Rethinking C.L.R. JAMES (book review)

Marcelo Guimarães Lima

Rethinking C.L.R. JAMES
Edited by GRANT PARRED
Blackwell Publishers. Cambridge, MA and Oxford. 1996
hard cover. 240 pages, $53-95

reviewed by Marcelo Lima 
New Art Examiner, Chicago, April, 1997 

Born in Trinidad In 1901, Cyril Lionel Robert James, the son of a schoolteacher, was raised in a black middle-class emvironment. He departed to England in 1932 to pursue a literary career and, upon reading Trotsky and Marx and contacting revolutionary workers' groups, was radicalized and transformed into a committed Marxist revolutionary. C.L.R. James emerged as one of the leading radical voices in London, writing on politics in his 1937 World Revolution, 1917-1936 : The Rise and the Fall of the Communist International, on anti-colonial struggles and black history, in 1938 publishing both The History of the Negro Revolt and the celebrated Black Jacobins, an analysis of the emergence of the modem Haitian nation. 

In his Introduction to this collection of essays, editor Grant Farred notes the several recent publications of works on and by James. This indicates the rediscovery of an author who has much to say to men and women of the late twentieth century, and much to relate of the great challenges, questions, dilemmas, struggles, triumphs, and defeats that mark the history of this rapidly vanishing century. In the crossroads of the struggles for the emancipation of the working class and the freeing of humanity from the dehumanizing violence of racism, James's legacy may acquire a renewed pertinence. 

However, we are in a period of ideological confusion, of diminished perspectives on the future of emancipation itself. It is necessary that we orient ourselves in a newly formed understanding of our ideological past to more properly guide the imagination of the future.

If there is a Jamesian renaissance in the making, let us avoid, as much as possible, misunderstandings, misreadings, and misappropriations. This avoidance, according to Farred, is one of the guiding preoccupations of the present volume. James is a sort of "pioneer" of the cultural and multicultural questions that are so prominent now. He is, therefore, most certainly a candidate for a refiguration of his historical /political writings and persona filtered through the spectacles of present-day ideologies. However, Neil Larsen's essay, "Negativities of the Popular," is most incisive in pointing out the differences between James’ Marxist approach and the often eclectic present-day ideologisms categorized as "Cultural Studies." 

Marcelo Guimarães Lima, C.L.R. James
pencil on paper, 2025

James - as the theoretician of the Diaspora and the politics of Black History, as the writer on the social/political expressions of cricket, as an analyst of American culture, and as the sympathetic critic of popular culture - is presented in essays by A. Ross, R.D.G. Kelley, and Farred, among others. The very diversity and multiplicity of James's works and career is recorded here: the multiple roles of this Third Worid intellectual whose arena was primarily the "First World" of the advanced industrial and post-industrial-British and American societies, the learned student of Hegel and Marx at ease with the common expressions of popular culture, cricket, film, and pulp literature. Yet this volume remains somehow without a "center" in the absence of a systematic examination - I think I can say, at the risk of misunderstandings, a more direct reading - of James's political ideas, his praxis, and the philosophical method of this militant Marxist intellectual. 

For those unfamiliar with C.L.R. James, the work will be useful as an introduction, and for the more personal materials it contains: reminiscences, interviews, and his letters to his second wife. For those more familiar with James's writings, it will raise the questions of the difficulties our present context offers to the heritage of revolutionary thinking. Moreover, this work still poses, to those who are interested, questions about the problems of human emancipation from the political order of (more than ever) global capitalism. James's interrogation of us is the most interesting issue here, and the real sign of the actuality of his works.