Identity and Caribbean Literature
Posted: Sunday, June 24, 2001

By Selwyn Cudjoe
A lecture delivered to the Japanese Black Studies
Association at Nara Women's College, Nara, Japan
In a wondrous introduction to Party Politics in the West Indies, C. L. R. James, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the modern Caribbean, made the following statement about the people of the Anglophone Caribbean: "People of the West Indies, you do not know your own power. No one dares to tell you. You are a strange, a unique combination of the greatest driving force in the world today, the underdeveloped formerly colonial coloured peoples; and more than any of them, by education, way of life and language, you are completely part of Western civilization. Alone of all people in the world you began your historical existence in a highly developed modern society-the sugar plantation. More 

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