...the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill Campus) with the naming of The George Lamming Pedagogical Centre, in the complex of the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination.
The naming ceremony coincided with the release of his Sovereignty Of The Imagination - Conversations 3. The trilogy spans 17 years, starting with the first publication in 1992 that offered a most valuable collection of essays, addresses and interviews from 1953 to 1990.
Published by Karia Press in Britain, it was jointly edited by Andaiye of Guyana and Richard Drayton, Guyanese-born citizen of Barbados, as a 300-page work that concluded with an address by Lamming, in which he had appealed: "The most urgent cultural and political task of education is to deepen and nourish the regional consciousness in each territory. A genuine national identity will only be experienced when there is a liberated regional Caribbean of one people." That was in 1986.
In his Coming, Coming Home (Conversations 2), nine years later, based on two lectures and published by House of Nehesi in St Martin and dedicated to the memory of the renowned historian Gordon Lewis, who had made "this archipelago his home", Lamming was to stress at a lecture sponsored by the UWI's Department of West Indian History and the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados:
"I do not think that there has been anything in human history quite like the meeting of Africa, Asia and Europe in this American archipelago we call the Caribbean. But it is so recent since we assumed responsibility for our own destiny, that the antagonistic weight of the past is felt as an inhibiting menace. And that is the most urgent task and the greatest intellectual challenge: how to control the burden of this history and incorporate it into our collective sense of the future . . . ."
Now, in Conversations 3, focused on Sovereignty Of The Imagination (Language And The Politics Of Ethnicity), published earlier this year by House of Nehesi and dedicated to the editors of the first in the series (Andaiye and Drayton), Lamming argues with customary eloquence:
"The concepts of race, nation and ethnicity constitute a family of constructs of largely European origin, which served to influence the attitudes we should adopt to any encounter with difference. European racism was a form of ethnic nationalism that invested the colour line with a power of definition which neither Asian nor African colonised could have escaped . . . ."
A pleasant Emancipation Day to all readers. Walk good!
July 31st, 09
