The work of acclaimed scholar, Professor Emeritus Rupert Lewis, has now been captured in the latest addition to Ian Randle Publishers’ Caribbean Reasonings series.

The book, titled Rupert Lewis and the Black Intellectual Tradition, is a collection of personal reflections and essays by some of the Caribbean’s leading thinkers on Lewis’s influence on issues of black national identity and black liberation.

The volume was launched last Thursday at The University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona and featured presentations from colleagues and past students of Professor Lewis.

Deputy Principal of The UWI Mona, Professor Ian Boxill, in his highlights from the book, noted the influence of Lewis’s intellectual predecessors, Marcus Garvey and Walter Rodney, both of whom Professor Lewis has written extensively about.

“The book is one that boldly highlights Lewis’s earnest study of political teachings of Marcus Garvey, Walter Rodney and the African-Caribbean experience, to promote understanding of the realities of blackness and to chart a course for African people throughout the diaspora,” Boxill said.

The volume comprises 16 chapters covering topics such as the Haitian and Grenada revolutions, pan-Africanism, and the current presence of China in the region.

As the eighth addition to the Caribbean Reasonings series, regarded as a treasure trove of Caribbean thought, the volume places Lewis among a pantheon of noted Caribbean intellectuals.

Publisher Christine Randle noted that the series has aimed to make the academic work of Caribbean scholars more accessible able to a wider audience.

“ Caribbean Reasonings is a series of edited volumes serving as critical guides to the Caribbean intellectual tradition; [And] a lot of the work is to try to take the academic speak out of the academic works that we produce to make them accessible to a general audience,” Randle said.

On the matter of accessibility, a testament to Lewis’s influence is his intellectual progeny, as the volume was edited by three of his past students who are from different generational cohorts — Maziki Thame, Clinton Hutton, and Jermaine McCalpin, all scholars in their own right.

Thame, who teaches political science at Clark Atlanta University, positioned Rupert Lewis and the Black Intellectual Tradition as a work which “locates Lewis, The University of the West Indies, Mona, and the Caribbean in radicalising moments when the kind of changed worked for was decolonising, liberating, and humanising”.

One such radicalising moment was the Walter Rodney riots in October 1968, a series of civil disturbances by UWI students, who protested the then Government’s ban on Rodney, who was prohibited from returning to his teaching position at the university.

Thame also asserted that the volume alerts Caribbean people to contend with what she described as the “present impasse, a demobilised and de-radicalised moment that presumes that we have already fixed the trouble with our world”.

Hutton, a professor of Caribbean political Philosophy at The UWI Mona, noted that Lewis was the first to introduce a course on Garveyism at UWI, and highlighted the importance of Garveyism as a black intellectual tradition.

“Garvey says that it is philosophy that is going to lead the black race’s development and emancipation. Garvey’s philosophy is the closest thing that we have as a nation to a national philosopher,” Hutton said, adding,

“Rupert understood the importance of Garvey.”

Meanwhile, McCalpin noted that Lewis was an advocate of an independent intellectual tradition, one that was not a mere by-product of slavery.

“He advocated for the centrality of an independent, black intellectual tradition. This tradition was not just reactionary, developing in response to the pathology of enslavement. Rather, it was a tradition that emerged out of the lived experiences of its thinkers,” McCalpin said.

In his response to the question of whether black people could look to a tradition of black thinkers before enslavement, and escape the influence of European intellectual tradition in the Caribbean, Professor Lewis said: “Defining philosophy and the black radical tradition, our people have always had ideas prior to us being enforced into this part of the world. There is a whole tradition of philosophy and scientific thought which came out of ancient Egypt, Sudan and Nubia, so there is a rich tradition prior to the transatlantic slave trade.

“However, even in the context of plantation slavery there have been individuals who developed their own ideas and acted on them,” Lewis continued, naming Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean Jacque Dessalines among those predecessors of the black intellectual tradition.