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This paper explores the impacts of Presbyterianism on Indo-Trinidadian communities in Trinidad. Through interviews with notable figures in the Church’s history, surveys within Presbyterian congregations, and in-depth research into Presbyterianism’s history in Trinidad, an analysis was conducted on how this history has shaped the Church from the twentieth to twenty-first century. General observations were also made in Presbyterian Church settings. The findings suggest that many contemporary Presbyterian practices mirror those of colonial times, albeit in a neocolonial context. Historical evidence supports the hypothesis that ideologies of Eurocentrism and elitism existed within the Presbyterian Church in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Trinidad, and aspects of these ideologies persist today. Additionally, both youth and adults within the Church express a need to address prevalent societal issues such as homosexuality, traditionally a taboo topic. Consequently, this research paper examines the concepts of “mission” and “submission”, aiming to understand the Church’s past reality, present state, and future implications within the Trinidadian Presbyterian context.

This paper examines how Achille Mbembe draws upon, then iterates from, the work of Aimé Césaire to provide a rich analysis of personhood in contemporary Africa. Typically, African treatments of Mbembe’s theorization place considerable emphasis on the intellectual influence of Frantz Fanon, rightly so. And while Fanon does have a central role in Mbembe’s writing, arguably it is Césaire who prompts Mbembe to conceptually insist upon the historical malleability of racial classification, racial civic ascription, and racial subjective comprehension as these social forms are reshaped by historical development. In tracing the development of these aspects of Mbembe’s social and political thought, this paper discusses the bisections and points of departures with Césaire’s poetry and philosophy as it pertains to the notion of Blackness. Effectively the dialectical encounter with Césaire and the Caribbean situation helps give rise to Mbembe’s main conclusion that there is a severe limitation to Black Reasoning, especially when its discursive referents give preference to a sublime singularity over the mutable.

Hegemonic ideologies both frame and limit the prevailing conception of the Trinidadian present. We can see this acutely at play with the struggles surrounding identity construction of Trinidadian women in the twenty-first century. In understanding the experience of women in Trinidadian society, health can be understood as an indicator of the class-status matrix, particularly when considering the non-communicable disease epidemic in the Caribbean. By directing our attention to both the body and the conditions under which the body exists, we can examine a history of exploitation and varied responses to exploitation. Drawing upon intersectionality, feminist, materialist and decolonizing frameworks, this research paper points at locations of ongoing gendered class formations, highlighting the dialectical relationship between identity categories that influence the mode of self-understanding of women in Trinidad and Tobago, their health outcomes, and well-being. Historical and cultural factors become important in understanding the value systems created for women and reproduced by society pertaining to wellness and health behaviors.

This paper summarizes a critique of C.L.R James’ work which the author is in the process of developing. If it can provoke a response in the direction of greater clarification of James’ writings as a whole and what significance they deserve in Caribbean Social Thought, then it would have come close to achieving one of its objectives.