CLR James

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CLR James

Cyril Lionel Robert James TC (born January 4, 1901 in Tunapuna ( Trinidad ), † May 19, 1989 in London ) was a cultural critic , journalist and an important socialist theorist and writer .

Life

CLR James enrolled in the prestigious Queens Royal College in Port of Spain in 1910 and achieved the best result in the entrance examination as the youngest winner in school history at the time. As a schoolboy he was a big fan of the sport of cricket and played successfully on the school team. His love for literature also grew at this time. He graduated in 1918. In the following years James worked as a teacher of English and history and was a member of a loose association of Trinidadian writers. He primarily wrote short stories; his first success was the story La Divina Pastora published in 1927 .

In 1933 James moved to London, where he wrote about cricket as a sports correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and wrote a play about the liberation fighter Toussaint L'Ouverture , which premiered in the West End . There he also wrote his well-known scholarly works on the history of the Communist International in World Revolution (1937) - a book about which Leon Trotsky was praised - and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938 ) on the revolution in Haiti , which became the standard work for the study of the black diaspora at the time. It is considered “a historiographical milestone. Because James conceived, without calling it that, an “Atlantic perspective” and linked the Caribbean, Africa and Europe ”. In London he joined Trotskyist groups.

In 1938 James came to the USA and wrote important cultural studies about the United States. He saw himself as a Leninist , although later (from around 1949) he rejected Lenin's concept of the party as a revolutionary avant-garde. He joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and, in its split over the assessment of the social character of the Soviet Union in 1940, was on the side of the minority around Max Shachtman and Martin Abern , who founded the Workers' Party . In this he founded, together with Raya Dunayevskaya and other party members, an internal group, the Johnson-Forrest Tendency (Johnson and Forrest were the pseudonyms of James and Dunayevskaya), which developed an assessment of the Soviet Union as a state capitalist society. The Johnson Forrest Tendency returned to the SWP in 1947, but left it again in 1949 and constituted itself as a separate organization under the name Correspondence Publishing Committee . The group had close ties to Socialisme ou barbarie in France.

James' attention during this time was directed to the black nationalist movement, which was gaining in importance, as well as the struggles in the industrial plants and the women's movement . Expelled in 1952 during the McCarthy era , he spent some time on Ellis Island , completing his book on Herman Melville . He was involved in the pan-Africa movement and saw the revolution in Ghana as an important model for international revolutionaries. In 1970 he was allowed to return to the USA and was appointed to the Federal City College in Washington . He later moved back to London, where he stayed until his death.

CLR James' works inspired many Caribbean socialists such as Eric Eustace Williams (with whom James broke after Williams became Prime Minister of the independent Trinidad and Tobago and made a little radical politics there), Maurice Bishop , Walter Rodney and the sociologist, poet and reggae musician Linton Kwesi Johnson .

Honors

CLR James is the recipient of the Trinity Cross , the highest honor in the state of Trinidad and Tobago at the time of award .

Works (selection)

Fiction
  • Minty Alley. A novel . New Beacon Books, London 1971, ISBN 0-9012-4107-5 (reprint of the London 1936 edition).
Non-fiction
  • Beyond a Boundary . Yellow Jersey Press, London 2005, ISBN 0-224-07427-X (reprint of the London 1963 edition).
  • Cricket. Selected writings . 2nd ed. Allison & Busby, London 1989, ISBN 0-85031-786-X .
  • Facing Reality. The new society; where to look for it and how to bring it closer . ak press, Chicago, Ill. 2006, ISBN 978-0-88286-308-5 (reprint of the edition Chicago, Ill. 1958; together with Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee Boggs ).
  • The Life of Captain Cipriani . An Account of the British Government in the West Indies . UMI Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. 2002 (Reprint of Nelson 1932 edition).
  • Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In . University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 2001, ISBN 1-58465-094-X (reprinted from New York 1952 edition).
  • Modern Politics. Being a series of lectures on the subject given at Trinidad Public Library . PNM Publ., Port of Spain 1960.
  • Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution . Allison & Busby, London 1982, ISBN 0-85031-461-5 (reprint of the London 1977 edition).
  • Notes on Dialectics. Hegel , Marx and Lenin . Allison & Busby, London 1980, ISBN 0-85031-150-0 (reprint of the London 1948 edition).
  • Party Politics in the West Indies . 2nd ed. Imprint Caribbean, San Juan, Trinidad 1984 (reprint of the 1962 edition).
  • The black Jacobins. Toussaint L'Ouverture and the independence revolution in Haiti ("The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution"). Verlag Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7609-0911-6 (Small Library; 341).
  • State Capitalism and World Revolution . Kerr Publ., Chicago, Ill. 1986, ISBN 0-88286-079-8 (reprint of the New York 1950 edition).
  • World Revolution 1917-1936. The Rise and Fall of the Communist International . Kraus Reprint, Nendeln 1970 (reprint of the London 1937 edition).
  • A History of Pan-African Revolt. PM Press, Chicago 2012 (reprinted London 1938 edition).
Work edition
  • Scott McLemee, Paul Le Blanc (Eds.): CLR James and Revolutionary Marxism. Selected Writings of CLR James, 1939-1949 . Humanity Books, Amherst, NY 1994, ISBN 1-5739-2371-0 (paperback).

literature

  • Paul Buhle: CLR James. The artist as a revolutionary . Verso, London 1988, ISBN 0-86091-221-3 .
  • Aldon Lynn Nielsen: CLR James. A critical introduction . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Miss. 1997, ISBN 0-87805-973-3 (paperback).
  • Carol Polsgrove: Ending British rule in Africa. Writers in a common cause . Manchester University Press, Manchester 2012, ISBN 978-0-7190-8901-5 .
  • Kent Worcester: CLR James. A Political Biography . State University of New York Press, Albany, NY 1996, ISBN 0-7914-2752-8 (paperback).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Anthony: Builders of the Nation . Circle Press, Port of Spain 2012, ISBN 978-976-8068-07-1 , pp. 52 .
  2. ↑ Kent Worcester: CLR James: A Political Biography . SUNY Press, Albany 1996, ISBN 978-0-7914-2751-4 , pp. 15 .
  3. ↑ Andreas Eckert : The black Jacobins in the white jerseys. Sixty years ago the "Black Jacobins" by CLR James appeared, a classic of global history . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 3, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME James, CLR
ALTERNATIVE NAMES James, Cyril Lionel Robert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British cultural critic, journalist, socialist theorist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 4, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Trinidad
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 1989
Place of death London