(1953- ) nonfiction writer,poet, fiction writer
Born in Montreal, Canada, to a Trinidadian mother and Jamaican father, Meeks grew up in Jamaica. There he attended Jamaica College before doing undergraduate work at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, during the politically turbulent early 1970s. After earning a doctorate from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Meeks acted as a media and political education consultant for the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada. He also edited The Free West Indian during the early 1980s. Musicians Bob Marley, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis significantly influenced Meeks’s work. In the acknowledgments to Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bakr (1996), Meeks thanked Gordon Rohlehr and Kamau brathwaite for teaching him “the importance of rigorous study and appreciation of popular culture as both central cause and effect of the political process.”
Themes of human agency, revolution, and radical Caribbean activism reappear in Meeks’s intellectual works. Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory: an Assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada (1993) traces revolutionary concepts from the French Revolution to reconsider revolutionary meaning. In Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bakr, Meeks maps two decades of radical movements in the Caribbean to examine why revolutions occur. An International Affairs reviewer wrote, “In the case of Grenada [Meeks's] account of the tragic fall of the revolution goes beyond anything which has been written before.”
Before returning to the University of the West Indies, Mona, where he is currently a senior lecturer in comparative politics and political theory and head of the Department of Government, Meeks taught at James Madison College, Michigan State University. In addition, Meeks has written poetry, which has been published in many anthologies. His recent and consistent intellectual contributions foreground significant revolutionary issues, making him one of the most influential contemporary Caribbean political theorists.
Other Works by Brian Meeks
Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2000. “NUFF at the Cusp of an Idea: Grassroots Guerrillas and the Politics of the 1970s in Trinidad and Tobago.” Social Identities 5, no. 4 (1999).
“The Political Moment in Jamaica: The Dimensions of Hegemonic Dissolution.” In Manning Marable, ed., Dispatches from the Ebony Tower. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
A Work about Brian Meeks
Allahar, Anton, ed. Caribbean Charisma: Reflections on Leadership, Legitimacy, and Populist Politics. Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, 2001.
