Anthony Bogues - Black Heretics, Black Prophets

The writing of a book has many legs, and we should recognize that these legs make it a collective enterprise. Writing is a dialogue not only with the self but also with the social world. So one needs at the end of a writing project to explore these legs, to reflect upon the making of the book. This book originated in a series of night classes held in the inner-city community of Craig Town, Kingston, Jamaica, in 1999. In this community I was asked to conduct a series of classes in black history. What was amazing was that for about six months a group of young men, most of them unemployed and all living under oppressive conditions, came twice a week, learning the rudiments of reading and writing, staying late into the night speaking, listening, and questioning the ideas of some of the figures in this book. What began as a class in black history quickly became a discussion group about black radical ideas. The decision was made to write a book about the black radical intellectual tradition when one of these young men, in Jamaican vernacular, recounted some of the key political ideas of Walter Rodney, eloquently stating what those ideas had meant to him and the rest of the group as young black men living in a society that oppressed them along class and color lines. To these young men I owe a great deal, and I hope that the book will reflect some of the ideas we intensely discussed many nights, trying to keep alive a hope that their lives could be changed.

Since then a few of these young men have died at the hands of state forces, others have left the area, and still others are trying to make their lives better. A book is in no way a substitute for making social change, but writing can help to clarify some of the ideas about history and politics, ideas that are important for the execution of social change. It is because the unemployed youths of Craig Town for a brief moment demonstrated what was possible for all human beings, once we recognized ourselves in history and as active agents who can change both our condition and history, that the book was written.

In the fall of 1999, Lewis Gordon, with an intellectual generosity rare in the academy, suggested that I write the book for the Africana Thought series. He argued that another book I was working on could be done later. I want to thank him for his insistence. Paget Henry, the other editor of the series, provided valuable support during the writing, reading some of the drafts and making extensive comments. I wish to acknowledge his support. Since coming to Brown University in the fall of 1999, I have taught a senior undergraduate seminar, Africans and the West: A History of Ideas, in which the students have forced me to sharpen my analysis of the black radical intellectual tradition; their probing questions have reshaped many ideas in this text. I want to thank them for their contributions to this project.

Various chapters in different guises were given as talks at several forums. The ideas about Cugoano were first developed for a paper presented in 1999 at the American Philosophical Association conference in Boston, and I want to thank the audience who attended that panel for their questions. After that panel Robert Gooding-Williams invited me to present some of the ideas of the book at the Humanities Center at Northwestern University. Both the faculty and the student seminars stimulated me to think how the ideas about a black radical intellectual tradition could be reworked in the academy as integral to the study of political theory. I want to thank Robert for this invitation and for his continued support of my work. At Howard University the chapter on James and Du Bois was presented, and the rich discussion which ensued that Sunday morning shaped the historical ideas of that chapter; I want to thank Patrick Goodin for making that seminar possible. Patrick also hosted a conference on Afro-Caribbean philosophy at Howard in which I first outlined the nature of Dread history. I want to thank Linden Lewis for his encouraging comments at that forum. At the University of California, Irvine, I presented an overall conception of the book and ideas about the nature of the black radical intellectual tradition to the Afro-American Studies Program. I wish to thank all who participated in that seminar particularly those who saw the work as an attempt in the history of ideas.

Particular sections of this book would not have been written without the rich discussions that I have with members of the Small Axe Collective. In particular I want to thank David Scott for arguments about Dread history; Nadi Edwards, who knows more than most about the nature of the popular Caribbean aesthetic; and Val Carnegie, whose brief article on Robert Marley proved very valuable. Thanks are also due to the filmmaker Julian Henriques, for discussions about Dread history, and to one of my most talented graduate students, Greg Graham, who did the newspaper research on the Claudius Henry trial. Jana Lipman of Yale University allowed me to look at some original documents she found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., that helped shaped the Rastafari chapter. Thanks are also due to my friend and colleague Rupert Lewis, who ever since he was my dissertation adviser has served as a sounding board for my ideas in gestation.