Vanguards and Masses: Grenada's Revolution, with David Austin

The Unequal Exchange Podcast

In 1979, Maurice Bishop and the New J.E.W.E.L. Movement (NJM) came to power, in the spirit of the Cuban and Haitian revolutions, against an authoritarian neocolonial puppet and promised to end illiteracy, poverty, and the colonial condition of Grenada as a site of former enslavement and ongoing extraction. 4 years later (and 40 years past from 2023) Bishop was dead, assassinated by members of his own revolutionary government, and Ronald Reagan was authorizing the imperialist invasion of a tiny island that posed no threat to the American Empire. What happened? The story of the Grenadian Revolution is a complicated tale of Vanguards and Masses; a dialectical interplay of the forces that make revolution possible. In looking at the 40th anniversary of the end of the short-lived revolution, we ask how a revolution's flame can burn so bright that even its extinguishing still casts a shadow on the Caribbean today. Our guest is David Austin, the author of the Casa de las Americas Prize-winning Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, and Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution. He is also the editor of You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. Recommended texts: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kuhDpdu-MOS72_mKntQPUO-EA4mgyNTf/view?usp=sharinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z-AxNFx88o Songs: Bass Culture, Linton Kwesi Johnson; Maurice Bishop Revolution, President Lily Films: Grenada, the Future Coming Towards Us

--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/unequalexchange/support