In 1984 the Centre for Caribbean Studies established the Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture in recognition of the life and work of one of the most outstanding scholar-activists of the Black Diaspora in the post World War II era. Rodney’s scholarship and activism encompassed ‘grounding with his brothers’ in Guyana (his country of birth), the wider Caribbean, Africa, the USA and the UK. The first Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture was entitled ‘The State, Politics and Violence in the Anglophone Caribbean’ and was given by Dr Harry Goulbourne in April 1985. Since then the Centre and the University of Warwick have routinely invited a distinguished speaker to deliver the lecture, details of which are below.

2024/25 Joan Anim-Addo

The 40th anniversary Walter Rodney lecture was given by Professor Joan-Anim Addo on the subject of Rodney's 'groundings'. Prof. Anim-Addo is Emeritus Professor and Director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies at Goldsmiths, and has the distinction of being the UK’s first Black Professor of Literature. Her most recent publication is This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books (co-written). She is Editor of Blacklines, the magazine of Black British Writing, and editor in Chief of the Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Black British Writing.

For a recording of the Walter Rodney lecture 2024, please see this link and scroll to 6 minutes from the start:

https://echo360.org.uk/media/1ef5dc3f-7910-4299-952f-b7f6d2d812a0/public

From left: Liz Egan, Ben Richardson, Tim Lockley, Joan Anim-Addo, David Lambert. Photo credit: Lisa Cook.

2023/24 Fabienne Kanor

Vincent Brown is Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. He gave a talk on "Designing Histories of Slavery in the Database Age".

(Left) Professor Vincent Brown and Centre Director Dr Fabienne Viala; (right) Prof Brown and Dr Leon Sealey-Huggins

2014/15 Verene Shepherd

Professor Verene Shepherd is Director of the regional Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) at the University of the West Indies. A slideshow presentation of the War memorials which Verene highlighted in her talk can be found War memorials and Black Liberation.

(Left) Professor Verene Shepherd, Centre Director Dr Fabienne Viala and Dr Yesu Persaud; (right) Prof. Shepherd, Professor Thomas Glave and audience members.

2013/14 Silvio Torres-Saillant

Professor Silvio Torres-Saillant’s thought-provoking Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture entitled 'The Advent of Blackness: The Caribbean and the Birth of Racial Modernity' navigated around the central idea that blackness – an ontological concept formed out of the transatlantic slave trade system – irrevocably shaped human relations by laying the foundation for racial thinking in the modern age. In a tour de force presentation that wove together such composite elements as Shakespeare’s Othello, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, black-on-black crime in the USA, the English Romantic poets, Halle Berry, and maroon slaves, the speaker set out the challenging argument that blackness has, throughout modern history, counterpoised and even neutralised the rules and norms of reason.

Drawing upon the absurdist example of the lynching ‘party,’ he set out the case that blackness operates to disrupt all human solidarities. Although pan-Caribbean in scope, the complicated racial history of the divided Caribbean island of Hispaniola served as a salient case study for Torres-Saillant’s analysis. Drawing on the model of independence in Saint-Domingue, he provided an interesting assessment of the repercussions of this first black revolution for political and economic relations both with the metropole as well as in the regional context. Asserting the view that ‘negrophobia’ spread from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the paper outlined the implications for racial dynamics shaping relations between Haiti and the speaker’s native Dominican Republic. In forthcoming research, Professor Torres-Saillant’s builds on these insights to explore Hispaniola as the birthplace of modern blackness in the Americas. The talk was followed by a reception to celebrate the launch of a newly revised edition by Peepal Press of Professor Torres-Saillant’s 1997 monograph Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. An audio recording of the lecture is available here.

Text by Christabelle Peters, IAS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Hispanic Studies.

(Left) Professor Silvio Torres-Saillant; (Right) Prof. Torres-Saillant with members of the Centre.

2012/13 Paget Henry Brown

This year’s Walter Rodney lecture entitled “CLR James, Walter Rodney and the Public Self of Caribbean Insurrectionary Politics” brought together a range of themes that Paget Henry (Brown University) has been grappling with over the last few years and outlined clearly the contours of a significant strand of thought relating to insurrectionary politics in 20th-century Caribbean history. The talk pivoted on the exploration of two central figures: Trinidadian historian, writer and philosopher C. L. R. James; and the Guyanese thinker and activist Walter Rodney.

Building on the framework that Professor Henry set down in his ground-breaking work Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (2000), the lecture began by elucidating the 'historicist' and 'poeticist' dimensions of James’s and Rodney’s thinking. Arguing that, for both men, the humanization of Caribbean workers was key to their politics, Henry traced out the way in which moments of revolutionary upheaval could be conceived as eruptions of a creative public self. This notion of subjectivity he saw as being shaped by the political and social conjunction and the class dynamics at play at the time at which they were writing. Given the transformations in the global economy since 2008 and the persistence, even increase, in tensions between different ethnic and religious groups in the Caribbean, the lecture underlined a call for new forms of dialogues in the region. Professor Henry, inspired by novelist Wilson Harris, set out the persuasive case for a new architecture of subjectivity as the basis for building fresh alliances in the fight against the exploitative thrust of global capitalism. An audio recording of the lecture is available here.

Text by Chris Campbell.

(Left) Dr Yesu Persaud, Professor Henry Paget and Dr David Lambert; (right) Prof. Paget's lecture

2011/12 Cecil Gutzmore

This lecture was entitled 'The Fanon-Rodney approach to Neo-colonialism and the Caribbean Nation-state Today'.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) and Walter Rodney (1942-1981) are two of the most significant revolutionary activist-intellectuals of the twentieth century. Both were African-Caribbean, functioning in the era of the Cold War. Their complex praxis saw them directly engaged in both African Diasporic and Continental African territories (Martinique and Algeria for Fanon; Jamaica, Guyana and Tanzania for Rodney). Both made important contributions to more than one academic discipline (between them psychiatry, political science, political economy and historiography). Their urgent and active concern with and for human liberation led them both to recognize capitalist-imperialism as the crucial current form of domination-exploitation. Both saw that, for Africans, victories against the colonial projection of such power represented an insufficient rupture, given its reincarnation in the structures and processes of neo-colonialism and its hegemonic global hold. This led them both to contribute theoretically and practically to the ongoing struggle against capitalist-imperialism as neo-colonialism, the concept having been coined by Kwame Nkrumah. Lasting victories in this struggle have to date been few. The principal concern of this lecture will be to examine the contemporary Caribbean nation-state, in all its apparent variety, in the light of Fanon’s and Rodney’s anti-neocolonial praxis.

2010/11

This year's lecture was given by the Most Hon P J Patterson, Former Prime Minister of Jamaica, and was entitled 'Migration and Development in the Commonwealth: A Caribbean Perspective'. A recording is available here.

2009/10 Edward Baugh

Professor Edward Baugh delivered this year's lecture on 'The Blossoming of Caribbean Literature: The Life and Work of Frank Collymore'. Below is an extract of the lecture, available in full here.

I suspect that Frank Collymore would blush to hear that he is the subject of a Walter Rodney lecture. He was hardly a radical or revolutionary. Indeed, he was conservative by temperament and upbringing; some, a few, might even say reactionary. He showed little interest in politics, was hardly overjoyed when Barbados gained independence from Great Britain. He was of the uninformed view that “We in B’dos have no African customs, folk-lore or anything of the sort,” and he spoke of “the somewhat absurd idea of Mother Africa.” Of course, in these positions he was very much of his time and upbringing. Still, he was open-minded and liberal (even if that is a dirty word in some quarters), one who valued the individual no matter the cause in which the individual was embedded, a man of principle, unconventional, even disturbingly so in his way, a person of great integrity, someone whom men of much more radical persuasion were honoured to be able to call their friend and mentor ...

Source: Walter Rodney Foundation