Elsa Goveia: History and nation

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 167-190

  Chamberlain, Mary ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77951787317     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/58.1.167     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Wilson Harris, as cited in Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-1972: a Literary and Cultural History, London, 1992, p. 215.
2. Cited Walmsley The Caribbean Artists Movement, p. 195.
3. 'Ever since the time of emancipation we have been trying to combine quite opposite principles in our social system. But sooner or later we shall have to face the fact that we are courting defeat when we attempt to build a new heritage of freedom upon a structure of society which binds us all too closely to the old heritage of slavery. Liberty and equality are good consorts, for, though their claims sometimes conflict, they rest upon a common basis of ideas which makes them reconcilable. But a most profound incompatibility necessarily results from the uneasy union which joins democracy with the accumulated remains of enslavement. In the end, either one or the other must be undermined by the constant antagonism of mutually intolerant elements.' Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century New Haven and London, 1965, p. 338.
4. Elsa V. Goveia, An Introduction to the Federation Day Exhibition on Aspects of British West Indian History, n. p. (but presumably University College of the West Indies), n. d. (but presumably 1958), Spanish Town, Jamaica, p. 41.
5. Goveia, 'Introduction, Federation Day Exhibition', p. 41.
6. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, New York, 1980. Halbwachs argues that every society has the 'frameworks' which permit and fashion recollection. Without these, recollection would not be possible.
7. Elsa V. Goveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End of the Nineteenth Century, Washington DC (1956) 1980, p. 177.
8. Goveia, 'New Shibboleths for Old', Caribbean Quarterly 10:2, June 1964, pp. 48-54;
9. republished in New Beacon Reviews, Collection One, ed. John La Rose, 1968, pp. 31-7.
10. Goveia, Slave Society, p. 338.
11. Sister Mary Noel Menezes was a key figure in the establishment of the Department of History at the University of Guyana. She was the author of a number of works on the Portuguese in Guyana and on the (much-neglected) Amerindians.
12. Mary Noel Menezes, 'The Intellectual Legacies of Elsa Goveia', Proceedings of a Commemorative Symposium in Honour of Professors Elsa Goveia and Walter Rodney, 15 May 1985
13. University of Guyana, Turkeyen, Guyana. History Gazette 66, March 1994, pp. 9-12.
14. Cited in Rex Nettleford, 'Forward', Caribbean Quarterly 30:3, 4, Sept.-Dec. 1984, p. v.
15. Rex Nettleford was also a founder of the Jamaican National Dance Theatre Company and remains its choreographer.
16. Nettleford, 'Forward'.
17. In those colonies with elected legislatures, stringent property and income hurdles restricted the franchise. Even in 1939 those able to vote represented only ten per cent of the population. See Cary Fraser, 'The Twilight of Colonial Rule in the British West Indies: National Assertion versus Imperial Hubris in the 1930s', Journal of Caribbean History 30:1 + 2, 1996, pp. 1-27.
18. J. H. Parry and P. M. Sherlock, A Short History of the West Indies, London, 1963, p. 283.
19. C. L. R. James, The Case for West Indian Self-government, London, 1933.
20. The British government, fearful that the Commission's report would trigger further unrest, postponed its publication until after World War Two.
21. Fraser, 'Twilight of Colonial Rule', p. 15.
22. John La Guerre, 'The Moyne Commission and the West Indian Intelligentsia, 1938-9', Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies 9:2, July 1971.
23. La Guerre ' Moyne Commission', p. 153.
24. Fraser, 'Twilight of Colonial Rule', p. 15.
25. James Millette, 'Nationalism and Imperialism in Caribbean Historiography', in The General History of the Caribbean Vol. VI Methodology and Historiography of the Caribbean, ed. B. W. Higman, London and Oxford, 1999, p. 187.
26. For further discussion see Clem Seecheram, Tiger in the Stars, London, 1997.
27. Brian Moore 'The Social Impact of Portuguese Immigration into British Guiana after Emancipation', in Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, Kingston, 1993.
28. Cited in Parry and Sherlock, Short History of the West Indies, p. 286. Sir Huw Springer, an Oxford trained lawyer and a trade-unionist, was first general secretary of the Barbados Workers Union, and Governor-general of Barbados 1984-1990
29. Lloyd Braithwaite, Colonial West Indian Students in Britain, Kingston, 2001. Braithwaite does however point out that students from British Guiana, in the early years, had also formed their own student organization and, in some cases, actively distanced themselves from their fellow West Indians by stressing their mainland American connections.
30. Cited in Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, p. 5.
31. Elsa Goveia, 'Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands 1780-1800', Doctoral Thesis, University of London, 1952, p. 1 (preface).
32. Elsa Goveia Slave Society Doctoral Thesis, p. 2.
33. Francisco A. Scarano, 'Slavery and Emancipation in Caribbean History', in General History of the Caribbean Vol. VI, ed. Higman, p. 72.
34. Goveia 'New Shibboleths for Old', pp. 48-54;
35. also in New Beacon Review, Collection One, ed. John La Rose, 1968, pp. 31-7.
36. Goveia 'New Shibboleths for Old'.
37. Goveia, Introduction to the Federation Day Exhibition, p. 42.
38. Goveia 'New Shibboleths for Old', pp. 34-5.
39. Goveia, Slave Society, p. 337.
40. Goveia Slave Society 1965 p. 338.
41. These were also Goveia's sources, but her take on them was very different.
42. Lord Elton, Imperial Commonwealth, London, 1945.
43. Lovell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean 1763-1833: a Study in Social and Economic History, London, New York, 1928, p. 7.
44. Vincent Harlow, Beit Professor of the History of the British Empire, The Historian and British Colonial History (Inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Oxford, 16 Nov. 1950), Oxford, 1951, p. 23.
45. In much the same way that C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938) was inspired by and from the West Indies.
46. Goveia, 'Slave Society', (doctoral thesis).
47. James G. Leyburn, The Haitian People (1941), New Haven, 1948.
48. John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Boulder, 1992, p. 14.
49. Most likely he was referring to the Nigerian historian, Kenneth Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885 (Oxford Studies in African Affairs), Oxford, 1956. Dike was a contemporary and close friend of Goveia's and became the vice-chancellor of the University of Ibadan.
50. Harlow, The Historian and British Colonial History, p. 10. Goveia (and F. R. Augier), many years later in the Times Literary Supplement, observed 'The eagerness of the young colonial post-graduates after the Second World War to write the history of their own countries was a cause of concern to some of their English tutors':
51. Elsa V. Goveia and F. R. Augier, 'Colonialism From Within', Times Literary Supplement, 28 July 1966.
52. Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles francaises (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), Société d'Histoire de la Martinique, 1981;
53. Au caps au temps de Toussaint Louverture (1798-1800), Les Ateliers Fardin, 1979.
54. Neither work is cited in the bibliography to her thesis or in its 1965 published edition, although they are referred to in the TLS article co-written with F. R. Augier, 'Colonialism From Within'. She also provided an introduction to Debien's work 'Gabriel Debien's contribution to the history of French West Indian slavery'. In Papers presented at the Third Annual Conference of Caribbean Historians, April 15-17, 1971, Georgetown, 1971, pp. 40-8, notes pp. 116-9.
55. Goveia, 'Preface', Historiography, p. 5.
56. 'The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world. The history that does work in the world, the history that influences the course of history, is living history, that pattern of remembered events, whether true or false, that enlarges and enriches the collective specious present, the specious present of Mr. Everyman. It is for this reason that the history of history is a record of the "new history" that in every age rises to confound and supplant the old... However accurately we may determine the "facts" of history, the facts themselves and our interpretations of them, and our interpretations of our own interpretations, will be seen in a different perspective or a less vivid light as mankind moves into an unknown future. Regarded historically, as a process of becoming, man and his world can obviously be understood only tentatively, since it is by definition something still in the making, something as yet unfinished.' (Carl Becker, 'Everyman His Own Historian', American Historical Review 37:2, 1932, pp. 235-6)
57. A perspective which was a precursor of what Hannah Arendt was to term the 'banality of evil'. See Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, London, 1994.
58. Goveia 'New Shibboleths for Old', p. 35. (See above.)
59. See, for instance, Goveia and Augier, 'Colonialism from Within', in which the authors caution against the temptation to act as the new 'court historians' of the newly-liberated nations.
60. Goveia, Historiography, p. 80.
61. This was eventually published as 'The West Indian slave laws of the eighteenth century' Revista de Ciencas Sociales 4:1, 1960, pp. 75-106.
62. As cited in Philip Sherlock and Rex Nettleford, The University of the West Indies: a Caribbean Response to the Challenge of Change, London, 1990, p. 206.
63. K. O. Laurence, Obituary of Elsa Goveia for History Teachers Association, n. d.. Others engaged prominently in this were F. R. Augier, Shirley Gordon, Douglas Hall and Mary Reckord.
64. Philip Foster, Education and Social Change in Ghana, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, p. 185.
65. Sherlock and Nettleford, University of the West Indies, p. 83.
66. Laurence, Obituary of Elsa Goveia.
67. Woodville K. Marshall, 'Foreword', Inside Slavery: Process and Legacy in the Caribbean Experience, ed. Hilary McD. Beckles, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, 1996.
68. The University College of the West Indies was located at Mona, Kingston, Jamaica and within the University community was always referred to as 'Mona'.
69. Sherlock and Nettleford, The University of the West Indies, p. 206.
70. After his expulsion from Jamaica, Rodney went to Tanzania where he researched and wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London, 1972). In 1974 he returned to his native Guyana to be Professor of History. This appointment was cancelled by the Government. In 1980, Rodney was assassinated. Goveia's ill health in 1968 when Rodney was expelled from Jamaica prevented her taking an active role in the Rodney affair.
71. R. T. Smith, 'Caribbean Research', http://home.uchicago.edu/~rts1/ caribbea.htm.
72. Elsa V. Goveia, 'A Tribute to Elsa Goveia', Caribbean Quarterly 30:3-4, Sept.-Dec. 1984, p. 2. (A short piece Goveia had written in 1961, reprinted as introduction to this special issue on her.)
73. Goveia and Augier, 'Colonialism From Within'.
74. As cited in Colin Clark, 'The Quest for Independence in the Caribbean', Journal of Latin American Studies 9:2, p. 341.
75. See Sherlock and Nettleford, University of the West Indies, pp. 79-94.
76. Anthony Bogues, 'Politics, Nation and PostColony: Caribbean Inflections', Small Axe 11.
77. Others included Kassim Bacchus, George Beckford, Edward Carrington, Norman Girvan, Owen Jefferson, Vaughan Lewis, Alister McIntyre, Orlando Patterson, Selwyn Ryan, Clive Thomas and LeRoy Taylor (Sherlock and Nettleford, University of the West Indies).
78. Lloyd Best, quoted in Sherlock and Nettleford, University of the West Indies, p. 126.
79. For an interesting discussion on Manley, Creole nationalism, and Rastafarian resistance, see Bogues, 'Politics, Nation and PostColony.'
80. Elsa V. Goveia, 'Past History and Present Planning in the West Indies', New World Quarterly Review 2:1, Dead Season [summer/autumn], 1965, p. 78. (The Dead Season, also known as the Hard Season, was the term used for the non-harvest period in the sugar cycle - roughly the late summer and autumn, it was a time when rations were low, nutrition was low, humidity high and slave mortality rose sharply.)
81. The anthropologist R. T. Smith argued strongly against M. G. Smith's 'pluralism' thesis.
82. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820, Oxford, 1971.
83. For a detailed history of this see Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement.
84. See also Louis James, 'The Caribbean Artists Movement', in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwarz, Manchester, 2003.
85. Elsa V. Goveia, 'The Social Framework', Savacou: a Journal of the Caribbean Artists Movement, 2 Sept. 1970, p. 10.
86. Goveia, 'Social Framework', p. 14.
87. Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, p. 98. Eric Huntley and his wife Jessica, political activists in Guyana, came to Britain in 1956 and 1957 respectively. They founded, in 1967, the Bogle L'Ouverture Press.
88. Goveia, 'The Social Framework', p. 15.