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buildings. Louis B. Homer, a Trinidadian researcher, noted: “Legend has it that his [Count Loppinot’s] demise came about while returning from Arouca, in a landslide that carried him down a cliff and half-buried him. He died in 1819 and was interred next to his wife, Marie Cecile Dannoy, who died before him.” 2 However, if one were to retrace the count’s steps along the Eastern Main Road and travel four miles west of Arouca, one would wind up in Tunapuna, the village in which C.L.R. James was born. Tunapuna – located in the quarter of St
C. L. R. James had intended in late 1938 to travel from his London base to the United States. His plan was to work with the Trotskyist movement there, but to return to England in time for the 1939 cricket season. We may well speculate that, in fact, his American sojourn would have extended for far longer than he envisaged, had world history not intervened. Neville Chamberlain
The work of Trinidad-born Caribbean intellectual C.L.R. James has made a distinct contribution to global Marxist thought which remains relevant to twenty-first-century global politics. Specifically, James’s work offers a post-Leninist reading of the character and future potential organisational forms of working-class revolt. In his major theoretical work, Notes on Dialectics , 1 and his more popular works, Facing Reality 2 and The Invading Socialist Society , 3 a central concern was to
Across the continent of Africa, a web of laws silenced African speech. On the eve of World War II, a small, impoverished group of Africans and West Indians in London dared to imagine the end of British rule in Africa. Printing gave oppositions a voice, initially through broadsheets, tracts, pamphlets, later through books and articles. The group launched an anti-colonial campaign that used publishing as a pathway to liberation. These writers included West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Ras Makonnen, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leone's I. T. A. Wallace Johnson. They formed a part of International African Service Bureau (IASB), and the communists saw them as "generals without an army, they have no base and must depend on their pens". Padmore saw 'trusteeship' as a concept invoked as far back as the late nineteenth-century conferences that divided up Africa. Pan-Africa, a monthly periodical T. Ras Makonnen put out, reported that Richard Wright urged his listeners to form an international network of 'cultured progressives'. Labour-powered nationalism was to Padmore more than a drive for self-government. With the Gold Coast political ground so unsettled, neither Nkrumah nor the Convention People's Party (CPP) made Wright privy to their operations. Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control. In 1969, when a small American publisher reissued A History of Pan-African Revolt , James added to it an epilogue explaining the 'rapid decline of African nationalism'.
9 ‘Race Today cannot fail’: black radicalism in the long 1980s Robin Bunce No discussion of the British left in the 1980s would be complete without an account of the Race Today Collective. Simply put, the collective was the most influential group of black radicals in the UK, ‘the centre, in England, of black liberation’.1 From its foundation in the mid-1970s to its dissolution in 1991, the collective coalesced around the magazine Race Today. It was the embodiment of C. L. R. James’s vision of a small organisation. Consequently, members saw their role in the
Rodney’s politics, convictions, and eloquence. 3 And while the poet was very familiar with Rodney’s work, there is a particular link between C.L.R. James and Johnson’s elegy: ‘Reggae fi Radni’ is in part a versification of James’s posthumous presentation on Rodney’s life and work in much the same way that Johnson’s ‘blood poems’ poeticise the poetics of Fanon’s phenomenology of violence. This is not to say that the poem does not reflect the poet’s independent assessment of Rodney or the conversations that Johnson
By the time How Britain Rules Africa came out, George Padmore had moved to London and joined C. L. R. James in speeches at Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square. They were a powerful duo, these two Trinidadians – ‘unquestionably,’ in James’s mind, ‘the leaders of the struggle against imperialism in London on behalf of the African people and people of African descent’. 1
, with C.L.R. James, of the State-Capitalist Tendency. The third section outlines her philosophical breakthrough, on theory and practice, her subsequent break with James, and the founding of Marxist-Humanism. These Marxist-Humanist years of her life were when she produced her richest work, including on Black freedom movements. In this section we provide a flavour of this work by focusing specifically on two aspects of the Red/Black Atlantic in her theory and practice: her work on what she referred to as ‘the American
Caribbean migration to Britain brought many new things—new music, new foods, new styles. It brought new ways of thinking too. This book explores the intellectual ideas that the West Indians brought with them to Britain. It shows that, for more than a century, West Indians living in Britain developed a dazzling intellectual critique of the codes of Imperial Britain. Chapters discuss the influence of, amongst others, C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul. The contributors draw from many different disciplines to bring alive the thought and personalities of the figures they discuss, providing a picture of intellectual developments in Britain from which we can still learn much. The introduction argues that the recovery of this Caribbean past, on the home territory of Britain itself, reveals much about the prospects of multiracial Britain.
This volume explores the life histories of a wide range of radical figures whose political activity in relation to the black liberation struggle was catalysed or profoundly shaped by the global impact and legacy of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The volume includes new perspectives on the intellectual trajectories of well-known figures such as C.L.R. James, Paul Robeson, Raya Dunayevskaya and Walter Rodney, as well as the important South African trade union leader Clements Kadalie and the poet Amiri Baraka. The volume also brings together new research and scholarship on a number of critical activists who were influenced by ‘black Bolshevism’ such as Henry Hubert Harrison, Wilfred Domingo, Cyril Briggs, Grace P. Campbell and Lamine Senghor. Detailed engagements with the political trajectories of such revolutionary figures opens up a set of diverse perspectives and engagements with different articulations of black internationalisms in the wake of the Russian Revolution. This enables a focus on the different and contested terms on which these relations were shaped, and some of the nuanced situated ways in which these relations were negotiated and lived. The engagement with particular lives and experiences offers a focus on different forms of political agency and solidarity shaped at the intersection of the Russian Revolution and the wider Black Atlantic world. Such a biographical approach brings a vivid and distinctive lens to bear on how racialised social and political worlds were negotiated and experienced, and also on historic black radical engagements with left political movements and organising.