Carole boyce davies images of nature
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Carole Boyce Davies on Claudia Jones
Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.
Peter Adamson: Maybe we can start out by setting some context for the work of Claudia Jones. So can I first ask you to say something about the approach that communists in general in the United States during Jones's time were taking to what was then called the Negro Problem?
Carole Boyce Davies: From all the work that I've done so far, one does not get a fixed logic of participation in a communist movement only on the basis of class. One consistently gets a conjunction in which race and class operate simultaneously. And that's the logic context, which in many ways now in today's context, people use language like intersectionality and so on, but for them, it was not so much that, as a way of accounting for all of their subject positions that were oppressed at the time. So one hardly finds a class-only position. One does find a race-first or race-only position in the logics of Garvey, which is a kind of diminution of what Hubert Harriso
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“A Community of the Self”
As both creative writer and critic, Curdella Forbes’ has made contributions to Caribbean letters that seem to emerge from what Carole Boyce Davies identifies as “the Caribbean creative/theoretical,” “that luminal space where the imagination feeds each of these streams and willfully brings them together repeatedly.”1 Forbes identifies Jamaican society as one that “has always conducted a passionate love affair with fiction.”2These words can also describe her own fondness for the Jamaica she grew up in, which is depicted in her fictional works Songs of Silence (), Flying with Icarus (), and A Permanent Freedom (). Mervyn Morris characterizes Forbes’s fiction as “eloquent” and “moving,” qualities reflected in prose informed by her experiences with yard storytelling.3In the last story of the children’s book Flying with Icarus, the mythical River Mumma tells the protagonist Oscar that extraordinary books are written by those who inhabit the ordinary yet have “learnt the secret of weaving words so others can see the magic that is there all the time.” River Mumma’s philosophy captivates Oscar and inspires him to write about her. At the story’s end, a little boy opens the cover of the book that Oscar eventually writes to find that its author