Decemmber 2014


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When I requested support funds to commit The UWI St Augustine to this recollection of Robin Cohen’s presence at UWI St Augustine from 1978-1980, the Dean of the Faculty of Social Science, Errol Simms, immediately agreed and committed funds to it, thus bringing with me the weight of the UWI St Augustine homage as well to the time that Robin spent with us as a testament and to the continued value of his work to the region. In preparation for this presentation I have also drawn on the memories of colleagues who knew Robin Cohen during his time in Trinidad and have incorporated some of their memories and tributes.

My presentation begins with a quick visual reminder to Robin of the campus as it was in the 1970s. I could lay my hands only on few images then and what it looks like now. There are still many traces and trails of the past within the new so although it is now an overgrown parking lot for some of us; the campus has attempted to maintain something of the pastoral beauty of its original site – the St Augustine estate, once a thriving plantation.

UWI St Augustine formally opened its doors in 1960 as a result of the merger of the University College of the West Indies and the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture. As seen in the first image, the building that currently houses a component of our Administration was in fact the Imperial Tropical College of Agriculture. All of this is to say that Robin would have come to a relatively young campus then, barely twenty years old, but a space that was already rooted in a history of knowledge production, and well known for its global contribution to the science of tropical agriculture.

In the decade of the seventies, a time when many economies had entered a recession, Trinidad and Tobago's economy was buoyant, fed by revenues from its petroleum resources that had bolstered the state sector and the declining agricultural sector. The 1970s Black Power revolution, a growing disaffection by educated as well as working class youth who felt disenfranchised by the current government, had among its leadership students and some young faculty of The UWI – thus the UWI Faculty of Social Sciences and the Department of Sociology that Robin had joined in 1977 from the University of Birmingham were both known for their militancy. Dr. Cecilia Karsh, currently at the UWI Cave Hill campus in Barbados reminded me that this was the tenor of the space she had joined years earlier that had coincided with Robin’s appointment with the same department.

Robin’s doctoral work on labour and migration in Nigeria along with his early South African experience and later sojourn in the UK would have well prepared him, I sincerely hope, for the kind of society he would encounter in Trinidad: its mixture of multiple races muddling its way in an era of postcolonial independence with overblown confidence and petroleum dollars. Professor Rhoda Reddock noted that although she was not privileged to be one of Robin’s students at the UWI campus (she was then working at the Cipriani Labour College nearby) she did get to know him and his family. She describes the campus that Robin joined as “then a golden period of sociology at UWI, St. Augustine. …at that time there were stalwarts like Susan Craig, Ken Pryce and Farley Braithwaite. Sociology was at the forefront of the analysis of social challenges facing the region and globally.”

How do I come to be part of this story? I had been working on the campus at the Institute for Social and Economic Research as a Research Assistant and had signed up as a graduate student to do the MSc in Sociology – this was a degree equivalent to our MPhil degree at present. Robin had been recruited as one of our first professors in the Department of Sociology which was still developing its graduate programme and was hired, among other things, to take us through rigorous training in theory and methodology. I recall some of the students who joined the class that year, or were there in previous years, among them Kim Johnson, Daphne Phillips, Heather Hollingsworth and Darius Figueira. All of us eventually graduated, whether in sociology or otherwise, and most have continued in some form of academia or writing. Whether this was due to Robin’s influence, or to the kind of student who would choose to do graduate work at this time is an interesting point – I would say that it was a bit of both. I think Robin had the capacity to generate enthusiasm for knowledge and spur us on to explore our individual intellectual growth rather than imposing a tailored one-size-fit-all programme and perhaps this was exactly what the graduate programme needed at the time. For my part he brought with him a wider understanding of a rapidly evolving global consciousness and did not confine us to the provinciality of place or space – thus already pre-figuring the global citizens of academia that we all had to become.

It was a new department and his presence in the faculty and at UWI brought multi-dimensional gains as some of his colleagues at the time recall. Brinsley Samaroo, Professor in History had this to say:

“I clearly remember Robin during the late ’70s when he arrived as professor of Sociology and soon became head of a fledgling department, which he energized not only by introducing new courses but also through seminars which included staff and students from other faculties, then a rare occurrence at St. Augustine. For young scholars working on diasporic studies he was particularly helpful, constantly emphasizing a global rather than a narrow geographical perspective and the need to ground empirical study on sound theory. His own writing on diasporas was a very useful guide to our research. He was always eager to learn new things about Caribbean society, looked at from his South African lens. One immediately sensed his abhorrence of apartheid as he explained the dynamics of that system to a region where the information and analysis was superficial. For that reason his seminars on South Africa were well-attended. To many of us he was friend and mentor.”

Dr. Susan Craig who would have been a colleague in the Department of Sociology observed: “In the 1970s when Robin Cohen joined the Sociology Department, he brought serious scholarship, a genial manner, and wide vistas.”

Susan particularly remembers his generosity in assisting her with the Departmental Reader on Caribbean Sociology that she was compiling, noting that Robin read all the articles and thoughtfully ordered them into sections while Selina, his wife, also helped with translating articles from French to English.

Although Robin spent a relatively short period on the island and at UWI, he continued to maintain relationships and connections. Susan noted that when Robin was invited by the London School of Economics and Political Science to be the External Examiner of her doctoral thesis in 1995, his knowledge, both of the Caribbean and of the Sociology of Development, was a great asset.

In my own case, Robin continued to reach out across the oceans of time and drew me into his projects. I was invited and accepted to be on the International Advisory Board of Global Networks: The Journal of Transnational Affairs which Robin, Alasdair Rogers and Steven Vertovec established and edit. Global Networks currently ranks in the top 20 journals that deal with Sociology/Anthropology and Globalization, no mean feat to achieve. Likewise, during my period as Deputy Dean (2004-7, Graduate Studies and Research) of the Faculty of Social Sciences I attempted to draw on the expertise of the Journal and its staff to assist the Faculty with developing its publication expertise and profile. Robin also invited me to present at a conference on Creolization that spearheaded a research project on Creolization and Diaspora in 2010 at Oxford University that he led. Unfortunately due to work commitments that year I could not accept this invitation, much to my regret.

Rhoda Reddock, like Susan Craig, comments on his generosity with networks that allow for the advancement of individuals: “For me personally how well I recall my discussions with him on graduate options and my interest in the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague which offered programmes in social development and social planning. At that time I felt the need for a more applied use of my sociological knowledge. As luck would have it, Ken Post, Professor at the ISS was visiting Robin and I was introduced, he was able to advise me on my application and the rest is history. I completed a Masters in Development Studies at the ISS which marked the beginning of a long relationship between that institution and the UWI.” As it turned out I completed my PhD at the ISS and the project of cooperation between the Netherlands and the UWI allowed eventually for the establishment of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies of which Rhoda and I are both founding members.

The Caribbean has had a lasting impact on Robin’s work. Rhoda again comments that “his publications would always include some mention of the Caribbean or the Caribbean Diaspora, which probably due to its small size, is not often visible in many ‘global’ sociological texts. He also continued to engage with those troublesome concepts of 'creole' and 'creolization': concepts central to Caribbean social thought but which have begun to have a life elsewhere. This interest culminated in the 2010 volume, “The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures” co-edited with Paola Toninato (Routledge). This Caribbean-influenced reader includes Gordon Rohlehr's essay, "Calypso Reinvents Itself" addressing that quintessential Caribbean creole form: the Calypso.”

How did the experience of the place and people mark Robin and how did the experience of Robin mark the place and people of the Caribbean and Trinidad in particular? I have referenced this from a range of personal recollections. I looked at the themes that are recurrent in his life’s work, labour, migration, diaspora , creolization – these themes preoccupy scholars whose work and lives are enriched by experiences of displacement, multi-culturalisms and always connected to some forms of othering much the same way that Robin’s own displacement from South Africa must have made him a constant traveller in another society. Clearly one of the things he has successfully done is connected scholars whose shared threads of interest have created a community within the larger global fields that these themes span.

For the Caribbean however, a footnote in the global landscape, Robin’s seminal essay, “Creolization and Cultural Globalization: The soft sounds of Fugitive Power” establishes the Caribbean as the crucial site where such ideas emerged long before it was popular to conceive of the creolized identity or the creole imaginary. In this era of new globalization, another US colleague based in New York, Aisha Khan, has also examined and critiqued the concept of creolization in fully explaining the evolving landscape of culture in the Caribbean. The intellectual value of this concept born out of a new world encounter five hundred years ago clearly remains of currency in the contemporary discourses of migration, diaspora, settlement and cultural adjustment – perhaps more so now, where shifting geographies of people and massive urbanization in the cities of developed countries yet again forces a rethinking of its explanatory significance in other contexts.

We owe a debt to scholars like Robin Cohen who lived and worked in Trinidad and found value in the minutiae of the region and in the firsthand experience of race relations that he encountered here. South African-born in a nation that was still living under apartheid, he delighted in experiencing a cohabitation of ethnic groups that presented a different model which might be emulated elsewhere. In his work, concepts such as creole and creolization are still being invoked, and with this invocation also travels the genealogy of these ideas in the work of Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Braithwaite and Edouard Glissant among others. That this is still a subject of conversation at Oxford in 2014 is an affirmation that the Caribbean continues to find a place in the current global discourses and in doing so, continuously also finding its centre.