C L R James In Imperial Britain

C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James's intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned from liberal humanism to revolutionary socialism. Rejecting the "imperial Britishness" he had absorbed growing up in a crown colony in the British West Indies, he became a leading anticolonial activist and Pan-Africanist thinker. Christian Høgsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieus in which James wrote works including his magisterial study The Black Jacobins. First published in 1938, James's examination of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. Høgsbjerg contends that during the Depression C. L. R. James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora and emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists in Britain.

C.L.R. James was a protean 20th century Marxist intellectual, widely recognized as a pioneering scholar of slave revolt; a leading voice of Pan-Africanism; a peripatetic revolutionary and scholar who was active in US and UK radical movements; a novelist, playwright, and critic; and one of the premier writers on cricket and sports. This intellectual portrait was written by James's longtime interlocutor and comrade Paul Buhle, and initially published in 1988. With a new final chapter, updated bibliography, a new foreword by historian Robin D.G. Kelley and a new afterword by philosopher Lawrence Ware, this long-awaited revised edition of a classic biography will be a key resource in the James revival.

Historian, revolutionary and cricket writer, CLR James was one of the truly radical voices of the twentieth century. Born in Trinidad in the final days of the Victorian era, he debated with Trotsky, played cricket with Constantine, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, inspired Kwame Nkrumah, and was a profound influence on the British Black Power movement. And yet by the late 1970s, CLR James was all but forgotten. The books he had written over the past half century were nearly all out of print. There were a few circles in which his name rang a bell: serious students of Black history; obsessive cricket fans. But that was it. When he died in Brixton in 1989, CLR James was internationally famous - lauded as the greatest of Black British intellectuals: the 'Black Plato', according to The Times. The ideas he put forward in his own time - of the importance of identity alongside class, of rebellion coming from below, of the leading roles of Black people, women and youth in political struggle - have gradually made their way to the forefront of our political thinking. His two great books, The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, still have the power to change readers' understanding of the world today. But while CLR James's work has been much examined, his long and remarkable life story has often been overlooked. For the first time, in a biography full of original research, human drama and keen insight, John L. Williams unveils the rich and compelling story of an intellectual giant. In doing so, he firmly establishes the importance of CLR James for the twenty-first century - if Black Britain has had a presiding genius, it remains CLR James.

Originally published in 1937, C. L. R. James's World Revolution is a pioneering Marxist analysis of the history of revolutions during the interwar period and of the fundamental conflict between Trotsky and Stalin. James, who was a leading Trotskyist activist in Britain, outlines Russia's transition from Communist revolution to a Stalinist totalitarian state bureaucracy. He also provides an account of the ideological contestations within the Communist International while examining its influence on the development of the Soviet Union and its changing role in revolutions in Spain, China, Germany, and Central Europe. Published to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this definitive edition of World Revolution features a new introduction by Christian Høgsbjerg and includes rare archival material, selected contemporary reviews, and extracts from James's 1939 interview with Trotsky.

This volume collects new angles and perspectives on issues shaping the development of the Caribbean. Bringing together essays on regional integration, identity, and culture and focusing on foundational personalities and institutions in the region, this book opens up new lines of inquiry on twentieth-century Caribbean history. Essays examine popular perspectives of the West Indies Federation; the intersections of ideology and governance through key figures such as C. L. R. James and Rawson William Rawson; the socioeconomic context of Caribbean foodways; and Carnival as a tool of cultural diplomacy. Integration is a critical theme throughout. Pointing to the region’s rich cultural and historical heritage, this book explores how Caribbean unification may provide a way forward for this patchwork of island territories facing the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Combining insights from imperial studies and transnational book history, this provocative collection opens new vistas on both fields through ten accessible essays, each devoted to a single book. Contributors revisit well-known works associated with the British empire, including Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Thomas Macaulay's History of England, Charles Pearson's National Life and Character, and Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. They explore anticolonial texts in which authors such as C. L. R. James and Mohandas K. Gandhi chipped away at the foundations of imperial authority, and they introduce books that may be less familiar to students of empire. Taken together, the essays reveal the dynamics of what the editors call an "imperial commons," a lively, empire-wide print culture. They show that neither empire nor book were stable, self-evident constructs. Each helped to legitimize the other. Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Elleke Boehmer, Catherine Hall, Isabel Hofmeyr, Aaron Kamugisha, Marilyn Lake, Charlotte Macdonald, Derek Peterson, Mrinalini Sinha, Tridip Suhrud, André du Toit

Against the lethargy and despair of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean experience, Aaron Kamugisha gives a powerful argument for advancing Caribbean radical thought as an answer to the conundrums of the present. Beyond Coloniality is an extended meditation on Caribbean thought and freedom at the beginning of the 21st century and a profound rejection of the postindependence social and political organization of the Anglophone Caribbean and its contentment with neocolonial arrangements of power. Kamugisha provides a dazzling reading of two towering figures of the Caribbean intellectual tradition, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their quest for human freedom beyond coloniality. Ultimately, he urges the Caribbean to recall and reconsider the radicalism of its most distinguished 20th-century thinkers in order to imagine a future beyond neocolonialism.