Trinidadian Selwyn Cudjoe, the heir to CLR James
On a chilly spring day last week I arrived in the salubrious setting of Wellesley College in Massachusetts to honour towering Trinidadian pan-African scholar Selwyn Cudjoe, who was retiring from the college after 38 years. A stellar group of academics and former students gathered to pay tribute to this unassuming don.
Kellie Carter Jackson, chair of Wellesley’s Africana studies department, which Cudjoe had built into a strong unit, praised his outspoken courage in making the college more diverse. Other colleagues spoke of his uncompromising, principled antiracism. Cudjoe quoted African-American scholar-activist Frederick Douglass’s maxim: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
His long-time colleague, William Cain, described him as a consummate writer whose pioneering work on Caribbean literature had transformed and reconceptualised the field.
Trinidadian-American scholar Carol Boyce-Davies highlighted Cudjoe’s enormous contributions to Caribbean feminist literature.
Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles placed Cudjoe among a Pantheon of post-slavery Trinidadian scholars, from JJ Thomas to CLR James to Eric Williams, before describing him as “an architect of diversity and democracy … an intellectual of the African renaissance”.
Nigerian literary scholar Biodun Jeyifo placed Cudjoe among a handful of “humanistic progressive scholars”. Several of Cudjoe’s students gave glowing tributes about how their uncompromisingly rigorous teacher inspired them and changed their lives through his dedicated mentorship.
Cudjoe introduced a pan-African-influenced multicultural course requirement for all students and fought for the appointment of black faculty and deans. His mantra had been “to serve rather than be served”.
My presentation at the conference focused on Cudjoe’s relationship with his great literary hero, CLR James, the pioneering post-colonial studies scholar-activist on whom Cudjoe had co-edited the 1991 book CLR James: His Intellectual Legacies.
Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said had called James “a centrally important 20th-century figure”.
Both James and Said — like Cudjoe himself — were deeply steeped in the Western literary canon, while seeking to mediate the struggle between the Occident and the third world.
CLR and Cudjoe both embody formidable dyed-inthe-wool pan-African scholar-activists, with Cudjoe engaging fearlessly in debates through his regular column in the Trinidad & Tobago Express. CLR and Cudjoe have an impressive breadth of scholarly interests, arguing forcefully for pan-African struggles to be located within universal contexts.
Cudjoe’s essay in my 2020 edited book The Pan-African Pantheon: Prophets, Poets and Philosophers was titled CLR James: With Africa on His Mind”. Eloquently written and tightly argued, his two main purposes were to place CLR in his proper historical, political and social context as having been “Made in the Caribbean” and not in London; and to demonstrate CLR’s life-long anti-racist pan-African commitments.
Cudjoe condemns the failure of many scholars to place CLR within the context of the first 31 years of his life spent in his Trinidadian homeland. He insists that “language and literature were vibrant aspects of the life of 19th-century Trinidad,” as elegantly demonstrated by his 2003 book Beyond Boundaries.
He assesses CLR’s 1938 masterpiece on the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, which created only the second independent republic in the Americas. James had written the book in the hope that it would help Africans on the continent throw off their own colonial chains.
Cudjoe also wrote on CLR’s 1963 classic Beyond A Boundary — surely the most important sociological study of the game.
For James, cricket is a momentary high, liberating its players from prejudice while they are within the boundary of the game. Cudjoe similarly argues that black West Indian subalterns used cricket to develop Among their Cudjoe own’culture s most to challenge the British-inherited one. endearing qualities are his uncompromising commitment to intellectual rigour and respect for diverse ideas: qualities similar to those of CLR. As this recent Wellesley symposium demonstrated, Cudjoe has been generous with his mentorship, scrupulously meticulous in his research and, like CLR, deeply committed to his vocation as a public intellectual.