Introduction
Aaron Kamugisha and Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi

The Caribbean is a veritable laboratory of racialism. We virtually invented racialism.

Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers1

The Caribbean Race Reader emerges from an extended series of conversations between its editors, colleagues in the Other Universals: Critical Thinking from Postcolonial Locations project - a dialogue that is now a decade old.2 Other Universals seeks to collectively consider the intellectual traditions of geopolitical spaces shaped by conquest and resistance to negation and oppression in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean. As the Caribbeanists in the collective, our meditations ranged across the terrain of Caribbean thought from questions of location, event, and memory in the sustaining and reproduction of ideas about and from the Caribbean, to the place of the region in the global history of anticolonial thought. Time and again, we returned to the question of the histories of race in the region - the role of the Caribbean in both the creation and consolidation of Western racism, its significant contribution to anticolonial thought, and the contemporary racial citizenship that continues to engulf all its nation-states. We were struck by the peculiar international reception and reproduction of theories of race and coloniality emergent from the region, such that the Caribbean becomes a symbol of multiculturalism and inter-cultural understanding guided by occasionally illuminating, but often limited contextual appreciations of Caribbean thought.3 Such inclusions, we thought, elevated Caribbean theory, but at the risk of forgetting Caribbean racial citizenship, the contemporary acceptance of neocolonial realities throughout the region, and an everyday racism that would give you the impression that you are in the heart of empire rather than ostensibly postcolonial nation-states.4

The Caribbean Race Reader, then, was conceived to address two problems. First, by aggregating in one place a selection of essays and archival documents that cover the era of European conquest through the time of formal political decolonization, this volume marks out the unique contribution of the region to the production of racial categories and forms of racism globally. Secondly, The Caribbean Race Reader maps out the relations between various Caribbean thinkers, their theorization of race/racism and the region as "an area of experience" in the history of the modern world.5 Following Mimi Sheller's rumination as to "what the effects are of appropriating a concept, moving it to the 'centre' as a 'global' referent . and gutting it of its political edge and theoretical complexity", which she describes as a kind of "theoretical piracy,"6 we engage in a project of (re)turning Caribbean thought and its thinkers to the Caribbean. By situating these racial texts in their Caribbean contexts, we problematize the extraction of Caribbean thought as raw material to be refined as global theory. At the same time, this collection of essays and documents refutes sanitized notions of the Caribbean as a postracial space.

Walter Rodney's riposte to the conditions of neocolonial rule with which we begin bears further, deliberate consideration. Rodney's Groundings marks the Caribbean as the ground-zero of the concoction of racialism, the very site of its "invention." The story of Rodney's sojourn in Jamaica as the first person appointed as lecturer in African history at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus has become an almost talismanic landmark in the tale of the rise of the left in the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean. Rodney's appointment, in January 1968, was curtailed by the Jamaican government's refusal to grant him entry to that country on his return from the Congress of Black Writers conference in Montreal in October of that same year. The massive protests that followed his banning, popularly known as the "Rodney Riots," are often seen as the event that signaled the emergence of a new left movement throughout the Anglophone Caribbean, a fifteen-year period of heightened revolutionary consciousness and activity which would come to an end with a succession of defeats - Rodney's murder by agents of the Forbes Burnham regime in 1980 in Guyana, the end of Michael Manley's democratic socialism in the same year in Jamaica, and the collapse of the Grenadian revolution in 1983.

Rodney's collected speeches from that time, published under the title The Groundings with My Brothers, are deservedly celebrated as one of the most important statements of Black consciousness by a Caribbean intellectual during the era of decolonization. His declaration with which this introduction commenced captures well the small geographical size of most Caribbean islands and their colonial re-constitution into plantations rather than societies, under which racial rule could be nearly perfected given a physical and social landscape stripped and re-created to suit the needs of slave society and economy. This creation gave the world large-scale chattel slavery, and through its laws and their distribution throughout the hemisphere "virtually invented racialism" - the qualifier astutely recognizing the multiple histories of race within the West, while still certain of the Caribbean's undeniably overwhelming contribution.

The point is not that the Caribbean alone was the site from which racial thinking emerged. It was one of several, but it was also central. The aim of The Caribbean Race Reader is to make visible the region's contribution to this invention of "racialism." The book gives readers access to the fields of contestation and debate from the vantage point of the Caribbean by assembling several works in close proximity. Thus, neither this introduction nor the constellations of texts that follow attempt an exhaustive history of the concept of race in the Caribbean, but rather present an argument about how we might read critical turning points in the social and political thought and intellectual history of the idea of race in the Caribbean, within a limited time period. The Caribbean Race Reader works from an understanding of the region as a set of "repeating islands," linked together by the Plantation as their common organizing principle,7 and occupying a specific geographic location. It is a space rendered real both through common natural environmental features and the acts of construction under colonialism, struggle, and post-independence. We do not separate the Caribbean into corresponding geopolitical, linguistic blocks - Hispanophone, Francophone, Dutch, or Anglophone. Nor do the selections we offer represent a comprehensive discussion of Caribbean thought on race but illustrate the texture of Caribbean interventions and influence on some of the most significant trajectories of race thought and theory since the so-called "Age of Discovery" and its tsunami of genocide, enslavement, land theft, and extractivism. We present this through the themes that constitute the four sections of this book: Making the Racial State, the Long Nineteenth Century, Black Internationalism, and Anticolonialism.

C.L.R. James once noted that Caribbean people were "more than any other people constructed by history."8 James's typically astute comment captures well the Caribbean's early abduction into colonial modernity, which he was among the first to link firmly to the social processes unleashed by the plantation system emergent in transatlantic slavery; and the question of this modernity in Black life has become over the last three decades a major theoretical preoccupation within Africana thought.9 There is, however, another line of inquiry that also centers the Caribbean plantation in an event of fundamental importance for the history of the world. And that is the Caribbean's contribution to the histories of racism. Tracing this contribution, the book does not follow a chronology as much as it unpacks various key moments in Caribbean racial thought, moving from the emergence of the colonial Caribbean state as a racial one to racialized, post-independence citizenship where "not just (any) body can be a citizen."10

Writing in 1774, Pedro Alonso O'Crowley declared that "the conquest of the Indies . filled all the vague diffusion of the imaginary spaces of man."11 O'Crowley's main area of preoccupation was the land seized as "New Spain," an enormous territory encompassing what we now refer to as Mexico, the Southern United States, Central America, and northern parts of South America; nonetheless his comment proffers an extraordinary insight on the place occupied by First Peoples in the colonial imagination.12 O'Crowley speaks to the ways in which the Caribbean played an overwhelming, decisive role in the emergence of modern racism, as the place where debates on the humanity of indigenous people would have their genesis.13 The most influential of these debates, between Bartolomé de las Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda at Valladolid in 1550-1, is simply one of the most important dialogs in the history of modern political thought.14 Sylvia Wynter's reading illuminates the gravity of this contest, which Sepúlveda...