Caribbean Reasonings: Freedom, Power and Sovereignty - The Thought of Gordon K. Lewis

For seven consecutive years, the Centre for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies, Mona hosted a series of 'Caribbean Reasonings' - conferences honouring outstanding Caribbean intellectuals. The C.K. Lewis conference was the final in the series; and though Lewis was neither a Caribbean man by birth nor heritage, he was so by choice and was without a doubt, a leading voice in Caribbean political science. From his arrival in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, until his death in the early 1990s, Lewis, through his numerous publications, established himself as a Caribbean thinker. In this volume, the contributors pay homage to Lewis's remarkable work embodied in his four most influential publications on the Caribbean - Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean, The Growth of the Modern West Indies, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought and Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled. The breath of Lewis's scholarship is revealed in the ten chapters covering his work on the Caribbean. From concepts of sovereignty and regional integration, to the nature of democracy in the contemporary Caribbean, the influence of Mrican thought and the Mrican Diaspora on the development of a Caribbean intellectual tradition, the influence of theology and the pursuit of a democratic socialism for the Caribbean, C.K. Lewis's work is analysed, admired and critiqued by the contributors.