Redemption from development: Amartya Sen, Rastafari and promises of freedom

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Notes

1. Sincere thanks to the editors and two anonymous referees for their extremely helpful and supportive comments. An earlier version of this article was presented in Osaka in 2009 at the ‘Reframing Development: Post-development, Globalization, and the Human Condition’ conference. This article is also inspired by David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah's intellectual work on cultural political economy.

2. Stuart Corbridge, ‘Development as Freedom: The Spaces of Amartya Sen’, Progress in Development Studies 2(3), 2002, p 184; Ingrid Robeyns, ‘The Capability Approach in Practice’, Journal of Political Philosophy 14(3), 2006, pp 351–376.

3. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1990, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990; see also Desmond McNeill, ‘“Human Development”: The Power of the Idea’, Journal of Human Development 8(1), 2007, p 11.

4. World Bank, World Development Report, 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

5. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf, 1999, p 18; see also Des Gasper and Irene van Staveren, ‘Development as Freedom—and as What Else?’, Feminist Economics 9(2), 2003, p 142.

6. Sen, Development as Freedom, pp 4, 17.

7. Amartya Sen, ‘Development: Which Way Now?’, Economic Journal 93(372), 1983, pp 742–762.

8. Deborah Fahy Bryceson et al, ‘Critical Commentary. The World Development Report 2009’, Urban Studies 46(4), 2009, pp 723–738; David Harvey, ‘Reshaping Economic Geography: The World Development Report 2009’, Development and Change 40(6), 2009, pp 1269–1277.

9. Corbridge, ‘Development as Freedom’.

10. See respectively, Peter Evans, ‘Collective Capabilities, Culture, and Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom’, Studies in Comparative International Development 37(2), 2002, pp 54–60; and see Sen's acknowledgement of this critique, Amartya Sen, ‘Responses to Commentaries’, Studies in Comparative International Development 37(2), 2002, p 84; Martha Nussbaum, ‘Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice’, Feminist Economics 9(2), 2003, pp 33–59; Lawrence Hamilton, ‘A Theory of True Interests in the Work of Amartya Sen’, Government and Opposition 34(4), 1999, pp 516–546.

11. See in general W D Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option, London: Routledge, 2009.

12. Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counterinsurgency’, Subaltern Studies II, 1983; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p 16.

13. Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, The American Historical Review 99(5), 1994, p 1481.

14. Gayatri Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, Subaltern Studies IV, 1985, p 339; for a critique see Veena Das, ‘Subaltern as Perspective’, Subaltern Studies VI, 1999, p 311.

15. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp 108–111.

16. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, p 19.

17. Guha, ‘The Prose of Counterinsurgency’.

18. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, p 23.

19. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, p 33.

20. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Politics and Possibility of Historical Knowledge: Continuing the Conversation’, Postcolonial Studies 14(2), 2011, pp 245–247; a similar tension is evident in Ranajit Guha, ‘The Small Voice of History’, Subaltern Studies IX, 1996, pp 1–12.

21. For various takes on the relationship see Enrique D Dussel (ed), Coloniality at Large; Latin America and the Post Colonial Debates, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

22. On the persistence—and diversity—of the postcolonial challenge see Robert Young, ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History 43, 2012, pp 19–42.

23. See Rolando Vázquez, ‘Modernity Coloniality and Visibility: The Politics of Time’, Sociological Research Online 14(4), 2007, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/7.html; Ashis Nandy might, here, spring to mind as a useful resource. However, given the particular ‘sufferers’ (to use the Jamaican term) whom I am relating to in this article, the more appropriate reference point would be the novelist and sociologist, Erna Brodber. Her novel, The Rainmaker's Mistake (London: New Beacon Books, 2007), purposefully sidelines the craftsmanship of historians for the recounting of enslaved pasts and presents.

24. See especially Amartya Sen, ‘Equality of What?’, in S M McMurrin (ed), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp 195–220.

25. Amartya Sen, ‘Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984’, The Journal of Philosophy 82(4), 1985, pp 169–221.

26. Sen, Development as Freedom, p 18.

27. For example, Amartya Sen, ‘Freedom of Choice: Concept and Content’, European Economic Review 32(2–3), 1988, p 273; Sen, ‘Development: Which Way Now?’, pp 24–25.

28. In following Sen's own attribution of the influence of Adam Smith I am, however, mindful of other key influences, for example, Rabindranath Tagore and Bengali history; see Corbridge, ‘Development as Freedom’, p 183, and fn2; Sen, Development as Freedom, p 8.

29. Sen, ‘Freedom of Choice’, p 272; Sen, Development as Freedom, pp 255–256, 263.

30. On the links between Sen and Smith and their valuation of freedom see Jerry Evensky, ‘Adam Smith's Lost Legacy’, Southern Economic Journal 67(3), 2001, pp 497–517.

31. Amartya Sen, ‘Capitalism Beyond the Crisis’, The New York Review of Books, 26 March 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/mar/26/capitalism-beyond-the-crisis/.

32. Sen, ‘Capitalism Beyond the Crisis’.

33. See for example Evans, ‘Collective Capabilities’, p 54.

34. Jürgen Habermas, ‘A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality’, in C Cronin and P De Greiff (eds), The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp 3–46.

35. See S J Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

36. See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Jonathan I Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

37. My interpretation of Smith is informed by this debate and borrows broadly from the following interlocutors: Lisa Hill, ‘The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 8(1), 2001, p 1; Evensky, ‘Adam Smith's Lost Legacy’; Leonidas Montes, ‘Newton's Real Influence on Adam Smith and Its Context’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 32(4), 2008, pp 555–576; Peter Clarke, ‘Adam Smith, Religion and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in G Cockfield, A Firth, and J Laurent (eds), New Perspectives on Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2007, pp 47–65.

38. Hill, ‘The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith’, p 5; see also Montes, ‘Newton's Real Influence on Adam Smith and Its Context’; and for Smith's own appreciation see Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 2000, pp 33–105.

39. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982, p 237.

40. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p 237.

41. See Hill, ‘The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith’, pp 9–11; Evensky, ‘Adam Smith's Lost Legacy’, p 501.

42. Clarke, ‘Adam Smith, Religion and the Scottish Enlightenment’.

43. Marshall Sahlins, ‘The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology’, Current Anthropology 37(3), 1996, pp 395–428.

44. Sahlins, ‘The Sadness of Sweetness’, p 402.

45. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp 27–29.

46. In general see Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations: An Introductory Essay’, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp 11–44; and Kamil Shah and Heloize Weber, ‘Saving the Natives from Idleness: Questioning the Historical Universality of a Labouring Self’ (presented at the International Studies Association Annual Conference, Montréal, 2011).

47. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, R L Meek, D D Raphael and P G Stein (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, pp 181–182, 185.

48. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp 188–189.

49. See ‘Adam Smith on Feudalism, Commerce and Slavery’, History of Political Thought 13(2), 1992, pp 219–241.

50. Sen, Development as Freedom, p 29.

51. Sen, Development as Freedom, pp 7, 28.

52. Stanley L Engerman, ‘Slavery, Freedom and Sen’, in B Agarwal, J Humphries, and I Robeyns (eds), Amartya Sen's Work and Ideas: A Gender Perspective, London: Routledge, 2005, pp 187–213.

53. See, for example, Frederick Cooper, Thomas C Holt, and Rebecca J Scott (eds), Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

54. In general, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966, pt II.

55. For the many complexities of these faiths and their relationships see Dianne Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

56. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, ch 4.

57. On Bedward see Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978, pp 6–8.

58. The term is taken from Nathaniel Samuel Murrell and Lewin Williams, ‘The Black Biblical Hermeneutics of Rastafari’, in Nathaniel S Murrell, William D Spencer and Adrian A McFarlane (eds), Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998, pp 326–348.

59. See George Shepperson, ‘Ethiopianism and African Nationalism’, Phylon 14(1), 1953, pp 9–18.

60. Marcus Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey or Africa for the Africans, two vols in one, Amy Jacques Garvey (ed), London: Frank Cass, 1967, vol 1, p 34.

61. Barry Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994; Kenneth Bilby, ‘Kumina, the Howellite Church and the Emergence of Rastafarian Traditional Music in Jamaica’, Jamaica Journal 19(3), 1986, pp 22–29.

62. On the canonizing of Garvey by the Rastafari faith see Rupert Lewis, ‘Marcus Garvey and the Early Rastafarians: Continuity and Discontinuity’, in Murrell et al, Chanting Down Babylon, pp 145–158.

63. See B Chevannes (ed), New Approach to Rastafari, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998; Frank Dijk, Jahmaica: Rastafari and Jamaican Society, 1930–1990, New York: One Drop Books, 2008; and the classic M G Smith, Roy Augier and Rex Nettleford, The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, Kingston: University College of the West Indies, 1960.

64. Rastafari has now become a global movement. See Ian Boxhill (ed), The Globalization of Rastafari, Kingston: Arawak Publications, 2008. In other work, for example, ‘Keskidee Aroha: Translation on the Colonial Stage’, Journal of Historical Sociology 24(1), 2011, pp 80–99, I have engaged with this important aspect of the faith. However, in this article I will keep the focus on its Jamaican coordinates.

65. For the complexity and diversities of comprehension see for example Yasus Afari, Overstanding Rastafari: Jamaica's Gift to the World, Kingston: Senya-Cum, 2007, ch 3; Eleanor Wint and Nyabinghi Order, ‘Who Is Haile Selassie? His Imperial Majesty in Rasta Voices’, in Murrell et al, Chanting Down Babylon, pp 159–165; Mutabaruka, ‘A New Faculty of Interpretation’, 2004, http://www.mutabaruka.com/newfaculty.htm.

66. Post, Arise Ye Starvelings, p 169; Joseph Owens, Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica, London: Heinemann, 1979, p 41.

67. Owens, Dread, pp 144, 204.

68. Filmore Alvaranga, Douglas Mack and Mortimer Planno, Minority Report of Mission to Afrika, 1961, http://rastafarionline.com/files/Mission_Report_1961.pdf.

69. Caribbean Rastafari Organisation, ‘Rastafari Call on European Union and African Union to Factor in Reparations’, 3rd Africa-EU Summit, Tripoli, 2010.

70. See, for example, Haile Selassie I, ‘Domestic Report on International Relations 1956’, in Selected Speeches of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, New York: One Drop Books, 2000, p 93.

71. See especially Michael Barnett, ‘Rastafari Dialectism: The Epistemological Individualism and Collectivism of Rastafari’, in Rastafari, Caribbean Quarterly, Kingston: University of West Indies, 2008, pp 49–58.

72. Clinton Hutton, ‘The Creative Ethos of the African Diaspora: Performance Aesthetics and the Fight for Freedom and Identity’, Caribbean Quarterly 53(1), 2007, pp 127–149.

73. Adrian A McFarlane, ‘The Epistemological Significance of “I-an-I” as a Response to Quashie and Anancyism in Jamaican Culture’, in Murrell et al, Chanting Down Babylon, p 108.

74. Leonard Howell and William D Spencer, ‘The First Chant: Leonard Howell's The Promised Key’, in Murrell et al, Chanting Down Babylon, p 384.

75. Owens, Dread, pp 22, 84, 91–95, 114.

76. See, for example, Monique Bedasse, ‘Rasta Evolution: The Theology of the Twelve Tribes of Israel’, Journal of Black Studies, 18 August 2008, pp 1–14.

77. It should be noted, however, that the School of Vision does baptize in the name of His Imperial Majesty. See Afari, Overstanding Rastafari: Jamaica's Gift to the World, p 211. See also my subsequent comments on baptism.

78. See, in general, Velma Pollard, ‘Dread Talk: The Speech of the Rastafarian in Jamaica’, Caribbean Quarterly 26(4), 1980, pp 32–41.

79. Smith et al, The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, p 22.

80. Ras Imo, ‘Progress & Responsibilities—Intellectual Property & Repatriation’, in Negotiating the African Presence: Rastafari Livity and Scholarship (presented at the Inaugural Rastafari Studies Conference, University of West Indies, 2010).

81. See, for example, Maureen Rowe, ‘Gender and Family Relations in Rastafari: A Personal Perspective’, in Murrell et al, Chanting Down Babylon, pp 72–88; and Imani M Tafari-Ama, ‘Rastawoman as Rebel: Case Studies in Jamaica’, in Murrell et al, Chanting Down Babylon, pp 89–106.

82. Afari, Overstanding Rastafari: Jamaica's Gift to the World, p 293.

83. Yasus Afari, ‘My Mother Who Fathered Me’, in Eye Pen, Kingston: Senya-Cum, 1998; see also George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, Harlow: Longman, 1979.

84. See Jalani Niaah, ‘Absent Fathers, Garvey's Children and the Back to Africa Movement’, in Tenth General Assembly of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Kampala, 2002; and for a feminist overview of the issues see Theresa Ann Rajack-Talley, ‘A Feminist Review of the Idea of Africa in Caribbean Family Studies’, Feminist Africa 7: Diaspora Voices 7, 2006, pp 33–48.

85. Fitz Balintine Pettersburg, The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy, Charleston: Forgotten Books, 2007, p 21.

86. Balintine Pettersburg, The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy, p 16.

87. Monica Schuler, ‘Alas, Alas, Kongo’: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p 86.

88. Clinton Hutton, ‘The Revival Table: Feasting with the Ancestors and Spirits’, Jamaica Journal 32(1/2), 2009, p 64.

89. ‘Biography of Empress Menen Book Launch on April 3, 2012’, Ites-Zine, Ethiopian-Calendar 2004, http://rastaites.com/news/archives/ET2004/03.htm#Mutabaruka.

90. On the importance of healing in the here and now for Revival, Kumina and Rastafari, see Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey.

91. This is not to deny, of course, that many of the words associated with a developmentalist episteme are not uttered by Rasta, for example, ‘progress’, ‘the future’, and even ‘development’ itself.

92. See Owens, Dread, pp 36–37.

93. See, for example, Mel Cooke, ‘Augier Urges Rastafari to Accept Jamaica as Home’, 19 August 2010, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100819/lead/lead9.html. The report shows an elite bias that seeks to ridicule the notion of repatriation.

94. Michael Barnett, ‘The Political Objectives of Rastafari: A Case Study of the Life and Influence of Ras Sam Brown on the Rastafari Movement’, in Rastafari, Caribbean Quarterly, Kingston: University of West Indies, 2008, pp 39–48.

95. For critiques of the narrative, see Anthony Bogues, ‘Politics, Nation and PostColony: Caribbean Inflections’, Small Axe 6(1), 2002, pp 12–15; see also David Scott, ‘Political Rationalities of the Jamaican Modern’, Small Axe 7(2), 2003, pp 1–22.

96. On these issues see Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1990, ch 6.

97. Comments made by Prof Barry Chevannes at ‘Negotiating the African Presence: Rastafari Livity and Scholarship’ conference, University of West Indies, August 2010.

98. Sen, Development as Freedom, pp 87, 153.

99. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967, p 134.

100. Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, p 341.

101. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, p 83.