The Dark History behind the Man Booker Prize

Excerpt From NY Times
By Natalie Hopkinson

Dr. Natalie Hopkinson

Natalie Hopkinson is the author of the forthcoming “A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents and the Art of Resistance,” from which this essay is adapted

The Man Booker Prize, one of the shiniest baubles and most generous purses in English letters, was awarded today to the American writer George Saunders for his novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.” The occasion invites us to reflect on how the residue of slavery and white supremacy permeates our cultural life and determines whose histories are celebrated and whose are erased.

Slave Ship

There is a dark side to the Booker brand. It has unpaid debts to humanity. It has unleashed continuing agony in places like Guyana, where the Booker brothers founded a sugar firm in 1834. Earlier this year, we lost at age 90 the great novelist and art critic John Berger who tried to bring attention to the problematic nature of Booker’s history in Guyana. In a fiery 1972 acceptance speech for the Booker prize for his novel “G,” Mr. Berger blasted the London-based Booker McConnell sugar firm’s exploitation of Guyana and African slavery’s role in funding the Industrial Revolution. He pledged to donate half the 5,000 pound prize money to the Black Panther Party. (The other half would fund a project on migrant workers.)

Bookers Universal Store- Georgetown - 1950s

During my own research for a coming book about art and resistance in my parents’ native Guyana, I came across a collection of documents held by Britain’s National Archives that demonstrated the kind of casual racial opportunism that should also be associated with Booker. In 1815, soon after the British successfully elbowed away Dutch, French and Spanish rivals to claim the small patch of rainforest land at the northern edge of South America, 22-year-old Josias Booker left Britain to help manage a cotton plantation in what was then British Guiana.

Soon, he invited his brothers, George, William and Richard, to join him in the hottest new start-up industry: sugar. In addition to growing cane harvested by enslaved African workers, the brothers established their own ship fleet and incorporated as Booker Brothers & Co. in 1834.
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