Out of the George Padmore Institute Archive: Venetta Ross, John La Rose and the Creation of New Roots in the West Indies

Abstract

This article draws upon a broad range of material from the George Padmore Institute (GPI) archive to examine the emergence of Caribbean activist John La Rose (1927–2006), visionary founder of New Beacon Books, as a radical publisher in London in the 1960s. Along with this material evidence, Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and his concept of social and symbolic capital is used to account for two apparent paradoxes at the heart of New Beacon’s project: that a self-described radical publisher relied on pre-existing networks, and that the radicality of New Beacon’s texts was produced, at least in part, by their institutionalisation. The article first describes the forms of networking, affiliation and disaffiliation that allowed La Rose to carve a space for his alternative publishing venture. It then explores an archive of letters between La Rose and West Indian teacher Venetta Ross, an ‘agent’ for New Beacon in the Caribbean. This correspondence suggests New Beacon’s role in reconceiving the secondary school curriculum in the West Indies. The closing argument of this article is methodological. From material evidence, sociologists of texts can develop a more complex picture of La Rose’s field. The field of radical Black publishing was defined not by the activities of one visionary mind, but rather made and remade by a great variety of actors.

Keywords:

• New Beacon Books
• John La Rose
• Caribbean literature
• West Indies
• archives
• radicalism

Notes

1 Whereas Habermas’s historically situated ‘bourgeois public sphere’ is an eighteenth-century phenomenon underpinned by print culture, in which ‘private’ men came together in a ‘public’ for conversation that appeared to be of general interest (36), Warner’s counterpublics are reflexive spaces of social confirmation and transformation: ‘by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse’, strangers become ‘a social entity’ and ‘engage in struggles … over the conditions that bring them together as a public’ (11–12).

2 I have chosen to leave the original punctuation of these letters intact so as to replicate some of the texture of the archival material.