Rethinking C.L.R. James - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1557865981 ISBN 13: 9781557865984

Publisher: Blackwell Pub, 1995

Synopsis

This collection of essays provides a critique of C. L. R. James's contribution to a broad range of intellectual pursuits. The Trinidadian-born James was a political activist in the Caribbean, the US and Britain, as well as being one of the leading figures in the early Pan-African movement. He also wrote extensively on literature, culture, cricket, and marxism. This book engages all these aspects of James's life to demonstrate his centrality to the current debates around the issues of postcoloniality and popular culture.
James, for too long unavailable to readers, is presented as an intellectual who participated in several key historical developments of the twentieth century. The book locates him in the history of the earliest struggles against colonialism, but it also clearly shows how his thinking - particularly his interest in nineteenth-century British literature - was shaped by the experience of growing up as a colonial subject in Port-of-Spain. The collection grapples with the paradoxes, the tensions, and ironies that characterized James as much as it shows how creatively he applied the lessons of those ambiguities and contradictions.

About this title

Review

Rethinking C. L. R. James is a collection of essays by nine university professors, all enthusiasts of James, a writer, historian, intellectual and Marxist. The book marks a new and growing interest in James' life and thinking following his death in 1989. Some of the essays have an academic tone; some split leftist hairs on details of James' views (like his love for the U.S.); but those who know James' books will be delighted that the man thrown out of the U.S. in the McCarthy era is now the subject of serious debate in American universities.

Review

[James] was a left-wing champion of de-colonization and black independence movements whose impulse was to loathe the Soviet bloc and its allies and to gaze with eager enthusiasm on the popular arts of the United States . . . as if America . . . were the natural home of the super-democratic, proletarian revolution that he kept expecting. -- The New Yorker, Paul Berman

Edition details

• Publisher: Blackwell Pub
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1557865981
• ISBN 13: 9781557865984
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 225
• Editor: Farred Grant