A study names Price-Mars as the father of Haitian negritude

In July 1956 Henock Trouillot published a long study of the political and social thought of Jean Price-Mars. His conclusion was that Price-Mars stood at the head of both the indigenist movement and Haitian negritude, and that the two ran out of one book. Ainsi parla l'oncle appeared in 1928, during the American occupation, and told the Haitian educated class that it had spent a century performing a French identity while treating the beliefs, the language and the religion of its own majority as an embarrassment. Price-Mars was eighty when the study appeared, and Magloire had presided over a national tribute to him the previous September. The timing was not neutral. By 1956 every faction in Haitian politics claimed descent from the indigenist argument, so settling who had founded it settled who its heirs were. Within eighteen months one of the doctor's admirers, Francois Duvalier, held the presidency.

Twenty nine Asian and African countries took part in the Bandung Conference of 1955. The word decolonisation acquired its modern meaning there, as a third option alongside capitalism and communism, at a moment when the Cold War was pressing every new state to choose one of the two. The first meeting of the Non-Aligned Countries followed in 1961. Non-alignment was itself a statement that the choice on offer was not the only one available. Bandung allowed Islamic and Indian arguments to be linked with the struggles in Africa and Asia, and it gave a vocabulary to people who wanted independence without simply changing patrons. In the early nineteenth century the words used for the same ends had been independence and revolution, as in the American and Haitian revolutions and the Mexican and Argentine independences. Haiti had made the case a hundred and fifty years before there was a conference at which to make it.

Edmundo O'Gorman, a Mexican historian and philosopher of Irish descent, published La invencion de America in 1957. His argument was that America could not have been discovered, because no such thing existed before Europeans made one. The landmass was there. The entity called America was a European product, assembled out of expectation, cartography and law after 1492. O'Gorman was refusing the rules of evidence that European historical writing took for granted, and he said as much, proposing that historians work from other premises. Both accounts of 1492 can be internally consistent, which is the point of the exercise. What separates them is where the person speaking stands and what he assumes before he starts. For the Caribbean the argument bites directly, since the islands were the first ground on which the invention was carried out, and the first place where people already living somewhere were written into another continent's category.

In 1958 race riots broke out in Notting Hill in London and in Nottingham. They marked the first open appearance of a racism made in Britain rather than carried home from the empire. Notting Hill was one of those transitional urban districts where Caribbean settlement had begun to take root in the middle of a British city, and three things met there. An organised fascist element became active for the first time since the 1940s, in the shape of the Unionist movement and the League of Empire Loyalists, and it carried the vocabulary of race into street corner politics. Local conditions were deteriorating as the room the postwar boom had allowed began to close. And the national press declined to read the events as being about race or about poverty at all. The Times ran an editorial headed Hooliganism is Hooliganism, filing the riots with teenage violence, football crowds and railway carriage vandalism as conduct an adult society could do without.