the Jamaican University Campus located in Mona, part of the capital Kingston, became a centre of activity for the intelligentsia discussing self-government. Scholars from economics, history, sociology and political science were meeting on campus, recalled one of its core members, the economist Norman Girvan:

I was a student on the Mona Campus of the University (then University College) of the West Indies between 1959 and 1962. I remember it as a time of great excitement, tremendous ferment and heated debates. (Girvan, 2010, p. 3)

Discussions revolved around post-independence politics, radical economic measures and the education system. In the following years, the members formed a regular meeting group called the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues. In 1962, the New World Group formally constituted itself in Georgetown, Guyana, and institutionalised its discussions in the journal New World Quarterly, published from 1963 to 1972 in Guyana. Epistemically, the group developed a new research paradigm of plantation society that centred the legacies of colonial history onto modern Caribbean society. Institutionally, the group’s members were also engaged in changing the British-centred education by reformulating courses and syllabi.

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As might be imagined, the New World Group’s familiarity with anti-colonial thought preceded formal political independence. Several of its members had come together in a study group already during their university years in London in the late 1950s. There, they met a group of diasporic Caribbean scholars that had been organising and theorising against colonial rule since the 1930s and 1940s. In her remarkable study of these intellectuals and how they developed Radical Caribbean social thought, Trinidadian sociologist Rhoda Reddock shows how this group of thinkers – all exposed to colonial education, knowing the colonial language, having grown up “in a racialized, colonial socioeconomic milieu […] with strong traditions of political or labour activism” (Reddock, 2014, p. 498) – developed “counter-narratives of modernity, critiquing and disrupting as they did, the universality and dominance of Eurocentric intellectualism and many of its sociocultural and economic institutions“ (Reddock, 2014, p. 494). The later New World Group members studied and networked with this diasporic generation in London and were socialised into this critical, anti-colonial milieu.

 

In 1962, the West Indies Federation collapsed due to nationalist movements. The largest territories, Jamaica and Trinidad, achieved political sovereignty that same year. Only a few months earlier, the University College had gained administrative independence from the University of London, which had previously made decisions on staffing, curricula, and programmes and had granted the degrees, and was renamed The University of the West Indies (UWI). The members of the New World Group were prominent voices in the public discourse in the post-independence period before the group dissolved in the early 1970s. Despite the group’s breakup, their work is of outstanding importance in founding a tradition of critical Caribbean-centred thought.

 

As one of the few regional institutions to outlive the break-up of the West Indies Federation, the university “became a working symbol of West Indian regionalism” (Thomas, 2001, p. 730).  After achieving autonomy, programmes were quickly extended to St. Augustine, Trinidad, and a third campus was built in Cave Hill, Barbados, to serve the smaller Eastern Caribbean states. Still being the largest public university in the region until today, the University of the West Indies is a core contributor to academic discourses and regional policies on global reparatory justice. The work of the New World Group epistemically laid the groundwork for a critically and publicly engaged research tradition and institutionally for the engagement with colonial legacies.

 

The case of the New World Group highlights the integral role of universities and knowledge production for the decolonisation movement and its global entanglement across former empires. It further underlines the importance of historically contextualising scholarly work in its tradition, exemplified by the significance of existing Anglo-Caribbean networks and contributions in London from the 1930s onwards. The New World Group is an outstanding example of often overlooked anti-colonial knowledge production that was in dialogue with global anti-colonial thought and thinkers as well as attentive to the local Caribbean context of plantation colonialism. Contributions to Decoloniality, postcolonial sociology and Southern Theory (and similar interventions in the humanities) have called for a critical study of the entanglement of colonial rule and knowledge production as well as the role and agency of anti-colonial actors. My PhD project builds on these contributions and further delves into the empirical examination of practices and process of knowledge production in the Majority World. It asks how academic knowledge was and is made practically in the context of colonial legacies and global inequalities.