In Memoriam: Locksley Edmondson (April 12, 1934 – August 18, 2026)

A Tribute from the Executive Committee of the Caribbean Studies Association

It is with profound sadness that the Executive Committee of the Caribbean Studies Association shares news of the passing of Professor Emeritus Locksley Edmondson, an influential Jamaican scholar of International Relations whose career spanned over five decades across several countries. He died on August 18 in Ithaca NY at the age of 92.

A founding member of the CSA in 1974 and its President from 1996 to 1997, Professor Edmondson was one of the intellectual architects of Caribbean Studies as a field committed not only to the regions internal complexity, but to its place within a wider, connected world.

Born in the rural parish of Clarendon to schoolteachers Stanford and Olga on April 24, 1936, Professor Edmondson trained across three continents — undergraduate work at the University of Birmingham, graduate studies in political science at Queens University in Canada — Professor Edmondson built a career that was, from its very beginning, unwilling to sit still within a single discipline, a single institution, or a single geography. He was a political scientist by training, but his real subject was the relationship between places: between the Caribbean and Africa, between race and international order, between the university and the wider work of liberation. That restlessness carried him through appointments at the University of Waterloo, Makerere University in Uganda, the University of Denver, Southern Illinois University, and, most enduringly, both the University of the West Indies and Cornell University, where he served for decades in the Africana Studies and Research Center and, earlier, in Government.

At UWI, his imprint was structural as much as scholarly: as Campus Dean of Social Sciences at Mona and then as University Dean of Social Sciences with responsibility for deepening institutional relationships across the university campuses in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad Tobago, and the Bahamas, he helped shape the very shared, multi-territorial architecture that the University — and by extension Caribbean intellectual life — still depends on. At Cornell, colleagues who came to the Africana Studies and Research Center as visiting scholars have long spoken of a scholar whose erudition was only surpassed by his generosity, and whose mentorship shaped generations of students working at the intersection of Africana and international studies.

What distinguished Professor Edmondson, and what CSA members will recognize as quintessentially his, was a refusal to treat the Caribbean as a self-contained unit of analysis. Across five decades of publication — from his early work on the internationalization of Black power to his later reflections on Afro-optimism and Afro- pessimism — he insisted on tracing the Caribbeans political, intellectual, and diasporic lines back to Africa and out into the non-aligned and Third World. He did this not as an intentional intellectual practice: through his work with UNESCO, the United Nations University, the Institute of the Black Peoples in Burkina Faso, TransAfrica Forum, and the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, he spent a lifetime building the very institutional bridges between the Caribbean and Africa that scholars now name as urgent and, encouragingly, that regional leaders are beginning to walk across. The efforts of figures like Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados to deepen Caribbean–Africa diplomatic, economic, and reparatory ties are, in a real sense, catching up to a vision Professor Edmondson was already articulating from a UN podium in Kingston in 1979. It is a rare scholar whose work anticipates the statecraft of half a century later.

The CSA holds a particular debt to him: as a founding member, he helped set the terms by which our Association would understand itself — as interdisciplinary, as regionally rooted, and as internationally engaged, unwilling to separate the study of the Caribbean from the study of the Black world it has always been part of.

To his family, his students, his Cornell and UWI colleagues, and the many institutions across Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora that he helped build, the Executive Committee of the Caribbean Studies Association extends its deepest condolences. His scholarship, his mentorship, and his tireless work as a bridge-builder remain very much alive in the field he helped found and we are all deeply grateful for his tireless efforts.

— The Executive Committee, Caribbean Studies Association