Cynthia Hamilton

Chair Director: African and African American Studies

University of Rhode Island
E-Mail: cha6734u@uri.edu

430 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MARCH 1992

short of this task because of the assumptions and hypotheses that underscore research. These include assumptions about man and human motivation, as well as established definitions of culture and institutional structures. Because social scientists have traditionally been concerned with stability and continuity, they have missed  intentionally or unintentionally -the adaptive quality and resilience of the masses that manifest themselves in varying environments. Because social scientists have focused on elites and their organized efforts of social transformation, they have failed to see the nameless multitudes whose creativity and imagination have been the source of all human history.

Because of the shortcomings of traditional social science analysis, James begins his most famous work, Black Jacobins, the

History of the Haitian Revolution, by distinguishing his work from existing historical analysis:

The propagandists of the time claimed that however cruel was the slave traffic, the African slave in America was happier than in his own African civilization. Ours too is an age of propaganda. Men will say anything in order to foster national pride or soothe a troubled conscience. (James, 1938/1963, pp. 6-7, 13)

In an effort to understand and analyze the contributions of societies and people ignored by the social science of the day, James, of necessity, rejected the starting point of the established disciplines. He did so by affirming first that the masses are the creators of their own history; the mass party and the "barefoot men," the peasants, workers, and unemployed must be exalted, elevated to a primary position as a force in history. As one writer has said with regard to James's work:

[He] established for the first time the historical importance of the self-activity of the oppressed colonial peoples. The wretched of the earth, to use Fanon's term, were no more passive objects of administrative control. They were men who resisted and in their resistance, proved as creative if not more so, as any other set of men. (Hill, 1972, p. 15)