The Gentle Revolutionary Passes: Jan Rynveld Carew (24 September 1920 – 6 December 2012)

Jan passed away at home with family in Louisville, Kentucky on December 6, 2012 at the age of 92. 

Our condolences to his family, and our thanks to him for his many gifts to all in this life.

Here are links to some of the memorials and tributes:

Renowned Guyanese novelist, Jan Carew, dead at 92
“The ministry therefore offers condolences to the Carew family and all his international colleagues in the literary and academic world.  “The Guyanese Wanderer” (2007) must be continuing his life’s work at a higher level.” 

- Guyanese Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport  

Full article:  "Renowned Guyanese novelist, Jan Carew, dead at 92" 

kaieteurnewsonline.com 

Jan R. Carew Obituary
"In the course of one revolving moon/ he was soldier, servant, statesman, and Maroon" (Pace, Dryden). 
CAREW, JAN R., of Agricola village, Guyana, passed away on December 6, 2012 leaving wife, Joy Gleason Carew, daughters, Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, Shantoba Eliza Carew; and son, David Christopher Carew; grandchildren Iseult Teran, Alexander Macbeth, and Benicio Carew; and great-grandson, Felix Radford. He also leaves his sister, Sheila Thorpe; nephews, E. Nigel Harris, Michael Harris; and nieces, Alexis Selman and Denise Harris. 

Full Obituary:  Louisville Courier-Journal

Guyanese literary icon Jan Carew dies

"He had a unique perspective on what it is to have a mission in life because every decade he seemed to have a new career but the goal is always the same to have done something in life."  - Shantoba Carew

Full Article: Demarawaves

Renown Guyanese author Jan Carew dies

JAN Carew, the internationally known Guyanese author of novels like Black Midas and Ghosts in Our Blood, passed away at his home in Louisville, Kentucky, USA on Thursday. He was 92. 

Full Obituary:  Guyana Chronicle Online

Remembering Jan Carew (September 1920 to December 2012)

Jan Carew. Retired Professor, novelist, poet, writer of essays, researcher of human diversity, race, history and other human issues was born in little Agricola, a post-emancipation village on the East Bank of Demerara, Guyana in a British colony.  His passing has already attracted poems, minutes of silence and other tributes. Early, one came from Marc Matthews. There will be a flood of them.

Full Article: Eusi Kwayana, Stabroek News

Jan Carew obituary

Caribbean novelist, playwright and scholar committed to the cultural unity of the black world.

Full Obituary: The Guardian

Jan Carew, 92, first chair of African-American studies at NU

Jan Carew, the first person to chair the department of African-American studies at Northwestern University, was an esteemed writer in his homeland of Guyana, tackling issues of colonialism, class divisions and racism. He also knew Malcolm X, and performed in an acting company with a man considered one of the greatest thespians of all time: Sir Laurence Olivier.

Full Obituary: Chicago Sun-Times

Jan Carew, Activist, Author, Scholar, Teacher, Passes at 92

At the close of his remarkable essay “Columbus and the Origins of Racism in the Americas,” Jan Carew wrote, “In this hemisphere we cannot just claim that by mingling our blood with that of the destroyer of the Indian, the enslaver of the African and the exploiter of peoples of a rainbow array of races, colors, creeds, we do not have to acknowledge the roots of our existence in the human world.

“For us, the sons and daughters of the New World diaspora, our ancestors are those who struggled most valiantly, paid the highest price in blood and suffering and who generation after generation pick up the fallen standards, from those who fought for freedom before them,” he added.

This was Carew at his most elegant and uncompromising stance, an unflinching freedom fighter who asked no quarters and gave none. 

Full Obituary: The Network Journal  

OBITUARY: JAN CAREW

African American studies scholar described as the “quintessential

Renaissance Man”

Professor of African American Studies from 1973 to 1987, Carew was

described as the “quintessential Renaissance Man – an author, historian,

internationalist, public intellectual, social justice activist and

pioneer in experimenting with sustainable lifestyles for people of color.”

Full Obituary: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NEWS

Netizens “Bow Farewell” to Guyanese Writer Jan Carew

Full Article/Montage: Global Voices

Race & Class
We are sad to announce the death of Jan Carew on 5 December, (a member of the R&C editorial committee and frequent contributor to the journal). The issue of R&C in his honour is available at the link below,

The gentle revolutionary: essays in honour of Jan Carew | Institute of Race Relations

Travel in peace, Baba Jan, on your journey to the village of the ancestors …

Ourstorian

Wha'ppen?
As many followers of Caribbean writing will already know, the region has lost one of its grand old men, the novelist, poet, dramatist, painter, intellectual and political activist, Jan Carew, who died on the 5th of December at the age of 92....

Full Article: PeePal Tree Press

Carew was a man with an encylopaedic knowledge who knew how to enjoy life
On introducing me to his friends after our first meeting Jan Carew never spoke as though we had first met only that afternoon. Listening to him you would surely believe that we had been lifelong friends. It remained that way even when he introduced me to his wife, Joy.

Full Story: Stabroek News

Black Midas in Moscow - Conversations with Jan Carew

Black Midas in Moscow

Conversations with Jan Carew

Joy Gleason Carew

Guyanese author Jan Carew is best known for his 1958 novel Black Midas. In 1964, Carew also published one of his most controversial books, Moscow Is Not My Mecca (US edition, Green Winter [1965]). And, as he learned much later, an unauthorized version of his book was circulated around the African continent as an “English language reader.” Carew’s novel was based on the stories of his cousin and other students from the Caribbean and Africa who had accepted scholarships to study in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Carew also drew on his own experiences as one of the first students from the English-speaking Caribbean to receive a scholarship to the Eastern Bloc countries when he went to Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s; and later, when he made two visits to the Soviet Union in the 1960s as a guest of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Following the publication of Moscow Is Not My Mecca, Carew was challenged by the Left and lauded by the Right, as each side tried to interpret his work from their often dogmatic and simplistic formulations. Carew, on the other hand, was exploring a complex set of relationships, which did not and still do not lend themselves to simple either/or divisions. Recognizing the potential of the Soviet experiment to provide much-needed support for the newly developing societies, Carew also felt he had a right to critique problems as he saw them and to call for reform.

Jan Carew is now ninety-one and in the process of writing his memoirs. This interview, conducted in Louisville, Kentucky, in July 2011, recounts aspects of his experiences as a student in Prague and, later, as a visitor to the Soviet Union, and his rising concern about the treatment of black students there...[More]

To read the complete interview, go to SX Salon

For commentary on this interview and the Carews see Ourstorian

Democracy Now Interview With Jan Carew on History of US Intervention in Ghana

History of U.S. Intervention in Ghana’s Domestic Affairs

download:   Audio Get CD/DVD More Formats

Ghana used to be on the lips of people worldwide for a much different reason. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ghana was one of the leaders of the worldwide anti-colonial movement. In 1957, it was the first sub-Saharan African country to win independence. Their first president — Kwame Nkrumah — became a leader of international stature, advocating African economic and political unity and non-alignment internationally. Those policies earned him the wrath of Washington and Nkrumah was ousted in a CIA coup in 1966.

Guests:

• Jan Carew, Emeritus Professor of African American and Third World Studies at Northwestern University. He lived and worked in Ghana before the 1966 overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah. He edited the monthly publication African Review and wrote an analysis of the coup called RA Season of Violent Change. He is the author of ??Ghosts in Our Blood: Conversations with Malcolm X in England, Africa and the Caribbean published by Lawrence Hill Books.

Click here to listen to the Democracy Now interview with Jan Carew

Click here for original story on Democracy Now

Jan Carew : Guide to the Paywrights works

Jan Carew: Guide to the Playwrights Works

You Tube Videos of Jan Carew

The Columbian Era - Jan Carew and Edward Scobie (1)

(First of 12 videos from this panel) 

For Partial List of Videos of Jan Carew on You Tube, Click Here 

Tribute to Jan Carew, May 11, 2010, London

A Tribute to Jan Carew
From: http://www.irr.org.uk/2010/may/ha000012.html

EVENT

A tribute evening for Jan Carew

11 May 2010

A tribute evening for Jan Carew, Race & Class, Editorial Committee member.

• Tuesday 11 May 2010, 6-8.30pm
• The Tabernacle, Powis Square, London W11 2AY

Speakers include:

• Colin Prescod - Chair Institute of Race Relations
• Dr Kimani Nehusi - activist, academic and author
• Arif Ali - Hansib Publications
• Doris Harper-Wills - storyteller and poet
• Dr Godfrey Brandt - educator and poet
• Juliet Alexander - compère
• Makeda Coaston - facilitator

Please RSVP to: info@hansib-books.com or call 020 8523 0888.

Events listing is provided for information only. Inclusion in this listing should not be taken to imply that the Institute of Race Relations supports an event or is involved in organising it.

 

Tribute to Jan Carew

Posted on May 10, 2010 by operationblackvote 

http://operationblackvote.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/tribute-to-jan-carew/

A tribute event is to be held tomorrow in honour of the Caribbean intellectual Jan Carew.
Best known for his seminal novel Black Midas, Carew was also a founding father of Britain’s Black Power Movement, publishing and editing the paper Magnet.
Born 24 September 1920 in Guyana, Carew is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. His poetry and first two novels, Black Midas and The Wild Coast, were significant landmarks of the West Indian literature then attempting through writing to cope with its colonial past and assert its wish for autonomy. Carew also played an important part within the Black movement gaining strength in England and North America, publishing reviews and newspapers, producing programs and plays for the radio and the television.

A. Sivanandan of the Institute of Race Relations, said of Carew: “Jan heralded and helped to shape the cultural revolution against colonialism and racism in poetry, painting, polemic and play. A wandering minstrel uprooted and cast abroad by the imperial imperative, he rooted himself wherever he was in the struggles of the people around him. And he was in many places, wearing many faces, but always in the same cause: freedom for the oppressed and downtrodden – teaching, writing, broadcasting, engaging with mighty men and women such as Malcolm X and Claudia Jones, Cheddi Jagan and Kwame Nkrumah, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes.”

Reception and Tribute evening for Jan Carew
Tuesday 11 May 2010, 6-8.30pm
The Tabernacle, Powis Square, London W11 2AY

The gentle revolutionary: Jan Carew at 90

By Stabroek staff   Monday, September 27, 2012

By David Austin

David Austin lives in Montreal and is the editor of the recently published book: ‘You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James.’ He recently spoke at an event celebrating Jan Carew’s 90th birthday sponsored by the Department of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. He shared the platform with Eusi Kwayana.


Jan Carew, who celebrated his 90th birthday on September 24,  has lived an extraordinary and itinerant life, or many overlapping lives, and seemingly many lifetimes. He begins in Guyana, but in many ways his life defies space and time. He is the quintessential diasporic persona, a happy wanderer whose presence helped to shape seminal moments in the lives of people of African and Caribbean descent.

Jan reported for the London Observer on the Cuban Missile Crisis from Havana; joined the Laurence Olivier Company in the 1950s and acted in several plays while simultaneously working for the BBC. He also studied dentistry at Charles University in Czechoslovakia and travelled to and wrote about Russia and people of African descent.

Jan worked alongside Claudia Jones and other notable Black and Caribbean figures as they attempted to humanize Britain, to liberate the decaying empire from itself and its legacy of colonialism and racism in the 1950s. He wrote several books of fiction, including Moscow is Not My Mecca, Black Midas, The Wild Coast and The Last Barbarian and several generations of West Indians were weaned on his children’s stories. He served as director of culture in Guyana in 1962 and an advisor to the Publicity Secretariat and editor of African Review in Ghana (1965-1966) and was detained when President Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup.

During his sojourn in Canada (1966-1969), Jan became the centre of a burgeoning literary scene, writing and mounting plays, including Behind God’s Back which, adapted from a short story by Austin Clarke, aired on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television in 1969. He started Cotopaxi, a literary journal that included poets and future University of the West Indies professor Cliff Lashley, Canadian poet Milton Acorn, and Jamaican Rudolph Murray, future editor of Black Images, arguably Canada’s first national Black arts and culture magazine. Still in Canada, he was active, and a voice of reason within, the Black Power movement, and later joined forces with Indigenous peoples in Canada’s Red Power movement.

Since 1969, Jan has lived and taught in the US where he was part of the burgeoning Black Studies movement in American universities, educating two generations of students at Northwestern, Rutgers, Princeton, Lincoln, and Louisville... [ More ]

Click here to read the rest of this article

Jan Carew and Runoko Rashidi
Photo from abibitumikasa

Symposium will examine Pan-African scholar’s legacy

by Hess,Cynthia E — last modified Jun 16, 2010 12:15 PM

Jan. 21, 2010

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The work of Pan-African historian Ivan Van Sertima, known for his claim that Africans visited the New World centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived, will be the focus of a Jan. 28 University of Louisville symposium.

“The Life and Legacy of Ivan Van Sertima” will run from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in Ekstrom Library’s Chao Auditorium. UofL’s Pan-African studies department sponsors the free, public event as the 2010 Jan Carew Colloquium.

Carew, a Pan-African scholar and Louisville resident who was a mentor for Van Sertima, also plans to attend the event. Copies of Van Sertima’s writings will be available, and there will be a screening of a video clip about the late scholar.

Speakers will include Jacqueline Van Sertima, Journal of African Civilizations president and Van Sertima’s widow; Runoko Rashidi, “The African Presence in Early Asia” co-editor; and Jose Pimienta-Bey, Berea College’s African and African American studies director and author of “Othello’s Children in the New World: Moorish History and Identity in the African American Experience.”

Van Sertima died last year after a career as a linguist, historian, anthropologist and Rutgers University professor of African studies. He edited the Journal of African Civilizations and founded the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations. Van Sertima may be best known for his 1976 book “They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America,” which challenged the view that the explorer discovered America.

His other publications included “Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern,” “Black Women in Antiquity,” “The African Presence in Early America,” “The African Presence in Early Europe” and “Egypt Revisited.”

For more information, call 502-852-5985 or contact W.S. Tkweme, assistant professor, at ws.tkweme@louisville.edu

###

Click here to read press release

Date-With-A-Book Book Club Chooses "Black Midas" for May 2010

Date with a Book, the book club that focuses on the work of writers from the Caribbean and the Caribbean Diaspora, has chosen Jan Carew's "Black Midas" as their selctoin for May, 23, 2010. 

For more information:  Date-With-A-Book

Forum, February 13, 2009: Exile and Cultural Inheritance in the Short Fiction of Jan Carew

February 13, 2009                                                                                                                                               

David Anderson, Department of English

"Exile and Cultural Inheritance in the Short Fiction of Jan Carew"

Jan Carew is one of the leading Caribbean intellectuals of the last half-century. Novelist, playwright, actor, film maker, government official, historian, and professor, Carew has spent his career examining Caribbean history and its rich varieties of culture, and searching for literary strategies to represent that richness. Professor Anderson’s talk will discuss Carew’s latest collection of short fiction, The Guyanese Wanderer, focusing on the many meanings of exile (historical, physical, and cultural) in Carew’s fiction, but also the themes of return and cultural reclamation that are central to this collection. 

The University of Louisville Faculty Research Forum is a forum for talks by our faculty and the occasional guest on humanities and social science topics of interest to interdisciplinary audiences.  These forums are sponsored by the Commonwealth Center with assistance from the College of Arts and Sciences.

      This year the Forum will be a joint project of CCHS and the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research,  highlighting a range of justice-themed research on various social and historical issues.Faculty Research Forums are held in the Bingham Humanities Building, Room 300 and begin at 3:30 p.m. unless otherwise noted.

U of L professor chronicles experiences of African Americans who immigrated to Russia

U of L professor chronicles experiences of African Americans who immigrated to Russia
Writer:Larry Muhammad
2/8/2009 Louisville Courier-Journal

Post-Soviet Russia today is often thought of as a corrupt oligarchy that dominates neighboring republics through economic and military means.

But in the early 20th century, some considered Russia an egalitarian paradise, its Bolshevik Revolution a beacon of hope for the world's downtrodden -- including some African-Americans.

Hundreds of black professionals frustrated by racism in the United States -- farmers, engineers, teachers, artists and intellectuals -- rushed to this new land of socialist opportunity between the 1920s and 1940s, seeking the respect and freedom denied them in the land of their birth.

They're the subject of "Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise" (Rutgers University Press, 2008), a new book by Joy Carew, an associate professor of pan-African studies at the University of Louisville.

Click here to read full article

"Black Students in Red Russia" BBC Interview

BBC RADIO 4 Wednesday 14 January 2009

Black Students In Red Russia Wednesday 14 January 11.00-11.30am BBC RADIO 4

"In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, Soviet-funded scholarships were offered to large numbers of students from developing countries to enable them to study in the Soviet Union. Presenter Burt Caesar tells the story of these students and finds out what happened to them...

"...Guyanese writer Jan Carew drew closely on the personal stories of students who travelled east for his 1964 novel, Moscow Is Not My Mecca. He shared a house with many of these students in London, a transit point on their journey. The programme includes an interview with Jan Carew, now in his late eighties..."

..  read more at the BBC Press Office 

Back Pedaling Into Mayflower Time': Malcolm X, C.L.R. James and the Black Radical Tragic

The Hunter College Department of English & Graduate English Club Presents:

"Back Pedaling Into Mayflower Time': Malcolm X, C.L.R. James and the Black Radical Tragic"

a presentation by

Jeremy Glick,
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Hunter College

November 24th, 2008, 7:30PM
11106 Hunter North

Professor Glick couples together some observations on Malcolm X's use of memorable lines from William Shakespeare during his 1964 Oxford Union debate presentation with an introduction to how he is reading C.L.R. James's use of the tragic in his historical writings on the Haitian Revolution. His commentary begins with an extended engagement with Guyanese novelist, critic, and political activist Jan Carew's reflections of his time with Malcolm recorded in Carew's 1994 memoir: Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean. Both Malcolm and James frame the tragic as a term that mines the importance of both the contingent and the strategic in challenging both liberalism and right-wing dominance.

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/~english/events/Jeremy%20Glick.html

This talk is free and open to the public.

Chats With Mentors: Thursday, March 27, 2008

4:00pm to 6:00pm March 27, 2008 Chat with Mentors: Pan-African Studies Celebration  (Talks) Jan Carew and Tchaiko Ruramai Kwayana, veteran educators in black studies, will discuss the challenges and successes of black studies programs in higher education. This is the first in a series of talks to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the master's degree in Pan-African studies March 27-29. Location: Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville Price: free Sponsor: Department of Pan-African Studies Contact:  tatall01@louisville.edu  502-852-4192 or 502-852-5985

An evening with Jan Carew:

A celebration of writing and reading

Thursday, December 6, 2007
5 - 7 P.M.

Blue Mountain Coffeehouse
400 E. Main, Louisville, KY, USA - corner of Main and Preston ( Map )
(502) 582-3220

Announcing: The Guyanese Wanderer
Inaugural edition, the Linda Bruckheimer Series in KY Literature of Sarabande Books

Jan Carew sets a fabulist eye and elegant hand to both old world and new. Combining Caribbean folklore, ghost story, adventure tale, and the literature of European exile, these narratives contain a spirited dialect and colloquial voice that startles and delights. The journey begins in Carew's homeland, among the gaudy parrots, jaguars, and six o'clock bees of Guyana, and then shifts to the boulevards of London and Paris. Carew's characters--hunters and seers, buffoons and book-people--defy convention, especially the strong-willed women.

Betina puts her husband in his place with a prospecting knife. Belfon comes of age with the help, and seduction, of Couvade, a preacher-woman. A tagalong hunter named Tonic gets in over his head in a stampede of hogs. And in London, a black man called Caesar, prefers a landlord who puts his racism up front.

Carew has lived a long life, in countries all over the world. He's comfortable taking on just about anything, whether racial prejudice or whimsical fable, the fierce natural world or city slum. These are the brilliant songs of a learned man.

-----------------

This event qualifies for Continuing Education Credit  in Literature and the Spoken Word through the Program in Community Communications of the Adena Center at Webster University.  For more information or to register for CEU credit, please email communitybiz@yahoo.com.

"The Guyanese Wanderer" Published by Sarabande Books

The Guyanese Wanderer
by Jan Carew

ISBN: 978-1-932511-50-5 (paper)
Price: $15.95 (paper)
Publication date: 07/2007

Sarabande Books is publishing "The Guyanese Wnderer" as the Inaugural edition of the Linda Bruckheimer Series in KY Literature.

From the Publisher:

In The Guyanese Wanderer, Jan Carew sets a fabulist eye and elegant hand to both old world and new. Combining Caribbean folklore, ghost story, adventure tale, and the literature of European exile, these narratives contain a spirited dialect and colloquial voice that startles and delights. The journey begins in Carew's homeland, among the gaudy parrots, jaguars, and six o'clock bees of Guyana, and then shifts to the boulevards of London and Paris. Carew's characters—hunters and seers, buffoons and book-people—defy convention, especially the strong-willed women.

Read More...

Publishers Weekly Review of The Guyanese Wanderer

Publishers Weekly
May 28, 2007


The Guyanese Wanderer:
Stories by Jan Carew
Sarabande, TP ISBN 9781932511505,
$14.95, Fiction


Excerpt:

The exploitation of Guyana's wry peasantry centers Guyana-born, Louisville-based Carew's lushly descriptive collection. In these 10 sharply observed tales, Carew makes a Guyanese sensibility-its wanderings home and away-palpable.


Complete Review:

The exploitation of Guyana's wry peasantry centers Guyana-born, Louisville-based Carew's lushly descriptive collection. "Chantal" proves a cautionary story of how far a husband can push his wife-and vice versa-before triggering a violent backlash. Two of the tales involve the passage to manhood of young Belfon, whose hard-luck mother gives him away in "The Visit" when she gets pregnant by a man other than Belfon's father. Brought up by his wealthy godfather, Atlassa, Belfon is the first student from his village of Biaro to win a place at the university, and in "The Initiation of Belfon," he heads to Trinidad by boat. He stops at the home of an old family friend and sensuous preacher-woman, Couvade, who teaches him more about the world than his godfather could. The last three stories pursue a West Indian man in exile, Cesar, who emigrated to Britain during WWII and remains in London as part of a "colonial old-timer" community, suffering enduring discrimination and eager to return home. In these 10 sharply observed tales, Carew makes a Guyanese sensibility-its wanderings home and away-palpable. (July)
--

LEO Weekly Review of the Guyanese Wanderer

... “The Guyanese Wanderer” was recently issued by Sarabande Books as the inaugural edition of the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature.    The 10 stories include recurring characters who are presented in a dazzling array of perspectives. There is a general flow to the settings — which start at the meeting point of South America and the Caribbean, and end in the capitals of post-World War II Europe — that mirrors Carew’s travels up to the 1960s. The personal adventures are described with details that are finely drawn with an eye for sensuous detail and an ear for contemporary language....

Click here to read the complete LEO Weekly Review of the Guyanese Wanderer

King tribute seminar to examine social movements

Nexuses of Change
Jan. 18, 4-6 p.m.
Seminar Room, Belknap Research Building
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY, USA
Admission is free and open to the public


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today’s peace movement, past civil rights struggles, anti-Vietnam War protests and a push for black power — all those efforts will be discussed at “Nexuses of Change: Explorations into Seminal Social Movements of the 20th Century,” an event to honor the work of Martin Luther King Jr.

Here are the topics and speakers:

“World War II, the Fight Against Fascism and the Anticolonial Movement: Lessons for the Peace Movement Today,” Horace Campbell, Syracuse University
“Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War Movements,” Richard Sobel, Northwestern University
“The Black Power Movement and the Prying Open of Elitist Universities,” Jan Carew, Northwestern University professor emeritus

U of L professor chronicles experiences of African Americans who immigrated to Russia (Full Article)

U of L professor chronicles experiences of African Americans who immigrated to Russia
Writer:Larry Muhammad
2/8/2009 Louisville Courier-Journal

Post-Soviet Russia today is often thought of as a corrupt oligarchy that dominates neighboring republics through economic and military means.

But in the early 20th century, some considered Russia an egalitarian paradise, its Bolshevik Revolution a beacon of hope for the world's downtrodden -- including some African-Americans.

Hundreds of black professionals frustrated by racism in the United States -- farmers, engineers, teachers, artists and intellectuals -- rushed to this new land of socialist opportunity between the 1920s and 1940s, seeking the respect and freedom denied them in the land of their birth.

They're the subject of "Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise" (Rutgers University Press, 2008), a new book by Joy Carew, an associate professor of pan-African studies at the University of Louisville.

Carew, a teacher of the Russian language who has led several tours to the country, said that Vladimir Lenin, the victorious revolutionary intent on transforming the society after centuries of Czarist rule, was suspicious of old-guard bourgeois specialists and sought help elsewhere.

"The model under Lenin of the Soviet experiment was very hopeful," Carew said in an interview. "People wanted to believe they were participating in constructing something new, and (had) no reason to believe this wasn't the case."

American blacks with technical and professional skills -- and sympathies for the Soviet experiment -- were actively recruited to emigrate, Carew said.

And as she notes in her book: "The black specialists could serve as bridges between the country's non-Russian people of color and the plans of a modernizing Soviet state. Ultimately, the majority of the black sojourners of the 1920s and 1930s returned to the United States shortly after their study or contract periods. … But a smaller group decided to remain, as the prospects of life under the Soviet experiment seemed far brighter than the certainty of returning to the Great Depression and a life under the crippling 'Jim Crow' in the United States."

Some well-known black leaders were involved, including scientist George Washington Carver, who helped organize an early team of agricultural experts; writer Langston Hughes, who traveled extensively in the country by train and wrote lengthy reports on life there; W.E.B. DuBois, America's leading black intellectual at the time; and Paul Robeson, the world-renowned actor, concert performer and political activist.

But as the Soviet Union and the United States became geopolitical adversaries in the 1950s, any such association with a communist government or political party invited career-ending public ostracism, if not imprisonment for treason.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed many blacks to testify, including the defiant Robeson, whose passport was revoked.

And although DuBois is known for his groundbreaking study, "The Souls of Black Folk," he's also often criticized for sugarcoating the Soviet despotism that presaged the bloody reign of Joseph Stalin.

"When you get to the 1950s, they believed that under Nikita Khrushchev there was an opportunity to return to that earlier society, that egalitarian time that appreciated the talents of everyone," Carew said.

"There was a kind of pragmatism; you had the Stalinist years, but at the same time you had no perfect models out there. Certainly with Jim Crow and lynching going in America and the colonial behavior of the European nations, you had no saints out there. Soviet support of the anti-colonial movement, that was a big part of it. This made the alliance with the Soviets more important."

Many African-American professionals of the era settled permanently in Russia, marrying Russian citizens, raising families and assimilating into Russian society.

"Blacks, Reds, and Russians" is grounded in primary source material and interviews with descendants, but tells this compelling race-relations saga as well from Carew's first-hand experience.

She began studying Russian language and culture while attending The Putney School in southern Vermont in 1960, received her bachelor's and master's degrees in the language from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and first visited the Soviet Union as a college student in 1967.

In 1979, she returned with her husband, Jan Carew, the noted author and leading Caribbean intellectual who in the 1950s had studied in Czechoslovakia. He was invited to Russia by the Soviet Writers' Union and his first novel, "Black Midas," was translated into Russian.

Her parents, Maurice and Eliza Gleason, had visited Russia in 1957 and had left a detailed log of stories.

She wrote, "A special feature was that their group would be among the first to visit the Soviet Union in the Nikita Khrushchev era. My father knew Paul Robeson through the fraternity they shared and was well aware of his struggles with the U.S. government over his support of the Soviet Union. He was curious to test Robeson's contention that Soviet relations with blacks were quite different from those between whites and blacks in the United States."

She recounted the later growth of expatriate disappointment with special treatment while average Russian citizens suffered, the constant surveillance by secret police, and suspicions during the Cold War that they were American spies.

But she called hate crimes based on race that occurred in Russia an anomaly caused by the collapse of the Soviet system, and called her personal journey a fascinating adventure.

"I took Russian in school because I wanted to be different," she said. "Then I heard the stories my parents told.

"Taking something on a whim -- that's led to my life's path. It's been an elaborate series of experiences that I've never regretted."

LIFE WORKS OF JAN CAREW ON EXHIBIT AT U OF L

November 7, 2005

Janene Zaccone (502) 852-6171 janene.zaccone@louisville.edu

LIFE WORKS OF JAN CAREW ON EXHIBIT AT U OF L

LOUISVILLE, Ky. � An exhibit of the artwork of Jan Carew will be on display through Dec. 7 in the Rare Books Gallery of Ekstrom Library on the University of Louisville’s Belknap Campus.

Titled “Message from Manaharva: Save Our Rainforest,” the exhibit includes paintings, books, articles, photos and artifacts that reflect Carew’s lifelong relationship with the Amazon rainforest and the inhabitants of his native Guyana.

Carew is author of “Black Midas” and other novels, essays, histories, poems, plays and children’s books. He entered academia after living for years in Britain as a writer and was a founder of the field of Pan-African studies. Recognized for his expertise in Third World studies, Caribbean literature and race relations, he has taught at many universities, including London, George Mason, Princeton and Northwestern, from which he retired in 1987. In 2000 he was a scholar in residence in U of L’s Pan-African studies department through the university’s Liberal Studies Project.

His career, however, has been more varied. Carew was an actor with Laurence Olivier’s theater company; is an activist for environmental, feminist and political issues; and has served as an adviser to heads of state of African and Caribbean nations.

There will be a reception with Carew and a program Nov. 29 outside the Rare Books Gallery in Ekstrom Library. The reception will begin at 5 p.m., with the program starting at 5:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public, as is the exhibit. The Rare Books Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.

For more information, call Amy Purcell at 502-852-1861.

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Click here for the original UofL news release.

Jan Carew: Mission Within the Mission

Jan Carew 

Mission Within the Mission

By Eusi Kwayana
From NathanielTurner.com

The first  2002 edition of Race and Class, a "London Journal of Black and Third World Liberation" (Volume 43 Number 3) saw fit to devote itself wholly to the celebration of the activity and the being of Jan Carew, whose 80th. birthday, 24th. September 2000 is still being observed. He is so well known in so many countries of the world that some were late for the party.

Both the man himself and the special publication of Race and Class deserve all the attention possible. That is the aim of this article. After a review of Race and Class (Volume 43 Number 3), the article will leave aside its material, which readers may obtain from any worthwhile bookstore, and offer a unique perspective of this remarkable individual.

Click here to read the full article