C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain

Abstract

This dissertation will aim to advance scholarly understanding of the political and intellectual itinerary of the late Trinidadian intellectual and activist C.L.R. James during the six years he spent in Britain from 1932-38. In the process it will not only revise the existing interpretation of the importance of these years within James's own life and work, but also suggest that James's experience during the 1930s raises wider questions about the nature of British society and politics during this critical decade. This thesis will consider James's early identification with imperial Britishness growing up in a Crown Colony in the British West Indies, and his rejection of this and his radicalisation towards a wider solidarity with forms of black internationalism. James's 'class-struggle Pan-Africanism', developed in partnership with his boyhood friend and compatriot George Padmore, will be examined for the light it sheds on anti-colonialism. James's critically important experience in the Lancashire cotton textile town of Nelson will also be detailed, as will his subsequent relationship with other politically radical intellectuals and the wider British left and labour movement during this period. James's understanding of imperial metropolitan culture in Britain will be explored through a discussion of his early cricket journalism while his other writings for the Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist press illuminate much about race and revolutionary politics in Europe, the Caribbean and America. An attempt will be made to reconstruct the concrete historical context in which James wrote his play Toussaint Louverture, his study World Revolution and his classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.Overall, this thesis will suggest that during the 1930s James not only intellectually conquered imperial Britain and advanced understanding of the African diaspora but also emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxist thinkers in Britain during the Great Depression. (London, 1987), front cover.Plate 2. C.L.R. James, 1938 [Photograph].From George Breitman (ed.), Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and SelfDetermination (New York, 1980), p. 32.Plate 3. Amy Ashwood Garvey, 1940s [Photograph].From Tony Martin, Amy Ashwood Garvey, (Dover, 2007), p. vi.Plate 4. Ethel Mannin and Reginald Reynolds, late 1930s [Photograph].From Robert Huxter, Reg and Ethel: Reginald Reynolds (1905-1958), his life and .. xu 10 18work and his marriage to Ethel Mannin (1900Mannin ( -1984 (York, 1992 105The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935-48 (Colombo, 2006). 109Plate 8. Fenner Brockway reviews C.L.R. James's World Revolution [Article] From New Leader, 16 April, 1937. Plate 9. C.L.R. James's copy of the Collected Works of VI. Lenin.Vol. XVIII [Frontispiece]. Copy courtesy of Kevin Morgan. Britain has given me at least some additional insight into 'the great philosophical conflicts of the day' that would not have been possible to gain had I never ventured outside the seminar rooms, libraries...

Trajetórias através de um prisma: Caribe, raça e consciência oposicional em C. L. R. James e Oliver C. Cox

“…O nome alternativo, 'Vermelha Nelson', era provavelmente mais preciso." (Council, 2017, Online, tradução livre) 17 Para Christian Høgsbjerg, foi na Inglaterra, e não nos Estados Unidos -como às vezes se costuma afirmar, que ocorre a radicalização de James (Høgsbjerg, 2014 canista, cuja organização International African Friends of Abyssinia 21 (IAFA) -que tinha como outros membros Jomo Kenyatta, I. T. A. Wallace Johnson, Amy Ashwood Garvey, T. Ras Makonnen e Albert Marryshaw -fora presidida por James (Kelley, 2012, p. 12). Os membros dessa organização, frustrados com falta de vontade da Liga das Nações de tomar uma atitude contra Mussolini, reagrupam-se e formam após a crise etíope o International African Service Bureau (IASB).…”

“…Ao se contrastar as trajetórias inicias de Oliver Cox e C. L. R. James, a primeira coisa que salta à vista são os pontos de chegada de cada um. James foi consagrado como um dos principais intelectuais do Atlântico Negro, e a quantidade de estudos sobre sua obra continua a crescer (Høgsbjerg, 2014). Oliver Cox pode ser considerado um sociólogo esquecido (Hunter, 1983), viu seu livro Caste, class and race enterrado pela editora Doubleday menos de um ano após o lançamento, que deixou de imprimi-lo após esgotada a primeira impressão (Sweezy, 1987), e produziu escritos tão impopulares nos "anos 1950 e 1960 que foi obrigado a pagar $2000 e $2500, respectivamente, para ter [seus outros livros] The Foundations of Capitalism e Capitalism and American Leadership publicados."…”

Black Britain and the Politics of Race in the 20th Century

“…Coupled with biographical work on major figures involved in these movements including Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore, Harold Moody, Una Marson, and Amy Ashwood Garvey who established the Florence Mills Social Club, which became a meeting ground for London's emerging Black intelligentsia during the 1930s, work on Black political activity during this period has established Britain's strategic role as both a seat of imperial power and, consequently, an incubator of Pan-Africanist thought. 21 In doing so, this body of scholarship has become foundational in understanding how metropolitan Britain, and London in particular, was akin to spaces like Harlem and Paris as it provided a critical hub of exchange, coalition building, and cross-national identification that in turn facilitated the political relations of the African Diaspora in the first half of the 20th century. 22 While biographies of important, but to some extent, largely exceptional figures who left a significant archival footprint because of their literary output, published political writings and/ or their representation in print media continue to animate work on Black political activity in interwar Britain, recent monographs produced by Susan Pennybacker and Minkah Makalani have employed biography and intellectual history to explore how Black activists in Britain created a world of transnational dialogs and solidarities, which facilitated leftist and anti-racist activism.…”