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Political theorists have long recognized the Trinidadian Marxist CLR James’ return to the Caribbean on the eve of independence (1958-62, 1965-66) as a critical juncture in the development of his mature political thought. This lecture recovers the collaborations between James, radical sugar farmers and organizers, and members of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union (OWTU) in this period to contest the incipient repressive turns of Eric Williams’ postcolonial regime. In the face of the collapse of West Indian Federation and the retrenchment of extractive political economies that followed it, Caribbean social movements and their fellow travelers (re)interpreted the plural histories of slavery and its abolition in order to conceptualize and contest the novel forms of repression mediated through the postcolonial state. These debates gave rise in turn to experiments in the configuration of a postcolonial mass party as a political institution through which to realize the promise of democratic postcolonial planning.

Teaching Demonstration: Thursday, November 7 at noon in Johnson 104

What is a Feminist Political Demand?

Abstract: What should feminists demand? How does the content of feminist demands contribute to the raising of feminist consciousness? And how do the intersections of race and gender shape the horizon of feminist politics? This lecture will introduce these questions by considering the debate over “wages for housework” that played out within the global feminist movement in the 1970s, especially through readings of Silvia Federici’s “Wages Against Housework” (1975) and excerpts of Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class (1981).