Rediscovering African cultural roots produced the Caribbean’s only successful revolution

Evidence

The struggles to rediscover the African “routes” within the complex configurations of Caribbean culture, and to speak through that prism the ruptures of transportation, slavery, colonization, exploitation, and racialization, produced the only successful “revolution” in the Anglophone Caribbean in this century—the so-called cultural revolution of the 1960s—and the making of the black Caribbean subject. In Jamaica, for example, its traces are still to be found in a thousand unexamined places—in religious congregations of all sorts, formal and irregular; in the marginalized voices of popular street preachers and prophets, many of them declared insane; in folk stories and oral narrative forms; in ceremonial occasions and rites of passage; in the new language, music, and rhythm of urban popular culture as well as in political and intellectual traditions—in Garveyism, Ethiopianism, revivalism, and Rastafarianism. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 858

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘routes’ vs ‘roots’ pun animates the whole cultural-revolution claim — defining the mechanism by which retracing routes makes a people black again.
• XREF: Marries directly to Hall’s identity-as-positioning thesis elsewhere in the volume and anticipates the diaspora identity readings in Islamophobia critiques (constructed identity, not essential).