Rethinking Race, Politics and Poetics: C.L.R. James' Critique of Modernity (Routledge Studies in Cultural History)

Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics

Routledge Studies in Cultural History SERIES EDITOR, Editor’s School

1. The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe Edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron 2. The Insanity of Place/The Place of Insanity Essays on the History of Psychiatry Andrew Scull 3. Film, History, and Cultural Citizenship Sites of Production Edited by Tina Mai Chen and David S. Churchill 4. Genre and Cinema Ireland and Transnationalism Edited by Brian McIlroy 5. Histories of Postmodernism Edited by Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing 6. Africa after Modernism Transitions in Literature, Media, and Philosophy Michael Janis 7. Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics C.L.R. James’ Critique of Modernity Brett St Louis

Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics C.L.R. James’ Critique of Modernity

Brett St Louis

New York London

First published 2007 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data St Louis, Brett. Rethinking race, politics, and poetics : C.L.R. James’ critique of modernity / Brett St Louis. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in cultural history ; 7) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-415-95772-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. James, C. L. R. (Cyril Lionel Robert), 1901—Criticism and interpretation. 2. James, C. L. R. (Cyril Lionel Robert), 1901—Political and social views. 3. Modernism (Literature). I. Title. PR9272.9.J35Z86 2007 813'.52—dc22 ISBN 0-203-93510-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-95772-0 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-93510-1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-95772-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-93510-1 (ebk)

2007016165

For my grandmother, Mary Lucas

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Modern Epiphanies: C. L. R. James and the Reimagining of Modernity 1

2

3

4

5

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1

“They Brought Themselves”: Modernity and the Emergence of the Black Jacobins

13

“Elective Affinities” and the Intellectual Vocation: Race, Politics, and Poetics

45

The Perilous “Pleasures of Exile”: Bad Faith, Failed Gods, and the Diasporic Life

83

Mapping Spontaneity: The Organic Unity of Self-Activity and Radical Struggles

121

“Freedom is Creative Universality, Not Utility”: Sociality and the Cultural Politics of Cricket

159

Epilogue: “The Struggle for Happiness”: From Epiphany to Poiesis

193

Notes Index

209 241

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in coming. That I have been able to finish it at all is only due to the help that I have received from numerous people, although I have not necessarily made as much use of it as I might have done. The usual disclaimer certainly applies in my case: the shortcomings of this book are my sole responsibility. This work began life as a PhD thesis, and for help with that project as well as useful guidance on how to proceed in terms of this book, I would like to thank my supervisor John Solomos, as well as my examiners Clive Harris and John Oldfield. I am also grateful to Chetan Bhatt for his insightful comments and suggestions on my thesis that were invaluable for writing this book. I am also thankful to the Economic and Social Research Council for the Research Studentship that supported that initial PhD project and enabled me to conduct archival research in the United States on which I’ve drawn in this book. Part of Chapter 3 was published as “The Perilous ‘Pleasures of Exile’: C. L. R. James, Bad Faith and the Diasporic Life” in Interventions 1(3), 1999: 345–360. Being a “work in progress” for so long, this book has been informed by and benefited from a series of conversations over the years. While I was not always able to grasp the significance of these exchanges as they took place, I hope I’ve at least been able to subsequently recognise their importance. In this regard, I thank Paul Gilroy, Barnor Hesse, bell hooks, Hazel Carby, Ato Quayson, Tony Bogues, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Gregor McLennan. I have also benefited greatly from ongoing encouragement and advice from Brian Alleyne and Bill Schwarz. Their interest in C. L. R. James, and acuity in how he might be understood and reassessed, has been an inspiration and a challenge. I am also grateful to Bart Moore-Gilbert for his help in finding my manuscript a “home,” and to Max Novick at Routledge for his support of my project and editorial direction. A range of unpublished material has been extremely important in helping me develop an understanding of the correspondence between James’s everyday life, social thought, and political interventions. For access to such invaluable documents, I would like to thank the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, and The Institute of Commonwealth

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Studies, University of London. I also owe an immense debt of gratitude to The C. L. R. James Institute in New York for its support. I would like to thank the archivist-librarian Ralph Dumain and especially the late director, Jim Murray. I am eternally thankful to Jim for his enthusiasm for my project from day one, and for introducing me to some very special people; I miss Jim a great deal in so many ways. The love and support of numerous friends and family, in the main at great remove, has also given me the energy to complete this book, especially in those times—of which there were many—it seemed an impossible task: I am especially thankful to Sheila St Louis, Kim St Louis, and Marie St Louis, as well as Andrès Rodriguez, Mick Canavan, and Laurie Dahl. To my grandmother, Mary Lucas, to whom this book is dedicated, I am simply thankful for everything; her spirit still guides me in much that I do. I am also thankful to Isaac St Louis for his joyful presence, rigorous questioning, and permission to work weekends in order to finish this book. And finally, I am grateful beyond words to Nicole King for her boundless generosity, encouragement, and love that has enabled me to write this book, as well as for the life that we share outside and beyond it.

Introduction Modern Epiphanies: C. L. R. James and the Reimagining of Modernity

“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society,” wrote C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination, “can be understood without understanding both.”1 This simple yet incisive observation emphasises the need for social and historical understanding to survey the entire picture of society with an eye for the intricacies of its human brushstrokes. However, in terms of the larger project of understanding Western modernity, such a clarifying project is complicated by the voluntary, coerced, and forced mass migrations across time, continents, and contexts. As a result, the individual and the social cannot be simply accepted as given entities awaiting explanation; rather, the very question of what they are, or indeed, their very existence as coherent, knowable forms, becomes crucial. This much has been become clear through the proliferation of critiques of the social and the human parading as global concepts and categories, while they are effectively no more than local ciphers for Europe and the European. Furthermore, these penetrative analyses have been at pains to point out the converse of this normative project—the ideational and physical subordination of those subhuman Others enduring an existence somewhat akin to beasts of burden in a pre-social state of nature. The task facing us, then, is easily identified if difficult to accomplish: modernity must be more profitably rethought as a diffuse and ever-expanding web of contact zones, exchanges, and relations that foreground modern human and social formation as produced by physical human traffic as well as a series of material and symbolic flows. And it is from this panoramic view that we might be able to move beyond the limited understanding of simple dichotomous human and social classifications of “them”/”us” and “here”/“there.” Instead, we may better comprehend the deep entanglements of modernity and account for the ways in which human existence and social formation is produced across time and space. In other words, these modern transnational migratory circuits, and their distended social, public, and private realms, necessitate an expanded critical imagination. But this does not mean that one might simply jettison a notion of the individual and social for analytical and political purposes in favour of ethnographically charting the plurality of lives and histories that animate modern

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human and social conditions. Indeed, as Chetan Bhatt usefully remarks, the opposition between the social as “the frolic of signification” and the political as reducible to “modes of agonistic subjectivisation” now customary within Euro-American intellectual debates heralds a dangerous moment.2 It signals, for Bhatt, the proliferation of sociological imaginations skilled in crafting cultural representations of the previously marginal, and the uncovering of the opaque sites of hegemonic power that are yet profoundly distanced from hard ethical and political labour. And so we find ourselves caught between the Scylla of totalising holism and its reductive tendencies, and the Charybdis of a proliferate différance that refuses to remain still for long enough to be brought into the realm of explicit understanding. However, bearing the practical inertia that this dilemma invites in mind alongside Bhatt’s injunction, two key enterprises come into sharp relief: the objectives of analytical understanding and political commitment. The necessity of praxis suggested here provides the point at which the prospect of combining the expansive comparative and historical demands of understanding modernity and the disciplinary tenor of Mills’s project is actually imaginable and coherent. Alongside his typical sociological concern with the anomic impulses of modernity and its enervating human effects, Mills is not simply interested in vocational understanding but also with concrete action and progressive change. Of course, this ideal of socially engaged thought is by no means distinctively or singularly sociological; for example, it might also be perceived as theological inasmuch as clerics (arguably) perform a (quasi-) intellectual social function. Nevertheless, given its non-aligned core social and moral concerns, the sociological enterprise occupies a useful vantage point from which to understand the individual and social, while also summoning enough critical substance to evaluate whether they are what they ought to be and, if necessary, how change might be effected. And, perhaps more importantly, the dangers of restrained thought and political dogma are offset by a sociological tradition of auto-critique that Mills draws on in posing a key self-reflexive question of this imagination: What “quality of mind” can profitably assume such a monumental task? The life and work of Cyril Lionel Robert James, 1901–1989,3 illustrates many of the pleasures, prerogatives, and pitfalls of understanding the wide-ranging formation of modernity and human and social life while (re)assembling a viable progressive politics. His biographical details are well documented4 and his life and work are generally understood within four stages: 1901–1932, Trinidad; 1932–1938, Britain; 1938–1953, the United States; and 1953–1989, when he travelled extensively between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean. While not sociological in the professional and vocational sense, James’s intellectual interest in the relation between social formation and human action, as well as his political commitment and fundamental concern with human freedom and sociability, encapsulates the expansive imaginative spirit that Mills advocates. In short,

Introduction: Modern Epiphanies 3 the personal, social, and political odyssey of James’s life afforded him a rich understanding of the opportunities and pressures of modernity and its bittersweet promise of human emancipation, to which he gave unique form and expression. Moving fluently across genres and disciplines, James wielded his pen as novelist, playwright, journalist, historian, and social, literary, and cultural critic; and contributed to philosophical, political, historiographical, and sociological debates. Beginning with the novel Minty Alley (1936) that ushered in an era of West Indian social realist fiction featuring “the folk” as central dramatic characters, James’s most notable publications include the masterful The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), a pathbreaking account of the Haitian Revolution; Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1948), a reading of Hegel’s (lesser) Science of Logic that sought to explain the centrality of the black struggle to the larger socialist movement as well as the limitations of democratic centralism and the vanguard party; Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953), a study of Melville and Moby Dick as an insightful critique of the emergence of modern totalitarian regimes and the neurotic and apathetic intellectual and managerial classes who, as impotent spectators to their own lives, were unable to resist this barbarism; and the incomparable quasi-autobiography Beyond a Boundary (1963) that seamlessly combines memoir and West Indian social history in a remarkable account of the life of cricket during the summit and fall of the British Empire and the emergent postcolonial future. In addition to these, James wrote and collaborated on many other important books and articles, and remained a committed and tireless public speaker late into his long life. James’s political interventions actively engaged and informed struggles for radical social transformation in the Caribbean, Europe, the United States, and Africa. He espoused a range of objectives including radical collectivism, racial justice, and individual freedom. A founder member of the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA) and its successor, the International African Service Bureau (IASB) in London during the inter-war years; an organiser of Southern sharecroppers and Midwestern automobile assembly plant workers under the auspices of the Workers’ Party (WP) and Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) in the United States in the 1940s; and a key figure in Trinidadian nationalist politics, especially the drive for the West Indian Federation during the late 1950s, James’s political engagement was truly diasporic. However, for all this activity, the projects with which James identified and energetically supported were invariably ineffectual. Although the reasons for this are complex and manifold, a key factor is that James was, arguably, an activist-intellectual, equally committed to both sides of this vocational coin. Therefore, while many of his radical and black intellectual peers genuflected towards Moscow and its party apparatus, and the Western Marxist luminaries built an elaborate edifice of ideas, James attempted to live the practical ideal of the “engaged intellectual.” While

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this might be taken as either to his credit or the falling between two stools, James appears to have had no choice in the matter: his intellectual formation and political commitment produced this expansive vocation for him where abstractions were only useful insofar as they could be reinserted into the concrete.5 If this portrayal deems James as a sober Marxist oriented towards ideas in the pursuit of political action, the humanistic romantic was never far from the surface. Indeed, James’s sensitivity towards human desire—what people imagined and wanted—is a notable facet of his intellectual approach that compelled him to pay attention to forms of popular culture often considered extraneous to serious intellectual debate and political activism. But his involvement in these disparate spheres was not simply the result of personal predilection. His polymath intellectualism was not a random eclecticism; his political engagement was not rigidly bound to functionalist ends; and his affinity with creative cultures was not an effete aestheticism. Despite various sectarian alignments, James remained a committed ecumenical Marxist, and his distinctive analytical method was as much informed by a formal appreciation of Marxism as were his life experience and allegiance to humanist principles. Therefore, it is as an especial Marxist and humanist that James displayed the qualities of imagination capable of understanding, in Mills’s words, “the intimate realities of ourselves” alongside “larger social realities.”6 This complex diversity makes James’s broad intellectual contribution and legacy difficult to situate. Thinking of his life and work as a series of distinct moments and interventions usefully brings its longevity and scope into focus and breaks it down into digestible portions: the early “literary James,” his “Pan-Africanist period,” the “culturalist years,” and so on. And as with any enduring intellectual figure fortunate enough to produce a substantial body of work, this compartmentalisation is an entirely legitimate enterprise; environments and ideas shift, and the notion of an unchanging, consistent oeuvre is difficult if not impossible to establish. Another way to approach the conundrum of situating James is to consider him in the various incarnations that constitute his intellectual persona: as theoretician, critic, journalist, activist, historian. Clumsy as it might sound, each of these designations could be legitimately prefaced with the word “Marxist.” While far from establishing the defining feature of his intellectual career, the “Marxist” prefix suggests distinctive methodological approaches and fundamental political concerns that remain relatively continuous throughout James’s substantive shifts in subjects and ideas, genres and practices. But at the same time, the methodological, analytical, and organisational discontinuities within his Marxism pose a different question: what provides the stimulus for such changes? In other words, what acts back dialectically on James’s Marxism and forces him, for example, to reconsider the status of racial oppression within broader class struggles or to develop a critique of the vanguard party?

Introduction: Modern Epiphanies 5 This issue is crucial because it highlights a delicate balance posed within the challenge of the sociological imagination refracted through James’s Marxism. To adapt Mills, James suggests that neither the intimacies of human life nor the historical laws of social development can be understood in isolation; material forces and human vitality are complimentary productive forces. Although such claims to a concern with qualitative human existence are implicit within Marxist analysis, as long as they do not lapse into utopian sentimentality or romantic idealism,7 James’s assertion has a different feel about it. His concern with moral life and unabashed delight in human creativity, imaginative expression, and emotional fulfilment is far removed from the quotidian life of Marxist preoccupation. With this in mind it is my contention that James’s life and work bear the hallmark of another prefix: that of “humanist.” The dialectical relationship between his humanism and his Marxism shapes the rich contours of his social thought, and informs my understanding of James as a humanist Marxist and provides the analytical foundation of this book. This dialectic between Marxism and humanism is immensely important to understanding James’s distinctiveness. The preoccupation with immiseration at the foundation of Marxist critique fundamentally relates to the human experience of economic exploitation and its inhumane psychic and social effects, and is (tacitly) dependent on a moral justification. This means that exploitation and alienation are not simply objectively noteworthy as incidental consequences of the capitalist mode and relations of production. Instead, the critique of capital is a subjective evaluation of the contravention of an absolute moral value that accepts exploitation and alienation as wrong without the validating authority of sacred Truths. Even though Marxism is antipathetic to religiosity, the notion that it is also “the god that failed” testifies to the deified status of its secular morality: for example, Erich Fromm reads Marx as an articulation of a Messianic atheism aiming towards human (social) salvation, and similarly, Leszek Kowlakowski recognises what might be understood as an eschatology within Marxism as trusting “the final judgment of history.”8 On the other hand, it is perhaps unsurprising that much literature presents humanism as a form of secular spiritualism-cum–value system that offers a moral guide or insight into individual and social life.9 Such synergy between Marxism and humanism is not lost on James: John Bracey recalls an occasion when James “cut short a discussion of Marxist humanism by saying that the phrase was redundant. To be a humanist in the twentieth century was to be a Marxist.”10 But this is not to place James among the “Marxist humanists” such as Theodor Adorno and Jean-Paul Sartre, dually characterised as pessimistic critical thinkers, from the pantheon of Western Marxism, or Eastern European Soviet dissenters who positively identified with the ideal of a communist society or later New Left figures.11 Indeed, as his first biographer Paul Buhle argues, James’s optimism distinguishes him from the Western Marxists who had “defeat” etched on their foreheads.12 Furthermore, despite the critique

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of capitalism as the undermining of the modern promise of universal human progress, the Euro-American arena provided the human subject and social theatre for Marxist humanism: for example, in a 1961 lecture, Erich Fromm bases the expansion of the category “modern man” to include Asians, Africans, and others from non-industrialised parts of the globe on the basis of their contact with and increasing resemblance to “Western man.”13 Against this evolutionary history of the modern germinating in Europe, writing in 1969 in reference to the 1967 Tanzanian Arusha Declaration and Julius Nyerere’s African socialist Ujamma project, James restates the dialectic between Marxism and humanism with an important clarification that bears repeating at length: It is sufficient to say that socialist thought has seen nothing like this since the death of Lenin in 1924, and its depth, range and the repercussions which flow from it, go far beyond the Africa which gave it birth. It can fertilize and reawaken the mortuary that is socialist theory and practice in the advanced countries. “Marxism is a humanism” is the exact reverse of the truth. The African builders of a humanist society show that today all humanism finds itself in close harmony with the original conceptions and aims of Marxism.14 This statement crucially asserts the indivisibility of humanism and Marxism and reverses Fromm’s Eurocentric diagnosis of the modern human and social environment for an anticipated humanist renaissance on the basis of objective African political and social conditions instead of an inverted ethnocentrism. But it also offers an even more astounding implication: As a secular morality, the principles of humanism are, for James, distinctively and irrevocably modern. The modern project to dissolve divine providence and realise the non-theistic possibility of human freedom and social equality is a yet-to-be-made radical spirit rather than an already existing essence or latent capacity to be found. As such it is not a question of whether or not the modernist project can be rescued, but rather that it must be reimagined. For James the necessary framework for such an undertaking is both Marxist and humanist, and must entertain a more expansive vision of modernity and its unfulfilled promise that is acutely aware of its wide-ranging formation and the vital contributions offered beyond the discrete borders of its heretofore principal European theatre. Thus two startling insights are established here: the indivisibility of humanist and Marxist principles, and a strident faith in the yet-to-be-realised promise and opportunities of modernity. Inhabiting the twentieth century and yet, at his admission, formed in the nineteenth, James straddles the high moment of modernity and its contradictions. The political promise of democracy and human freedom compromised by colonial and totalitarian domination; the immense productive power of industrial and technological advancement increasingly reserved for the wealthy few; and the pernicious myths of racial inferiority that falsified

Introduction: Modern Epiphanies 7 evidence of a collective human condition, were all apparent to James. And yet, unlike Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of brutality and inequity as logical corollaries of the core impulses to dominate and master within modern rationality, James retained faith in reason and progress as viable and worthy principles.15 For James, the deployment of progress as an instrument of cruelty and liberation and the link between enlightenment and domination that Adorno and Horkheimer saw as dialectical were material expressions of competition for resources and concomitant ideological effects. Although there are various possible explanations for this difference, including his preference for explanatory tools other than the psychoanalytical, James’s refusal to accept a necessary link between the ideals of democracy and progress and their brutal degradation reflects existential and political instead of philosophical precepts. While the Western Marxists concentrated on modernity in terms of the Euro-American arena, James occupied a different personal and intellectual position that recognised the instrumental deterioration of reason into terror, evident within the Holocaust as previously practised, albeit in different form, during the Atlantic slave trade and formation of plantation societies.16 His commitment to reason and progress is, therefore, a political gesture that enables him to situate resistance: the application of reason enables the black Jacobins to acquire a revolutionary consciousness, and their will to action was not vengeful ire but a progressive attempt to realise a better, more equitable existence. In its various forms, James’s social and political thought is based on a diagnostic critique of modernity that remains sympathetic towards its humanistic and political principles of freedom and equality. Despite the manifest failings of modern Enlightenment, its egalitarian and progressive ideals remain compelling for James and stand out as indubitable, secular revelations for modern times; they are “modern epiphanies.” This framing of James’s understanding of and relationship to modernity can be usefully fleshed out through Norman Denzin’s discussion of experience and life history through the concept of epiphany as the location of a series of “interactional moments that leave marks on people’s lives,” which potentially generate individual “transformational experiences.”17 Invoking Mills, Denzin expands on this conceptualisation, pointing to epiphanies as incontrovertibly linking the individual and the social by highlighting the relationship between private troubles and public issues. Thus while epiphanies are individual experiences situated within moments of crisis instead of strictly constructive divine revelations, given the significance of individual crisis and profound revelation as formed within broader contextual moments they are at once biographical and structural. This is suggestive of two important issues: first, although epiphanies present themselves as individual crises, they are also symptomatic of larger social pressures; and second, they lead to varied consequences that are neither necessarily coherent nor satisfactorily resolved. In this sense, James’s individual compulsion towards freedom and equality that are also publicly and structurally manifest as modern

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epiphanies initiates a profound analytical and political struggle instead of a triumphalist point of resolution. The precise character of this struggle is transparent within the quintessence of James’s activist-intellectual engagements. In explaining the capacity of the epiphany to combine the personal/biographical with the social/historical, Denzin instructively draws on Sartre’s notion of each individual as a “universal singular” which recognises an individual as irreducibly so and demands that they are understood “as a single instance of more universal social experiences and social processes”18—we are, therefore, distinct and yet similar.19 In terms of the interpretive interactionist model he advances, Denzin foregrounds the relationship between the subject’s life experiences and their historical moments as mutually productive, which is useful for understanding the method and concerns of James’s social and political thought as allied to his personal and intellectual development. In other words, there are simple questions to be asked: How did James arrive at his epiphanies as individual crises? And how are these individual experiences translated into a meaningful and useful method for social and historical analysis? A consideration of the biographical is unavoidable here. The world that James was born into and inhabited presented freedom and equality to him as personal and social paradoxes at almost every turn. And as if the blatant iniquities of crown colony government were not enough, the intellectual personality James developed through its pedagogical principles placed him in that dilemmatic interstitial position occupied by the black Jacobins who were simultaneously included and excluded from modernity. There is another important point of note: James’s modern epiphanies are developed through a principled commitment to Marxism and humanism and subject to a thematic core. As a result, this book is structurally and analytically informed by the triangulation of race, politics, and poetics that I understand as central themes within the Jamesian oeuvre. This is, of course, rather schematic, as James engages more than these three subjects throughout his work. However, it is not my contention that these themes are all with which he engages in a narrow sense. My point is twofold: first, that as broad categories, race, politics, and poetics are recurrent throughout his work, not necessarily all three at once but more often than not any two work in articulation—Beyond a Boundary and American Civilization, for example, might be animated by all three, while James’s anticolonialist and Pan-Africanist writings might be seen as more concerned with race and politics more specifically20; and second, these broad categories each incorporate many different, specific concerns—for example, in the wider sense, James’s historical and social analyses can be understood as political, as his literary and further humanistic concerns such as in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways can be taken as poetic in the Aristotelian sense of a productive human culture for edifying and pleasurable purpose.21 The thematic triumvirate of race, politics, and poetics is a good substantive foil for James’s Marxist and humanist principles and approach; they provide a useful framework for

Introduction: Modern Epiphanies 9 articulating his concern with the material conditions of social existence, as well as his conceptualisation of moral and emotional life as a holism instead of as discrete facets of the social and human condition. If, as Primo Levi wrote with Jean Améry in mind, “To argue with a dead man is embarrassing and not very loyal,”22 then Rethinking Race, Politics and Poetics respectfully aims to be a disloyal embarrassment. There is a straightforward reason for this: James is, to my mind, one of the most innovative and significant Marxist intellectuals of the twentieth century but is seldom recognised as such which has had an understandable effect. In light of this oversight, many discussions of James have a restorative rationale and concentrate on asserting his intellectual and political importance as an iconic figure in black, anticolonial, and Third World liberationist struggles. However, this tendency has also incurred some of the regrettable consequences of hagiography. As a result, and inspired by Stuart Hall’s suggestion that James’s “work has never been critically and theoretically engaged as it should be,” this book takes Hall’s assertion that “major intellectual figures are not honoured by simply celebration [but] . . . by taking his or her ideas seriously and debating them, extending them, quarrelling with them, and making them live again” as a clarion call and point of departure.23 And although I aim to be sympathetic in this task, such a critical appraisal is unavoidable as this book’s intention of making James’s ideas “live again” presents assiduous critique as a necessary and desirable enterprise. Of course the project of understanding the entirety of James’s corpus demands justification. Martin Glaberman, a longtime comrade of James, has notably remarked that “Everyone produces their own James. People have, over the years, taken from him what they found useful and imputed to him what they felt necessary.”24 Although, unlike Glaberman, I do not claim to have “lost the patent” to James that requires having to “share him with others,”25 I do appreciate the difficulty facing his interlocutors and comrades when confronted with the distanced observations and interpretations such as those offered in the pages below. Nonetheless, I offer two main justifications for this book’s ambition to engage with James in toto. First, as Michel Foucault suggests, the analysis of the author’s oeuvre requires the interpretative operation of (re)constructing it as a coherent unity out of a series of experiential, imaginative, and unconscious fragments that are also shaped by historical forces.26 While this might suggest the identification of James’s corpus or even a Jamesian perspective as inherently problematic, Foucault’s concern is that the unity and meaning of the oeuvre is neither given nor immediate but emerges from the interpretative operation of “transcribing” and “deciphering” what is both manifest and concealed within the text. This informs the hermeneutic approach in this book that attempts to engage with James’s work in its historical and textual specificity, as well as to interpret its meaning and evaluate its implications. Such an interpretative venture is further justified when one attempts to understand the entirety of James’s corpus and is confronted by the various inconsistencies, weaknesses, and

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evasions of an intellectual life made real across decades, continents, and moments that are brought into sharp relief and demand explanation. In addition to this critical enterprise there are two further important justifications for my interpretative approach. It is important to understand James as a Marxist theoretician and practitioner instead of as a career academic. Many of his statements were developed pragmatically to travel across activist and intellectual contexts instead of as theoretically intricate and impregnable edifices—if the latter is indeed possible. Therefore, in assembling the unity of James’s corpus, I approach the ideas produced through his activistintellectual modality as a form of “catachresis”—“proximate naming”— where meaning shifts in response to situational and relational conditions and its encoding is subject to virtually infinitesimal variations of codes.27 Finally, rather than simply considering this hermeneutic process as the clarification of the “real” meaning of James’s oeuvre, I approach it as an inescapably subjective project oriented towards making James’s ideas “live again.” To this end I draw on Hans-Georg Gadamer and situate James beyond his specific standpoint “situation” that has a characteristically limited vision by referring to the concept of “horizon” as the expansive vision gained from a propitious location.28 Using the concept of “horizon,” I hope that this book will achieve Gadamer’s aim of enhancing the interaction between reader and text in two senses: first, that we will be able to piece together and grasp James’s corpus across time and contexts; and second, that this process will put us in conversation with James and enhance our understanding of our own present and contemplation on the future. An important thematic rationale exists in addition to these hermeneutic concerns. As stated above, James’s published work is distributed across a wide variety of disciplines and genres. Consequently, the totality of his work is difficult to summarise and his similarly wide-ranging statements cannot be reconstructed here in their entirety. Nevertheless, while it is tempting to treat these periods and the ideas and work produced within them as discrete, it seems to me that dominant methods, themes and ideas, as well as intellectual shifts and conclusive breaks, can be discerned. Such a holistic view is crucial to an understanding of James. First, his methodological commitment to a totalising conception of history, society, and human activity makes it dangerous to wholly separate thematically connected analytical insights from each other. For example, his analysis of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership in The Black Jacobins and Frank Worrell’s in Beyond a Boundary, although different in moment and context, both demonstrate a central concern with a Socratic and dialogic relationship between leader and led. In each account, leadership is responsive to its popular constituents and seeks to persuade and encourage mass commitment to a set of objectives, instead of promoting a top-down didacticism that also resurfaces in James’s mature critique of the vanguard party in Notes on Dialectics. More generally, as noted above, race, politics, and poetics are consistently employed as key generative categories within James’s modern epiphanies.

Introduction: Modern Epiphanies 11 It is not simply the existence of this synergy that is significant, but that it is not incidental. Each discrete event helps cohere a totalised conception of politics that is lost if James’s work is dismantled into discrete, “manageable” texts or moments. An obvious example is the distinction made between his political and cultural work that is transparent in how he is read and appropriated. Interest in James’s “cultural” writings such as American Civilization has been seen as an avoidance of his Trotskyist concern with emancipation that reflects the “depoliticized academic interest” rampant within Cultural Studies.29 The other side of the coin is that James’s repudiation of Trotskyism and its limited appreciation of cultural politics in Beyond a Boundary can be used to support an opposing argument that dismisses the significance of his earlier “political” work. This either/or scenario risks committing the grave error of separating political and cultural fields, as well as different humanistic and social scientific approaches, as incommensurate. The lamentable corollary is the serious distortion and misunderstanding of James’s intellectual range. Within this compartmentalisation, his wide-ranging interests can only resonate as idiosyncratic personal and intellectual concerns, leaving the reader to marvel at the assorted (as opposed to mutually relevant) insights, with the aggravated loss of the especial political force of his ideas. This book proceeds within two broad sections. The first explicates and analyses James’s personal and intellectual development by situating the evolution of his ideas in their various formative contexts and modes of exposition. Chapter One explores James’s understanding of the modern world as produced through the multiple sites and multilateral flows of modernity. I draw attention to his appreciation of the centrality of the New World to the formation and consolidation of modernity through the productive clash of race, politics, and culture, rendered through the figure of the black Jacobin as an exemplary modern personality. Chapter Two focuses on the surfacing of his distinctive intellectual approach as forged through an “elective affinity”—in Goethe’s sense—with race, politics, and poetics as competing and complementary concerns further complicated by his peripatetic life. Combining an assessment of the “young James” with his more mature works, Chapter Three develops a close examination of the intersection of his personal life and intellectual production and their informative impact on each other. I pay special attention to the impact of his itinerant life on his social and political thought through the prism of “bad faith,” not in order to make character assessments but to reconsider the paradigmatic diasporic postcolonial intellectual with which James is so often associated. The second section focuses on James’s praxis more specifically and extends the analytical insights presented in the first three chapters into a consideration of his political prescriptions. Chapter Four engages with the theme of spontaneity, central to James’s political thought yet seldom explored in detail. I trace the development of his dissatisfaction with the paternal didacticism of the vanguard party, and analyse the merits and failings of his alternative theorisation of organisation as predicated on the spontaneous emergence

12 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics of autonomous mass self-activity and workers’ organic radicalism. Chapter Five concentrates on James’s later work and his distinctive approach to cultural politics as a form of radical activity. Drawing largely on his cricket writing and Beyond a Boundary in particular, I suggest that his concern with a popular aesthetic rendered within cricket offers an invaluable critique and extension of Marxist praxis. James’s sensitivity to human emotional and creative needs and desires strongly counters the evasion of the same as esoteric distractions within classical Marxist politics, that strictly equates the amelioration of human alienation and labour exploitation with altered material conditions such as improved relations and conditions of production. The book then concludes with a brief Epilogue that points to the ways in which James’s work remains instructive for us today in relation to contemporary debates on the state of Marxism in relation to post-marxism and anti-humanism as well as reinvigorated concerns within humanism and the imagining of an ethical politics capable of reconciling individual will and democratic sociality. There is one last thing to be said. All that is physically left of James now is his work—principally ink on paper. For some, there are intimate memories of the person, but the rest of us are left only with his texts. For coming generations, these and these alone will constitute the key resources that might guide us towards a better understanding of the present and future through an appreciation of the past. Some of us, and those yet to come, can only have an imaginative relationship with “Nello”—James’s nickname to his intimates. And “we” will not be able to conjure “Nello,” as in “Nello used to say . . .” or “Nello would think/say/do . . .” as a means to bypass dialogue and dissent. Without such recourse, we will have to discuss, debate, and disagree in reference, but without deference, to James; we will be able to build authentic alliances through an engagement with his work but not in his name. It is in this sense that we will truly take James’s ideas seriously, extend them, and make them live again.

1

“They Brought Themselves” Modernity and the Emergence of the Black Jacobins

The distinguishing feature of the slave was not his race but the concentrated impact of his work on the extensive cultivation of the soil, which eventually made possible the transition to an industrial and urban society. C. L. R. James, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery” From our twenty-first century vantage point, it seems rather obvious to state that the dominant cartography of modernity is a largely Europe-centred enterprise. The respective philosophical, political, and economic events of the Enlightenment and the French and industrial revolutions taken to signal the emergence, consolidation, and development of modernity are exclusively and distinctively European events. Even exemplary contemporary perspectives on the emergence and constitution of modernity, supposedly acclimated to an intellectual environment that questions and problematises the foundation and production of knowledge within narrow geographical contexts, have not fully escaped this constricting focus. Anthony Giddens’s outline of the birth of the modern reflexive subject and social institutions, Marshall Berman’s tour of European urban centres with Goethe, Marx, and Baudelaire as guides, and Jürgen Habermas’s recognition of the (unfinished) generative impulse provided by nineteenth-century aesthetic modernism, all demonstrate the tacit Europe-centred frame of normative modernity.1 While the emergence of modes and relations of mass industrial production, social institutions, and novel cultural forms within Europe are undoubtedly indelible markers of what we consider as the dawn of the modern era, they received vital stimulation from imperial voyages of discovery, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial settlement, and the expropriation of raw materials and profit from colony to metropole. When contributory factors in the emergence of modernity are found outside Europe, they often chart unidirectional flows from the Old World to the New. The “discovery” of “new” regions, materials, and resources; the growth of mercantilism and international markets; the encounters with indigenous populations; and the voluntary, coerced, and forced migrants that populated modernity are taken as the result of European ingenuity and

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activity. Again, to say this is not to say anything new. Scholarship on the formation of modernity as forged beyond, as well as within, European shores is plentiful to the extent that if not capable of issuing a new normative modernity, it at least represents a counter-canon.2 It is thus tempting to understand this interdisciplinary counter-canon incorporating philosophical, sociological, and historical perspectives, among many others, as effectively rewriting modernity in a more expansive frame as the distinctive product of a post-colonial intellectualism armed with critical deconstructive techniques. However, while this counter-canon has its own distinctive features, I would suggest that it is made possible by and written out of a critical terrain that bears significant traces of James’s intellectual hallmark. During the 1930s James recognised that slavery and the Atlantic slave trade was crucial in the emergence of modernity, not only in the customary terms of industrial and social development and capital accumulation, but also in that the plantation slave personified a novel, modern, proto-proletarian consciousness. James’s corrective of the partial history of modernity is based on two fundamental insights: the multidirectional flows between the Old and New Worlds, and the slaves’ durable embodiment of the spirit of modernity that resisted the iniquitous destiny of individual estrangement and social subjugation. His recognition of the extent to which metropolitan capital accumulation and industrial, social, and cultural development was facilitated by the Atlantic slave trade, colonial expansion, and the productivity of plantation slave societies, expands the customary boundaries of modernity beyond Europe. His expansive vision also questions the birth of the newly reflexive subject freed from pre-modern localised ties that populated (European) modernity and constituted it as a decisive historical rupture with the traditional “past.” He recognises the creation of a distinctive, creolised “New World culture” forged by slaves through their physical and imaginative journey across the middle passage into the Americas, which provides a significant counter to the notion of modernity as synonymous with what Benedict Anderson recognises as the development of a “national imagination” located within a “fixed sociological landscape.”3 This culture not only disrupts ideas of the development of modernity within static national boundaries, but also conceptualises a diasporic spatiality that acts as a catalyst for the production of syncretic cultures as emergent and hybrid forms that surpass the fearful insularity of Old World cultures. In addition to questioning the dominant perception of unidirectional economic, social, and cultural flows, James, as Stuart Hall incisively points out, constructs a history of modernity that challenges orthodox imperial and Marxist historiography. In its place, James asserts the significant role of the black diaspora at the inception of modernity and dismantles the metropolisperiphery and traditional-modern binaries.4 His unorthodox interpretation of Marxism also leads him to reassess the analysis of modern capitalist relations of production and the desired existential ends of the modern subject. James’s understanding of the impact of New World slavery on the constitution of

They Brought Themselves 15 modernity then provides the basis for a broader exploration of the emergence of the modern individual and their social condition that confronts the pervasive melancholic equation of modernity to the individual and social frustrations of alienation and industrialisation. Demonstrating the hallmark of his humanistic concern with the impact of individual creative agency on the formation and development of social relations and structures, James illustrates how the modern themes of alienated existence and constraining social orders emerge and are resisted within New World plantation societies. The insurgent originality of James’s expansive geopolitical and humanistic understanding of modernity is perhaps most evident in his dialectical attempt to wrest an exemplar of the universal progressive potentiality of human will from a terrifying example of particularistic suffering and resistance. In his understanding of the San Domingo Revolution as a social uprising striving towards securing human freedom instead of an asinine frenzy of destruction and violent racial revenge, James’s black Jacobins raise arms alongside their French revolutionary cousins to realise the annulled modern promise of freedom and equality.5 For James, this communality signifies the struggle to rescue the inviolate modern universalisms of enlightenment and progress from their debasement, reiterating Aimé Césaire’s declaration that there is room for all at the rendezvous of victory.6 Therefore, James not only writes African slaves and plantation societies into the history of modernity, but also recognises the attempt of the former to realise the radical democratic promise of modernity as an inclusive human enterprise instead of the particular outcome of a distinctive racial experience. James’s insight into the formation of modernity, its sites and social structures, relations, and actors, might appear rather obvious to us now, but it is difficult to overestimate its significance. It demonstrates the intellectual foundations of his humanist Marxism—the entangled concerns of social formation and individual activity—and the existential complexities of the interminable world that he recognised and entered. It also provides the point of departure and orientation for this chapter. I want to suggest that this articulation of the social and the humanistic forms the basis of his understanding of the formation of modernity through the experience of capitalism and colonialism and the social constructions of race, class, culture, and nation. I propose to explore this development through his delineation of the social emergence of the black Jacobins, the travails of their journey from deracination and acculturation to political consciousness, and the imaginative resourcefulness that encapsulates their irresistible humanity.

SLAVERY, BIO-POWER, AND THE “DARK SIDES OF MODERNITY” The classical sociological framework for understanding modernity that draws attention to its contradictions, principally the opposition of progressive

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and degenerative change, asks whether the latter constitutes a purposive consequence or incidental effect. For many charged with addressing this question, the manifestation of this latent contradiction is often seen as a contemporary event. Giddens’s understanding of the exponential growth of the industrial-military complex in the twentieth century is an example of this inherent opposition that is supplemented by the periodic environmental and economic crises that destabilise financial systems and ecosystems.7 This perspective on the emergence and development of modernity, what Giddens recognises as the result of the “double-edged character of modernity” and its “dark sides,” betrays a particularly presentist train of sociological thought. Put simply, the early-modern fears of the sociological founding fathers may be intellectually penetrative and portentous, but retain a somewhat quaint quality given the hitherto unimaginable capacity for the management of social orders and relations within contemporary technologically advanced societies. It is simply not the case, however, that this presentism understates the incisive quality of traditional sociological critiques and their enduring relevance. It also obscures and marginalises a crucial historical aspect of modernity’s dark side; namely, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial expansion, and the formation of plantation slave societies. The emergence of state militarism and extensive social surveillance that Giddens rightly understands as significantly developed and refined during the twentieth century are, in James’s formulation, evident in nascent forms at the inception of modernity within the organisation of plantation society. James’s analysis of the Atlantic slave trade demonstrates the development of militarism and attempts at totalised social control through various tactics including systematic terror and surveillance as essential to the emergent industrial-military complex of colonial slave societies and modern capitalism. James begins the preface to the first edition of The Black Jacobins by stating the profound economic and geopolitical importance of San Domingo for France, and the significance of the slave trade to the entire enterprise: In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied twothirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation. The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves.8 The economic and political importance of San Domingo to France leads James to detail the systematic logic underpinning the critical role of the slave trade and strategies of colonial governance within plantation society. As capital resources crucial to the creation of exchange and surplus value, the slaves were collected as “property” and transported from Africa as human cargo. The significance of this contention as a Marxist analysis

They Brought Themselves 17 of the Atlantic slave trade, predicated primarily on profit-oriented material exchange instead of racial or racist motivation, has long been recognised and developed, perhaps most notably by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery.9 However, even at this early stage in his intellectual odyssey, James demonstrates a discomfort with the facile explanation offered by an intractably economistic analytical model. Instead, he sets himself the target of illustrating the synergy between the ideal and the material as providing the formative impulse for the management of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation societies. Given his assertion that the physical value of the slaves was enhanced by their mental capacities—for example, their ability to grasp technical procedures—James recognises that the functioning and maintenance of the plantation economy and society meant that the slaves had to be controlled intellectually as well as physically. And although the supply of slaves was in a sense limitless, the costs of transportation and the human losses incurred en route, coupled with the process of seasoning and the low reproductive rates in the Americas, meant that the slaves were not a totally expendable capital resource. This meant that the slaves had to be managed in a highly calculated manner. Not in the respective proto-Fordist or -Taylorist senses of productive efficiency and maximisation, but rather in the ordering and management of the entirety of their existence. In The Black Jacobins, James details how recreation, communal gatherings, and procreation among other mundane activities were assiduously regulated so as to ensure the continued economic and social operation of the plantation as well as the safety of the plantation owners and managers. This impression of totalised human management fleshes out Michel Foucault’s conceptual paradigm of “bio-power” as “without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism.”10 Just as Foucauldian bio-power recognises that capitalism “would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes,” James’s analysis of the processes of colonial management alongside the slave trade and the development of New World slave societies demonstrates the emergence of novel modes of social formation and control.11 For him, these new forms of social order within plantation economies cannot be easily explained away as examples of pathological irrationality. Rather, the systems of control within slave societies are the direct and purposeful outcome of capitalist industrial modes of production within a colonial plantocracy. By identifying the coercive and non-coercive forms of power exercised within the maintenance of plantation society, James conceptualises the distinctively modern modes of controlling a social population in a more expansive geopolitical frame. His understanding of the maintenance of slavery and plantation society in the face of the numerical disadvantage of those exercising power shares the bio-political concern with “the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birth-rate, longevity,

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public health, housing and migration.”12 In a sense, James’s attention to the political practices and economic imperatives central to the formation and maintenance of New World slave societies and plantation economies points to a conspicuous absence of the racialized discourses and effects of slavery and colonialism within Foucault’s account of bio-power.13 This is not to dismiss Foucault’s understanding of modernity as based on an imperceptive and ethnocentric discursive matrix that ought to be replaced by an alternative paradigm that restores historical accuracy through a concentration on the experiential and epistemic primacy of enslaved and colonised peoples. Rather, it reiterates James’s establishment of a broader geopolitical frame of modernity. He recognises the coercive and non-coercive functions of the industrial-military complex of slave societies as producing the regimes of bodily discipline, the management of (reproductive) health, and the deployment of surveillance techniques in the production and organisation of social space and ideas. This is the case in capitalist social systems within both Europe and New World slave societies. A series of examples develops this expanded bio-political framework. For James, the apparently brutal treatment of slaves in transportation, at the point of sale and during their new employment, was informed by a series of rational judgements predicated largely on economic imperatives. Slaves were transported in the most confined conditions in order to maximise the available space; the intimate and degrading examinations on the auction block served to allow the purchaser to determine the quality of their prospective goods; the marking of flesh denoted possession, not punishment; the exacting work regimes were determined by the precise requirements of mass sugar production; and, apart from sleep, the allocated periods of rest were apportioned so that slaves could cultivate provisions that might sustain them during periods of scarcity when epidemics broke out and thousands died. Additionally, the slave masters’ disciplinary techniques were not the “unusual spectacle of property-owners apparently careless of preserving their property,” but were rather the means by which they would “ensure their own safety.”14 This “unusual spectacle” represents one of James’s most influential analyses of slavery: although he usefully documents the vicious bloodshed fundamental to plantation slavery, he was at pains to demonstrate that it was not gratuitously brutal, but that its techniques of repression and violence were the most sophisticated expression of capitalist discipline available at that precise historical moment.15 In pointing out that the torture of slaves was a series of systematically ordered events instead of random incidents, James articulates the production of legitimate ideas and forms of social conduct and the “regime of calculated brutality and terrorism”16 central to plantation and colonial management. Therefore, the physical techniques of brutality and punishment enacted on slaves are not solely isolated as normalised acts within the practical context of slavery, but are also a result of ingenious instrumentality. Starting with the practices of torture, James notes that punishments were not indiscriminate

They Brought Themselves 19 occurrences that merely embodied the physical practising of power, but were refined in a series of specialised variations and even given their own titles to denote that they were carefully considered and assiduously developed practices. For example, the “four-post”—where the arms and legs of the slave were tied to posts set into the earth—was adapted for the pregnant woman by a hole dug in the ground to accommodate her stomach.17 This preparedness transgresses ideals of feminine frailty (of course inapplicable to slaves) and taboos around the sanctity of life in utero that might ordinarily have been accepted as reserved for God’s will. We can also imagine that the disciplinary effects of this sadistic ingenuity would have provided the unnerving signal that all customary moral standards of compassion and pity had been suspended. The practice of torture as a form of punishment and discipline instead of gratuitous violence represents a profound shift in the mechanisms of power. James recognises the reason of the “unusual spectacle” of owners’ brutality towards their slaves as peculiar to the rational demands of modern capital accumulation and growth of commercial markets and industrialisation. This novel form of social control through calculated and routine violence is suggestive of Foucault’s analysis of the transformed exercise of social power from the ancient to the pre-modern. In contrast with its absolute ancient form, where a sovereign power held and exercised the right to dispose of life that transgressed or contravened its authority or will, Foucault points out that the right of life became “dissymmetrical” in its relative and limited modern manifestation: The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the “power of life and death” was in reality the right to take life or let live.18 Power, therefore, becomes a “right of seizure” and is concentrated within the regulations attached to allowing life as well as the taking of life. The regulatory aspects of conferring life are constituted as a means to exercise social control with the emphasis on the productive, as opposed to the destructive, capacity of power. This reformation of power seeking to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise and organise the forces under it”19 is evident within James’s understanding of slavery. The treatment of slaves then serves alongside the interests of capital as an example of the Foucaldian notion of “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.”20 Similarly, the power exercised by the slave owners is precisely oriented towards economic and social productivity; the promotion of a requisite social order is of paramount importance to the protection and advancement

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of the dominant mode and relations of production. It is therefore important to note James’s appreciation of the regimes of bio-power within slave societies as also entailing productive aspects relative to social structure and individual consciousness. The development of labour skills and specific educational imperatives combined the careful encouragement of modes of self-development with the maintenance of plantation slave society. As such, The Black Jacobins notes that slaves were encouraged to undertake “recreational” small-scale subsistence agriculture and instruction in principles of Christianity. This aimed to reproduce individual skills and dispositions, acculturating slaves to certain modes of acceptable “civilised” social behaviour while obviously excluding them from full civic membership. James understands the supplementary nonviolent and non-coercive regimes of control and dominance as indicative of the endeavour to internally organise slaves’ minds and bodies in response to the tangible fear of the revolutionary potentiality of their free private association. However, he also points to the assiduous attempts of slave owners to retain the ultimate control over life as the bio-political regimes that regulated slave life were especially ill-disposed towards the right of life and death being exercised by the enslaved population. James continually illustrates how this slave owners’ right was contravened by the African slaves; for example, many would chose suicide over enslavement, triumphantly jumping overboard when allowed up on deck across the middle passage in order to grasp the freedom awaiting them in death.21 Such cases of suicide are not simply explicable as individual events; they represent a significant transgression of the sovereign’s power and right of life and death. In terms of the slave owners, this suicidal practice signals the slaves’ unlawful assumption of the sole right of owners to dispose of their property. Therefore, the historical illegality of suicide within Western societies, and its position as an early source of sociological concern that “testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life” is mirrored by certain anxieties within slave societies.22 James’s example of the “torture of the collar,” where women suspected of aborting a pregnancy were made to wear a collar fastened around their neck “until they produced a child,” serves as a reminder of their injudicious exercising of the right of life and death and subsequent debt of new life to their owner in recompense.23 The specific convergence of bio-power and the discursive repertoires and coercive practices supporting and reinforcing slavery and plantation society also illustrates another key mode of social control within modernity: surveillance. Of course, a variety of factors—increased informational flows, technological advancements, advanced powers of electronic observation— have combined to create a form of surveillance within late-modern social formations on a totalised scale hitherto unimaginable.24 Indeed, while it is difficult, if not erroneous, to deny the elaborate range and scope of this contemporary technological capacity in its specificity, it is worth appreciating

They Brought Themselves 21 the emergence of immense programs of social surveillance prior to the twentieth century. Foucault’s much vaunted reference to Bentham’s Panopticon as a form of social surveillance for the purpose of non-coercive social control that historicises our post-/late modern awareness of the invisible gaze of power is instructive here.25 Within this perspective, the pivotal political function of seventeenth-century architecture as a means to organise social space and implement integrated surveillance techniques, is regarded as the institution of totalised social observation used to control subject populations. Although there was a significant variance in the social relations of slavery throughout the Americas in terms of the differences in the formulation of laws governing slaves,26 the management of social space through assiduous observation consistently remained a key project. As such, the spatial organisation of New World plantation societies often reflected the relationship between social relations and policies for slave management: for example, higher levels of slave self-reproduction in North America and fear of the potential radicalism of this “settled” population, led to a rigidly demarcated and policed social and cultural distance between slave and owner.27 Even still, the high levels of slave mortality in the Caribbean created a need for the continual importation of “fresh” Africans. Although some see this need as the beginning of a cross-cultural synergy and development of a creole society and culture, totalised control and spatial regulation remained key objectives. Feared for its seditious potential, the slaves’ cultural practices and indigenous sacred rituals were prohibited. Attempts at regulation were reinforced by punishment and privation, and although The Black Jacobins concentrates on conveying the slaves’ acts of resistance, the fact that they had to resort to the secret preservation and performance of their practices—often late at night—demonstrates the range and scope of the surveillance to which they were subject. Therefore, even if on a lesser scale, the role of surveillance within the maintenance of the plantation social order is suggestive of New World slavery as a distinctively modern event that established thoroughly modern forms of social, economic, and cultural organisation. Imagining an instructive conversation between James and Foucault bears fruit at the descriptive level; their different examples draw needed attention to the meticulous development of state violence and the tacit forms of power extending beyond the sphere of physical activity. Nevertheless, they significantly diverge at the level of explanation, as is transparent in James’s adoption of an activist mode that leads him towards concrete forms of explanation and praxis. His preparedness to provoke indignant ire through reaching conclusive observations and prescriptions offers a crucial distinction given the controversy surrounding the political efficacy and applicability of Foucault’s work. For one, analyses of Foucault’s descriptive focus and the capacity of the discursive character of his epistemological insights are sometimes taken to recognise the amorphous character of political power

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without addressing the resolute demands of an engaged politics.28 Indeed, while some critiques of Foucault’s conceptualisation of the productive aspects of power have lamented its incapacity to fully theorise resistance, for James the dialectician, description, explanation, and prescription are different levels of an integrated historico-political exercise.29 Without uncovering the specific objective conditions of society, one is intellectually and politically disenfranchised, cut adrift from informed hope in a frightening sea of serendipitous contingency. For James, discreet analytical enterprises are an important intellectual activity, but remain inseparable from political assessment and prescription. Therefore, within this Jamesian schema, the descriptive and historical correspondence between the disciplined economy of movement exhibited by the marching soldier and the ordered arrangement of the slave-gang is only significant inasmuch as it offers some explanatory insight and informs political purpose. Of course, this is simply to point to the value and limitations of considering James alongside Foucault, which is especially important given the incompatibility of the latter’s thought with the same Marxist ideas of ideology—dependent on the construction of a power relation that presents domination and resistance as dialectical opposites—that influence James.30

VERSIONS AND VISIONS OF MODERNITY As outlined at the start of this chapter, the recognition of modernity as constituted through the multidirectional flows between the Old World and the New is one of James’s key contributions. While this insight is regarded as part of a series of “thrilling reversals” inasmuch as they illuminate how “the colonies created Europe, and slavery created Western civilization,”31 James does not replace one unidirectional model with another. Although he raises the hitherto peripheral profile of the Atlantic slave trade and New World plantation slave economies as epochal modern events in terms of providing a proto-industrial capitalist mode and relations of production, he does not erase the significance of European developments. This is clear in Modern Politics, in which he locates the dawn of the modern age in the seventeenth century with the emergence of English parliamentary democracy and Cartesian rationalism.32 As such, Jamesian modernity is more a series of thrilling articulations than reversals. He charts the modern age as emerging through the combination of politico-material democratic impulses and philosophical rationalism that dominated in Europe until the solidification of the Industrial Revolution.33 Normative European modernity thus remains important for James because it formally raises these democratic and rationalist ideals, even if it is unable to realise or fulfil them. Nevertheless, in what is now a signature postcolonial move that assesses the powerful effects of the colonial experience on both colony and metropole, colonised and coloniser,34

They Brought Themselves 23 James not only understands how the Old World made plantation slavery and the New World, yet simultaneously, he evaluates how the New World facilitated Old World capitalist economic consolidation and industrialisation. Perhaps more powerfully, James seeks to explain why the New World as a social space, and the modern personality that inhabited it, was more receptive towards the formal modern ethical-political ideals of freedom and democracy than the Old. If, for James, the character of Old World modernity was broadly typified in the combination of democratic principles—beginning with Cromwell and the Levellers, to the American and French Revolutions, to philosophical rationalism from Descartes through to German Idealism—the specificity of New World modernity was altogether different. The customary understanding of Western modernity, as a radical break with the past noting a transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ societies evinced through the radical reshaping of spatial-temporal relations, is inapplicable to the New World. The idea that time becomes standardised, increasingly regulated, and removed from local contexts, and that space is formally bounded within national units, offers a particular characterisation of modernity where space and time are configured as oppositional poles: “time” is attached to the “Historical” and privileged through its equation with movement and progression, while “space” is a static formation, given meaning through its dominant partner.35 This formulation significantly conceives of space as simply “there,” that is, determined by and activated through temporality. Space is to be conquered and recast in time which, in turn, is produced by the standardised social practices and the fetishisation of temporality resulting from the mode and relations of modern capitalist industrialisation. This political version of the social-temporal structure of modernity has been supplemented by sociological accounts of “reflexive modernity” that enumerate the social actor escaping from tradition and the state of nature.36 Broadly stated, the contention is that the modern individual emerged from the particularistic constraints of community and the requisite expectations placed upon them resulting from their position in the life course and into reflexive activity. Without the timeworn patterns of communally ascribed roles of self-activity, the modern agent was free, so the story goes, to create themselves; they acquired an individual (auto)biography and fashioned a self according to their own unfettered understanding of what they might, could, and should be.37 As stories of modernity go, this one is particularly attractive inasmuch as it counters material-determinist treatises, and allows us to witness the birth of universal human consciousness and self-determination from a profound temporal distance. However, this story of modernity and the formative relationship between space and time is, as is the case with all historical reconstructions, subject to contestation. In terms of the expansive Jamesian vision, a key point of disagreement emerges over the social actor emerging from the Atlantic slave trade and opening of the New World. In contrast to the conflict between time and

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space within Old World modernity and its reflexive subject (whose individuality already presupposes their social atomisation), the New World social space and individual actor is fundamentally different. James uses the Caribbean as an exemplar of New World modernity that, unlike the Old World, is a combination of “here” and “there.” This is to say that the various migrants—forced, coerced and voluntary—that populated the New World came from somewhere else, constituted the New World as a creolised social space, and endowed its diasporic inhabitants with an expansive weltanschauung. The modern European concern with creating and maintaining coherent national communities and identities within fixed spatial boundaries was far less feasible within the New World. In this sense, the Caribbean was the domain of the Creole, drawing from the Spanish, criollo, denoting “a committed settler, one identified with the area of settlement, one native to the settlement though not ancestrally indigenous to it,” and was creolised.38 This denotation is descriptively and analytically important in its suggestion that the creolised community was without the customary European sense of cosmic, economic, political, or cultural centrality, and had no salient singular historical essence to refer to. For James, the Caribbean is thus framed as a tabula rasa because it has never been a traditional colonial territory with clearly distinguished economic and political relations between two cultures. Native culture there was none. The aboriginal Amerindian civilisation had been destroyed. Every succeeding year, therefore, saw the labouring population, slave or free, incorporating into itself more and more of the language, customs, aims and outlook of its masters.39 Inspiring a now routine refrain within postcolonial criticism, James positively recasts this historical and traditional deficiency. The Caribbean specifically, and the New World generally, is a syncretic construct, and the absence of coherent national traditions and cultures is not a vacuum that must be fulfilled by the adoption of boundaries and cultures exported from the colonial centre. Instead, this lack liberates the civic ideals and people of the New World from the constraints of reified tradition. It opens the possibility of countering the normative force of an “imaginative geography” that constructs the Other through the dramatisation of distance, difference, and diversity, with an alternative imagination that produces a potentially more inclusive social space instead of (in)forming exoticized and racist discourses.40 This idea of the social potential of Caribbean creolisation has been advanced to great effect by Edouard Glissant’s critique of the ironic fallacy of Western History—in view of its attachment to “universal” humanism—as a Eurocentric exclusionary totality that has practiced domination and resisted “the liberating force of diversity.”41 Furthermore, given that the obsession with History as capable of recovering “the primordial source,” paradoxically,

They Brought Themselves 25 does not yield normative truths but “peculiarities” that obscure as well as illuminate, Glissant recognises creolised notions of a de-centred history as indispensable. Consequently, creolised Caribbean “nonhistory” results from the convergence of different peoples, histories, and cultures that have travelled across space and time. This is a powerful abstraction in its capacity to dislocate the linear Historical continuum that depends on and reifies sameness, yet also grasps the concrete social; creolisation is not just a concept or an event, but something that has been struggled for: “Just as Sameness began with expansionist plunder in the West, Diversity came to light through the political and armed resistance of peoples.”42 This brings us to the threshold of the creolised agents of the New World who, as Glissant argues in a manner resonant of James’s black Jacobins, asserted the right to diversity through political and armed struggles. The criollo identified by Edward Kamau Brathwaite is a disputed figure whose interstitial position in the New World raises the possibilities of the development of a creole “folk culture,” or the retention of African social and cultural practices outlined within plantation society and plural society models of creolisation.43 These debates are crucial in declaring the stakes in assessing the meaning of the interstitial black diasporic subject in the Caribbean, and the structure of its social systems in relation to colonialism, slavery, and cultural pluralism. While this has sometimes framed creolisation as an either/or proposition of assimilationist imitation or indigenisation that survives and resists the dominant (colonial) culture, Brathwaite draws out its complexities. He argues that the process of Caribbean acculturation is subject to an “ambivalent acceptance-rejection syndrome” and that what is (mis)labelled as mimicry is, in actuality, an unavoidable feature of creolisation that combines imitation and native creation: “our real/apparent imitation involves at the same time a significant element of creativity, while our creativity involves a significant element of imitation.”44 This refusal to privilege either imitation or native creation within the conceptualisation of creolisation recognises the inexorable synergy between colony and metropole, the New World and the Old, and establishes a foundation for approaching the Jamesian understanding of the social and cultural import of creolisation. As an early aggregation of an industrial proletariat, New World slaves were at the vanguard of the alienating tensions of modernity that Marx famously noted in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. However, while the—albeit minimal—compensation of wages enabled wage-labourers to overcome their indifference towards the content of their labour, slaves had no such distraction from or consolation for their own alienation. The slaves’ alienation, and its psycho-social manifestation, is a critical issue not just in its relationship to alternate strategies of imitation and native creation, but also in its association with the foundational sociological dualism of agency and structure. The epic heroism of James’s black Jacobins is challenged by the set of stringent material and physical challenges that they confronted. Burgeoning infant mortality rates attributable to a variety

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of diseases, ill-treatment and malnutrition which also caused low fertility and reproductive rates, the large number of fatalities sustained during the middle passage, and the initial process of “seasoning” in their new lands all contributed towards the low life expectancy of Caribbean slaves and the need for their constant replenishment.45 Orlando Patterson’s influential study Slavery and Social Death outlines further insurmountable existential barriers facing the slaves in that their transportation from Africa instilled a consuming and stultifying “natal alienation” that left them floundering, adrift in a liminal existence synonymous with “social death.”46 Of course, James imagines the slaves’ response to their alienation rather differently. He argues that their experience of plantation society, and position within the productive process, not only positioned them at the nexus of modernity, but crucially gave them an unparalleled insight into the inherent flaws and contradictions of Western civilisation and the suppressed promise of modernity. As a valuable capital and human resource charged with developing technical skills, operating and maintaining complex industrial systems, and generating enormous wealth, the slaves were terrorised by the systemic brutality necessary for maintaining the plantation economy and the slave owners’ safety. In living these tensions, the slaves were simultaneously positioned inside and outside of Western civilisation. This is not to say that they were situated within different social realities at specific moments, but that the totality of their social existence was an encounter with this simultaneous inclusion and exclusion from Western civilisation: From the start there had been the gap, constantly growing, between the rudimentary conditions of the life of the slave and the language he used. There was therefore in West Indian society an inherent antagonism between the consciousness of the black masses and the reality of their lives, inherent in that it was constantly produced and reproduced not by agitators but by the very conditions of the society itself.47 The emergence of the black Jacobins through their fraught encounter with the West is not, however, the entire story. Given that James’s early literary exploits had left him fascinated with individual character and its significance within historical development,48 The Black Jacobins also serves as “an extraordinary synthesis of novelistic narrative and meticulous factual reconstruction” that recovers the social resonance of individual creative genius within the unlikely setting of New World slavery.49 The transplanted Africans—peoples of distinct histories, social institutions, languages and cultures—possessed a creative subjectivity predating their arrival in the Americas. This is an obvious statement, but writing in an era when the concept of African civilisation was largely considered absurd, it was important for James to insert the black diaspora into the broad frame of social history and human civilisational development instead of distilling his arguments to the concentrated relations of industrial capitalist production.50 The New

They Brought Themselves 27 World may have been a tabula rasa, produced through the creative tension of the creolised processes of imitation, retention, and native creation, but the sensibilities of the transported Africans significantly contributed towards its reformation: For the slave brought himself [sic]; he brought with him the content of his mind, his memory. He thought in the logic and language of his people. He recognized as socially significant that which he had been taught to comprehend. . . . He valued that which his previous life had taught him to value; he feared that which he had feared in Africa; his very notions were those of his people and he passed all of this on to his children. He faced this contradictory situation in a context into which he was thrown among people of different African backgrounds. All Africans were slaves, slaves supposed to act in a specific way. But what was this way? There was no model to follow, only one to build.51 In bringing themselves, the content of their minds, memory, logic and language, and in bringing their values, fears and notions, the African slaves demonstrated the distinctively human qualities of contemplative consciousness. As such, they epitomised the modern personality through their capacity to fashion a habitable existence out of the fusion of these retentions, their new social structures and roles, and their human potential. Instead of succumbing to the “natal alienation” and “social death” towards which plantation society ushered them, James’s black Jacobins exemplified the entirety of the modernist project. Their suffering bore testament to the flaws, contradictions, costs, and risks of Old World modernity, and their struggles embodied its promise and the thrall of progress and enlightenment. This is the pivotal Jamesian contention: there are two versions of modernity and yet only one. There is the modernity of the Old World, characterised by the false promise and latent potential despoiled by the egocentric materialism and aggressive individualism of capitalism. And there is also the modernity of the New World that appreciates the relationship between the individual and the collective and the social implications of reasoned thought; in short, this modernity truly understands the human value of freedom and democracy. This second modernity is modernity in essence; it is modernity in as opposed to of the New World. This essential modernity is the keeper and the concretisation of the abstracted Hegelian spirit of humanity that evolves towards Freedom; for James, freedom is largely imagined within European modernity but made real elsewhere. This model is at once compelling and problematic. As Glissant points out, the creolised counter-narrative to Eurocentric industrial modernity disrupts the negative effects of linear temporality and fixed space. The formation of a diasporic consciousness is forged through unfolding spatial and temporal interconnections that James identifies in the slave communities that combine African retentions, colonial adoptions, and their new plantation

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habitus that, in turn, reflect the hybridity of “routes” as opposed to the purity of “roots.”52 Therefore, instead of defending the unsustainable purity of race, culture, history, and tradition—and resorting to the violence necessary to reinforce such untenable absolutism—diasporic identification is oriented towards the processes of becoming as opposed to the fixity of being.53 The centrality of the process of becoming to diasporic New World identity contests the binary that dictates either the deracination of slaves or their capitulation to mimicry. And given that this becoming is oriented towards a free modern personality, James is able to cast the New World as modernity proper instead of a local or racial counter-modernity. The pivotal impact of the slaves’ “training in social labour” enabled them to develop the “concrete ability to turn from the faculties used in physical work to the powers of speech and other forms of self-expression,” which allows James to portray them as human agents.54 Just as Glissant argues that “[s]ameness rises within the fascination with the individual” and “[d]iversity is spread through the dynamism of communities,” diasporic identity is formed through the material and symbolic forms of diversity characteristic of modernity but denied by hegemonic Modernity.55

RE/IMAGINING THE EPIC OF HISTORY The conceptual paradigm of the creolised diversity of modernity in the New World is, however, somewhat compromised by James’s methodological approach. If the title The Black Jacobins provides a firm descriptive marker of James’s historical project, then the book’s subtitle, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, reflects his methodological process. For James, politics is not simply a logical process of rational calculation that assesses the utilitarian relationship between the management of material resources and their social distribution. Instead, his understanding of social structure is acutely attuned to the qualitative existence of its human actors, and he formulates politics as the process by which these agents attempt to realise their quest for human fulfilment. Eschewing the reduction of political life to rational calculation, James idealises politics as a Socratic enterprise, whereby authentic popular commitment is secured through the presentation of a compelling value agenda. Therefore, political and social development—that is to say, history—is not an arid linear temporal process evident within a series of tangible events driven by efficiency and maximisation. It is the unfolding epic of an historical drama where social actors struggle to create the social order that they imagine as capable of delivering their material subsistence and psychic peace. Although this has an aura of religiosity about it, the teleological sensibilities of James’s political imagination are cohered within an avowedly secular domain. The key point that marks the distinctiveness of his independent Marxism is his desire to maintain sight of sensuous and emotive

They Brought Themselves 29 humanistic qualities that tended to be relegated within materialistic assessments of social structure and relations. Furthermore, this creative proclivity is compatible with the project of radical social transformation, inasmuch as a worthwhile revolutionary movement must attempt to conjure a new epochal moment that can only exist as imagined before the attempt to make it real.56 While assiduously avoiding modelling individuals as ciphers of socioeconomic calculations, James’s novelist’s concern with character means that the individual plays a significant role in his historiography and social and political thought. However, it is notable that the individual is conceptualised both collectively as the “mass” and singularly as the leader—it is the realisation of individual agency within the mass of black Jacobins and Toussaint’s leadership that affect the San Domingo Revolution. Furthermore, an interest in dominant personalities is consistent throughout his work: for example, in a talk on George Padmore, James lists Lenin, Gandhi, Mao Tse-Tung, and Nkrumah as the four notaries driving the movement towards a new global epoch of revolutionary social transformation.57 Elsewhere, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, and W. G. Grace, among many others, are presented as figures whose especial genius mirrors significant epochal shifts. While James does not necessarily frame the role of great men as pivotal to historical development58—they are produced by and in turn produce their historical moment—this methodological predilection is analytically significant as both a facilitating framework and a limit to social understanding. A careful reading of James illustrates a complex relationship between leaders and the “masses” they represent which, at times, reifies the representative capacity of leaders as individuals and ushers the mass into a peripheral role. Simply put, while James consistently frames mass action as pivotal to historical change, his fascination with the force of personality and individual leadership provides a recurrent contradiction. This fact raises a key question: to what extent does the analytical focus on leadership compromise an account of a mass revolutionary movement as emergent from the latent radical selfactivity of the people? Much after the initial publication of The Black Jacobins, several theorists have discussed the tension between leader and “mass” in terms of specific theoretical inconsistencies within James’s understanding of Hegelian philosophy that, in turn, impact deleteriously on his historiography and political thought. This shortcoming is discernable within the struggle for primacy between James and Raya Dunayevskaya inside the Johnson Forest Tendency (JFT), as well as the significant divergence of their respective abstract theorisations of political organisation and conceptualisations of praxis.59 Olga Domanski suggests that James’s failure to grasp the complexity of Being, Essence, and Notion in Hegel’s lesser Logic in his preparatory work for Notes on Dialectics had serious effects. His inability to understand the 1950 East German miners’ strike as a new and radical response to mass automation demonstrated his failure “to grasp the new stage of production and the

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new stage of workers’ revolt because, at that very time he became altogether preoccupied with proving the ‘social personality’ of ‘original characters.’ ”60 The significance of this “failure” is compounded in that the “new humanism of the great East German revolt played a secondary role to the humanism of the great writer.”61 Domanski’s observation suggests that, just as Marx and Engels caution against in The German Ideology, James veers towards the trap of overemphasising individual personality within an abstracted historical understanding that fails to recognise materiality as the causal explanation for social development. In addition, for Domanski, a complacent paternalism lurks beneath James’s historiography and political thought, in that while Dunayevskaya located the “new society” within the final syllogism of Hegelian Absolute Mind, James is only able to see himself as mind. Domanski asserts that while culture was an important sphere for the News and Letters Group, it was a residual space for James where he could position the masses without having to address them as Mind.62 Indeed, Domanski’s assertion that culture was a residual category for James is particularly unconvincing in that it ignores the cultural critique of American Civilization which, ironically, is one of James’s texts least consistently fixated on the pivotal role and function of representative individuals. In addition, Aldon Lynn Nielsen argues that Dunayevskaya’s critique of James—reiterated by Domanski—is based on spurious and incomplete quotation from Notes on Dialectics and de-contextualised references drawn from a letter to Grace Lee. Nielsen thus refutes the charge, stating that not only did James have a nagging intuition about the relevance of Philosophy of Mind, but also “continued throughout his career to return to Hegel’s most difficult works.”63 There is, however, a point worth pursuing here. It would be unfair to suggest that James contradicted Marx and Engels’s point of connecting ruling ideas to ruling individuals and relations of a given mode of production thus preventing the abstraction of the enemy within concepts such as “the notion” and “the idea.”64 The objects of James’s political ire—for example colonialism, capitalism, and racism—are concretised within a given mode and relations of production, including the productive relations of slaves and colonial expropriation of materials and surplus value. And, despite Domanski’s objection to James’s supposed patrician sensibility, he was concerned with the autodidacticism of the people and their existential epistemic privilege that lacked formal training, yet was informed by an instinctive political knowledge unparalleled within Marxist abstraction. Nevertheless, James’s thought does include a fetishisation of the personality, especially the charismatic leader who derives “his” mandate and power from “his” ability to internalise the social desires of the masses—drawn from Hegel’s characterisation of the “World Historical” individual. For Hegel, the mind or spirit that creates World History is neither passive object nor activity external to the object. Instead, the “spiritual activity” governing historical development is directed towards an object that is “active in itself” and has

They Brought Themselves 31 “spontaneously worked itself up into the result to be brought about by that activity, so that in the activity and the object, one and the same content is present.”65 Therefore, the World Historical individual is not only created by a given time, but creates that time itself, and as such, is the instrument “of the mind or spirit of their time and their people.” This idea is crucial for James’s analysis, insofar as Hegel then states that the formation of the World Historical individual demonstrates a dialectical process in that “their people served these heroes as an instrument for the accomplishment of their deeds.”66 The delineation of the World Historical individual whose self-activity is synonymous with the populace, social reality, and historical moment resonates throughout James’s social and political thought. While the Hungarian workers’ councils eulogised within Facing Reality and the slaves’ organisational autonomy to shape their own destiny enumerated in The Black Jacobins, for example, both recall the direct popular democracy of the Paris Commune, the dominating figure of the World Historical individual looms large. In the case of the San Domingo Revolution, James later crucially suggests that while the development of Toussaint’s ideas and methods cannot be seen as inevitable, by the middle of 1794, it was difficult to separate his personality from his formative social environment; for this reason, James finds it essential to establish Toussaint’s character as an individual.67 The vagueness of the point at which social forces end and the impress of personality begins suggests the tension James faces in the relationship between the leader and mass. The starting point here is Hegel’s argument that partial self-knowledge, through constituents of the “single self” instead of its totality, has meaning for individuals but not philosophy. He suggests that an incomplete understanding of Mind distorts absolute meaning into individual perspectives suitable for the machinations of real politik but incompatible with “right” and “morality” which can result in the erroneous attachment of World Historical characteristics to “petty” individuals. Even though James, like Hegel, understands historical truth as knowable through established principles and rigorous investigation, James understands history as constantly distorted by capitalism for the purposes of social control. However, where Hegel, for whom “very good reasons of his time . . . led his Logic into an impossible and fantastic idealism about world-spirit,”68 can explain any apparent incoherence in his thought as Divine Providence, James, the avowed atheist, has no such all-embracing contingency. Therefore, he draws on specious mythological and biological premises in order to sustain his construction of the World Historical character of the epic leader. The disorderly dialectic between leader and led is further complicated by the function of myth within theories and narratives of Caribbean acculturation that is sometimes taken to demonstrate the retrieval of historical memory as a struggle between the coloniser and colonised.69 For example, given the suppression of factual information and manipulation of historical record, mythical belief becomes a powerful and crucial social resource. In this

32 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics vein, Wilson Harris argues that Caribbean myth performs a crucial imaginative and social function: it raises the possibility of imagining a historical past and free future where the existence of either is neither transparent nor self-evident.70 However, if the common acceptance of myths as random and irrational stories misunderstands their social capacity to soothe ontological, existential, and metaphysical anxieties, it must be noted that myths do not necessarily resolve the contradictions that sponsored their emergence in the first place.71 This caveat is crucial in highlighting the differential social purposes and effects of myth; while Harris points to an imaginative form of mythopoeia as the deliberate and conscious creation of a transparent historico-political project, myth also serves as an acknowledged fictitious substitute for the factual. In his eagerness to reclaim the radical self-agency of the African diaspora, James affords the leader iconic social status and mythic political qualities as a means of validating their World Historical character and the movement they represent. This tendency is evident in the discovery and elevation of an individual as essential to his political vision, for example, his adherence to the concept of charismatic leadership in discussing Kwame Nkrumah’s role in the Ghana Revolution. Baruch Hirson sees this as an opportunistic mode of James’s thought in that he soon became weary of Nkrumah’s eccentricities and looked for alternative African leaders, such as Nyerere, to “place on the pedestal alongside Marx and Engels.”72 Alluding to the mythology of the charismatic leader and its dangers while noting the dictionary definition of “charismatic” as a talent bestowed by God, Hirson suggests that the centrality of individual leadership within James’s social thought is problematic. For Hirson, the resultant contradictions and inconsistencies within James’s work are only resolved through the mystical and mythologised powers of the leader. The mythological contingency within James’s characterisation of the World Historical Individual is incongruent with the rationalist affinities of his social thought and leads him towards weak forms of explanation where, for example, the singular importance and universal character of Toussaint is asserted through an association with other significant historical and fictional figures.73 However, if these conclusions signal a methodological weakness, they also demonstrate James’s worthy concern with building narrative accounts of social and historical development that would possess a compelling moral force instead of a simple functionalist explanation. This is to say that in assuming the task of understanding and conveying the entirety of modernity, his undertaking is an exercise in what we now understand as the sociological imagination capable of portraying intimate personal and broader social realities. Indeed, as James turns towards conceptualising the dialectic between race and class, he achieves a more satisfying analysis of the synergy between individual experience and social structure that combines an eloquent account of human agency, mass radicalism, and political solidarity alongside a practical appreciation of socioeconomic forces and structures.

They Brought Themselves 33 THE BLACK JACOBINS AS PROTO-PROLETARIANS The deep significance of James’s intervention, and its effect on the understanding of the formation of modernity, bears repetition. An orthodox critical understanding of the emergence of modernity and the modern industrial-capitalist world economy retains Europe as the crucial formative arena. Over two decades after the publication of The Black Jacobins, Eric Hobsbawm’s important appraisal of the late eighteenth century, The Age of Revolution, describes the world in 1789 as “overwhelmingly rural” and notes that it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain that the urban population began to overtake the rural.74 Also for Hobsbawm, the “take-off” phase of the Industrial Revolution that “broke out” in the 1780s and indicated the initial liberation of human productive power, was a largely British event. The implication here is that the urban and the metropolitan in midnineteenth–century Britain signify the consolidation of industrial development and social advancement initiated there three generations earlier. Concurrently, the slave plantations of the Caribbean islands, like the estates of North America, were “large quasi-feudal” formations characterised by a monoculture economy based on sugar and sometimes supplemented by the limited production of other export crops such as tobacco, coffee, and dyestuffs. Indeed, the history of the Caribbean between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries “can be written in terms of the decline of sugar and the rise of cotton.”75 Additionally, the gestation of the revolutionary political consciousness that would be fully awakened within the proletariat born during the full throes of the Industrial Revolution is situated firmly within Europe and the French Revolution, not the American. The spectacular success of the anticolonial struggle in San Domingo that so captured James’s historical and political imagination is, as a result, understood as an event inspired by the French Revolution. For James, it is precisely this relegation of the historical and economic significance of the Americas in the formation of the modern world, and the distinctively modern character of its peoples, that requires critical redress. Considering that Hobsbawm is concerned with a history of European social and economic development, his chosen focal point is unsurprising. However, the penetrative insight of James’s analysis is evident in its critical contribution to different intellectual moments. In the inter-war years his work, not least The Black Jacobins, sought to write the Atlantic slave trade and the modern, radical subjectivity of the African slaves transported to the Americas into history. That same body of work is also able to provide a corrective to later accounts that, despite moving against the arid orthodoxies of imperial historiography, retain a strict European focus. The profound quality of this latter capacity to mount a contemporary intervention that retains its relevance in the future is especially evident in the sense that, now in the twenty-first century, James reads almost as a presentist critique of the

34 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics radical orthodoxy to which Hobsbawm belongs. His attempt to challenge the understanding of (Western) modernity as an age formed through unilinear flows of influence from Europe outwards to the New World is important in two key senses additional to the discussion above. First, he attempts to locate the emergence of radical self-activity within the modern personality. But James undertakes this as both a retrospective historical exercise and a corrective to the atomisation of the individual, whose increasing separation from the public sphere within modernity has been understood as deeply enervating and socially damaging.76 Second, he charts the significance of the dialectical interaction between the slaves’ racial formation and their material (social and productive) existence in the birth of the modern agent. His point here, as I will elaborate below, is to decentre the often antagonistic relationship between race and class and to demonstrate the slaves’ relative autonomy and integrity that can, and must, be understood both individually and in articulation. In The Black Jacobins James asserts that the history of West Indian society is predicated on two things: the sugar plantation and black slavery. These two determining factors of West Indian society also instruct his conception of modernity, insofar as the wealth created by the slave trade enabled the rapid growth of the colonial powers. The growth of slave systems signalled the emergence of a modernity closely entwined with the logic of capitalist development specific to that particular historical epoch. Echoing Marx, James argues that slavery was central to eighteenth-century economic development and would have continued indefinitely, had the plantocracy and French and British bourgeoisie been able to balance their economic interests.77 The logic of the capitalist mode of production guiding the interests of the plantocracy and French and British bourgeoisie is, at face value, organised within an orthodox Marxist explanatory framework. The relations of production in place between slave and master are geared towards the maximum expropriation of surplus value for the minimum cost, and will remain viable for as long as the system is sustainable. This system is, of course, faithful to a foundational understanding of capitalist production as the transformation of raw materials into commodities that can be sold at a profit. However, James’s fidelity to this paradigm is tested and compromised by Marx’s understanding of the form of labour power that facilitates the materials/ commodities transformation. Simply put, for Marx, workers within a capitalist economy sell their labour in exchange for wages, and as such are free to convert their wages into whatever use-values they desire, whether that is to purchase goods and commodities or save a sum. In stark contrast, the slave as unfree labourer is part of a feudal system of production as opposed to a capitalist one, and the free worker is an independent free agent with responsibility for themselves and the spending of their wages.78 The distinction between slave and free worker—where the former is an unfree labourer without the agency resulting from the disposal of wage income—forms the platform for James’s subtle deviation from Marx. The

They Brought Themselves 35 key point of difference is that for Marx, the slave is solely and simply a capital resource: “The slave-owner buys his worker in the same way as he buys his horse. If he loses his slave, he loses a piece of capital, which he must replace by expenditure on the slave-market.”79 Regarding the acquisition, organisation, and replacement of slaves within plantation economies, James’s position here is not wholly incompatible with Marx. However, James asserts that although the slaves are treated and objectified as capital, they are not stripped of their reflective consciousness and do not lose their human subjective powers. Therefore, the decisive rupture occurs where Marx argues that the free worker “learns to control himself, in contrast to the slave, who needs a master.”80 This cursory reconstruction of the Hegelian master-bondsman dialectic is deeply problematic for James, who does not share Hegel’s notion of internalised dependency or Marx’s depiction of the slave as akin to a “beast of burden.” Even though capitalist manufacturing and wealth creation is (theoretically) driven by a dispassionate productive logic and the use of inanimate (human) tools, African slaves, for James, were neither simply chattel nor automatons. Although the experience and formation of slavery differed throughout the Americas, James recognises that while slaves were sometimes treated as material property, they were also a recognised capital resource and they developed important technical and artisanal skills and abilities.81 This development occurred despite the difference between the establishment of Caribbean colonies as slave societies based on the economic rationale of the plantation and the settlement of North America based on a pioneering yeomanry with slavery largely restricted to relatively small-scale farm and domestic settings.82 James emphasises each plantation as a self-sufficient unit where slaves acquired the skills needed to maintain its efficient running; throughout the British West Indies this skilled labour thus minimised the importation of expensive components from England. Slaves were blacksmiths and coopers; slave shoemakers, dyers, tanners, and weavers made their clothes. They also gained off-plantation skills: in the U.S., for example, slave seamen piloted rafts carrying tobacco and ferried new settlers across Virginia’s rivers. Some worked away from the plantation because it was more profitable for many planters to “hire out their skilled black workmen for seventy-five to two hundred dollars a year.”83 However, even though they are “skilled black workmen” and not simply slaves charged with performing mundane and gruelling tasks, James is not simply concerned with slaves as workers. Rather, he appreciates their unique conditions and relations of production as a skilled labour force that created a distinctive “modern personality”. The emergence of this modern personality embodied by the Africans transported to the Americas as slaves is an epochal event that is an outcome of capitalist productive forces, yet it is also reflective of the modern subject supposedly born of Renaissance rationalism. The historical materialist basis for the emergence of the black Jacobins as a social personality is clear

36 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics in James’s transparent debt to, yet strategic use of, Marx. James’s recognition—that while the black Jacobins had the capacity to make history, they could only do so within given circumstances84—is not simply an affiliation to the tenets of historical materialism, but a direct nod to “The Eighteenth Brumaire.”85 Similarly, James’s lament on the Dessalines-led massacre of the whites at the conclusion of the San Domingo revolution, as an antidemocratic tragedy that marked Haitian culture for generations, draws heavily on Marx’s ambivalence towards political violence that could serve as a revolutionary lever—yet it ran the risk of reproducing repressive social apparatuses.86 However, it is important to understand these references as a specific descriptive strategy and not a derivative analytical framework. James’s homage to Marx significantly draws on the latter’s talent for combining fiery polemic with rhetorical flourish as well as penetrative analytical insight.87 It is Marx, as the author of timelessly evocative phrases that capture the psychic battle of the proletariat for self-realisation and class consciousness, who seduces James, for whom, after all, the formal observations of Marxism constitute a humanistic common sense. This foregrounding of the narrative and the dramatic over a formalist empirical examination and analytical focus is crucial because, for James, modernity is essentially about people, not things. The circumstances directly encountered by the black Jacobins are indeed “given and transmitted from the past,” but for James, the revolutionary selfactivity of the slaves demonstrates not only their autonomous subjectivity acting inwardly, but also their capacity to affect lives and economic developments throughout Africa, Europe, and the Americas.88 As new, modern people in the New World, they had no history of revolutionary promise or failure to refer to and, unlike Marx’s assessment of European proletarian inertia, had no dead to bury or ghosts to exorcise. The African slaves, as James so eloquently put it, “brought themselves” along with their resourcefulness and desire for freedom that was, in turn, amplified by their reflexive experience of their social environment: The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement.89 In contradistinction to Marx, then, it is clear to James that plantation economies are not easily dismissed as a form of “primitive accumulation” synonymous with the pre-history of the capitalist mode of production. Similarly, the black Jacobins are not simply a coerced labour force that can be easily dismissed as an estimable radicalized peasantry tilling the land of a “quasi-feudal” sugar plantation. Instead, as Stuart Hall notes,

They Brought Themselves 37 the penetrating value of James’s insight lies in his understanding “that the history of modernity revolutionises everything. Nothing could be turned back. Everything is transformed. Thus the people of the Caribbean—fortuitously, paradoxically—had been transformed into a kind of prototypical, modern people, no longer rooted in a traditional, religious or particularistic way of understanding the world.”90 The black Jacobins were constituted as “prototypical modern people” as a result of the materiality of their subjection to bio-political regimes and their relations of production, as well as their subjective experience of the alienating tensions of modernity as an early approximation of an industrial proletariat. In addition, their reflexive capacity that informed the development of a revolutionary praxis is indeed significant. James’s suggestion of the possibility of individual agency as an expression of radical self-realisation and determination, as well as the elevation of the individual and their representative function in relation to the mass as irreducible to the oppressive constraints of productive forces, is unparalleled in classical Marxism.91 This idiosyncratic Marxist approach arguably demonstrates, as I shall discuss, James’s greater affinity with the young idealist, humanist Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts than the mature political economist of Capital. James recognises that the social structures and relations of Caribbean plantation economies produced a prototypical proletarian worker defined by their profound alienation from a productive process into which they were forced, and yet at the same time stimulated the emergence of a relatively unfettered modern subjectivity. Thus the mentality of the black Jacobins, as that of a prototypical modern people, was not weighed down by the nightmare of the tradition of dead generations. In fact, James rearticulates the incubating promise of metropolitan radicalism through the ambivalent encounter of African slaves with the West. What the European radical intelligentsia and leftist activists had only dreamt of, a small privileged cadre of James’s black Jacobins had already achieved in that they used their position to cultivate themselves, to gain a little education, to learn all they could. The leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by the cultural advantages of the system they are attacking, and the San Domingo revolution was no exception to this rule.92 Unlike their angst-ridden and constrained European proletarian cousins, the black Jacobins had creatively drawn on their alienating experience of proto-industrialised production. They resisted the capitulation to estrangement when confronted with their labour as alien property and the increasing concentration of the means of their existence in the hands of a capitalist plantocracy. Instead, the slaves of San Domingo negotiated a path through the minefield of plantation society, developing strategies of resistance and, ultimately, revolution.

38 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics That they were able to achieve revolution, however, is due to their specific formation as modern people within the tabula rasa of the Caribbean, and is irreducible to their relations of production. For James, the slaves were distinctively modern in the sense that their predicament as enslaved peoples, transported as chattel, educated in the skilled technical processes of the plantation, and instructed in the principles of Christianity, rendered them living testaments to the inherent flaws and contradictions in western modernity. They realised the discrepancy between the abstract human rights encapsulated in the progressive triumvirate of liberty, fraternity, and equality and the concrete labour and racial oppression that they suffered.

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PEDAGOGY OF RACE The process of racial formation plays a key role in the production of this prototypical modern subject. Interestingly (for 1938), James entitled his study of the San Domingo revolution The Black Jacobins and not, for example, the “Negro Jacobins” or the “San Domingo Jacobins.” Thus, the prototypical modern revolutionary proletariat of San Domingo are not identified as “Negroes” or as a national collective: they are black. Considering that James does in fact use the term “Negro”—he published a collection of essays entitled A History of Negro Revolt in 1938—his choice of the appellation “black” for what he understood to be a book of great importance is significant. An obvious speculative explanation would be to suggest his unease with “Negro” as an ascribed term that also referred to a specific and pre-determined biological race with a set of given traits and characteristics. Even though James’s conceptualisation and understanding of race shifts throughout his career, his opposition to it as a biological concept that naturalises social behaviour in favour of social forms of racial description and identity is relatively consistent. In The Case for West Indian Self-Government, published in 1933, James had already realised that, in terms of the West Indies, racial formation is constructed from particular historical and social determinants: The Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people and about fifteen or twenty per cent of people who are a varying combination of white and black. From the days of slavery these have always claimed superiority to the ordinary black, and a substantial majority of them still do so (though resenting as bitterly as the black assumptions of white superiority). With emancipation in 1834 the blacks themselves established a middle class. But between the brown-skinned middle class and the black there is a continual rivalry, distrust and ill-feeling, which, skilfully played on by the European peoples, poisons the life of the community.93

They Brought Themselves 39 The distinction between black and white and various combinations “in between” displays residues of the biological forms of racial description, albeit articulated with and played out through particular sets of class antagonisms.94 Writing in 1939, however, James argued that the attempts of “capitalist scientists” to “isolate the ‘pure’ Negro from all other African peoples is admitted today to be pure rubbish. Though there are broad differentiations, the Negroes in Africa are inextricably mixed.”95 Although this putative constructionist description is problematic in the sense that it continues to infer the existence of biologically discrete races prior to mixing, it recognises the now orthodox argument that there is significant biological variance within, as well as between, racial groups.96 Nevertheless, the notion of inextricable mixing as the basis for an understanding of socially determined racial categories is beginning to crystallise within his thought. By 1963 and the publication of Beyond a Boundary, James would frame race in a more nominalist sense, noting the social and elective aspects of Learie Constantine’s racial identification whereby he was “black” despite European ancestry.97 Although “European blood” descriptively remains a biological racial variable, its analytical efficacy is effectively eroded. Since the possibility of establishing racial purity has been dismissed and the (biological) term “Negro” is meaningless or of negligible descriptive use, James asserts “black” as another salient, socially emergent, and meaningful form of racial identification. It is the Constantine’s social position and struggles for self-activity, then, that significantly constitute “black” as a political identity. This sense of a black political identity, most clearly articulated in James’s mature works yet evident in nascent form in his earlier formulations of race, is important in that it facilitates his articulation and decentring of race and class as explanatory tools. James wants to retain race and class as discrete yet associated analytical concepts because of the possible errors when one is overdetermined by the other. In terms of the emergence of the black Jacobins as prototypical modern people, the complex interaction between race and class is crucial: it counteracts the misunderstanding of social relationships structured by conflicts characteristic of the productive process—as racial enmities that are unavoidable conflicts of blood. James’s concern with the reification of biological race that obscures its class relation is perhaps especially evident throughout The Black Jacobins in his reference to the erroneous and unjustifiable panics over miscegenation and bloodlines that falsely characterise the “mulatto” population in San Domingo.98 In his response to the characterisation of the mulatto as untrustworthy and unstable, he interestingly argues that the depiction is based on their precarious position as free subjects, often with financial resources but without the civil authority and cultural capital to secure the social status commensurate with their objective material resources. Therefore, for James, the fact that many mulattoes were wealthy and propertied

40

Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics

does not inevitably align them with correspondent societal class positions. He concludes that mulattoes are a “typical intermediate class with all the political instability of this class”99 before exploding any possible recourse to the biological: “mulatto instability lies not in their blood but in their intermediate position in society.”100 It must also be noted that James’s conceptualisation of racial formation and its relation to social identities is not solely forged in negation; he is not only concerned with what race is not—the biological—but how, precisely, it is social and political. This positive and prescriptive concern emerges from a concern with racial enmities demonstrative of class antagonisms that are manifested as the intra-proletarian antipathies highlighted by Marx.101 James believes that any misunderstanding of the San Domingo revolution as a “race war” not only distorts its objective social character, but misses an important political opportunity to recognise and unite the particularity of racial experience with the universality of class location. This sentiment is clearer in James’s internationalism: the modern spirit of the Jacobin, as the sincere pursuant of freedom, equality, and fraternity, is not bounded by race, nationality, or World, whether Old or New. Instead, the French and Haitian Revolutions are recast as parallel events within an implicit and organic socialist international.102 On the one hand, the slaves had become aware of the French Revolution and imagined the “white slaves” overcoming their “masters” to enjoy freedom; the slaves, then, were consumed by the revolutionary spirit of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which inspired their own 1789 revolts in Guadeloupe and Martinique.103 And on the other hand, as the Paris masses developed their revolutionary libertarian spirit, they became increasingly horrified at slavery and supported their “black brothers” and abolition.104 Similarly, alongside the specificity of this correspondence James notes a totalising “steppingstone geography” effect that links historically specific events—such as the effects of abolitionism in America on the freeing of the Russian serf, or the symbolic significance of the banning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Italy as an incitement to the peasantry.105 This recognition of the commonality of class struggles within particular New or Old World locales indicates the germination of James’s tendency towards spontaneous forms of non-vanguardist political organisation. He notes the Paris masses’ recognition of the terrors of slavery and their humanist empathy with the slaves’ struggle that became synonymous with theirs. Many began to refuse to drink coffee because of the colonial connection, which James recognises as an act of solidarity with their enslaved proletarian brothers across the Atlantic and an important political display of class unity.106 This formulation of internationalist proletarian solidarity brings us to the threshold of the precise conceptual and political relationship between race and class within James’s work. Indeed, it brings to mind probably the most often cited and, it must be said, misunderstood, passage in James’s entire corpus. In The Black Jacobins, concerning his articulation of class and

They Brought Themselves 41 racial struggles, James famously states: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental [is] an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”107 The tendency is to understand this statement as James’s struggle to decide whether class should be privileged over race, or vice versa. On the one hand, it presents a stark analytical divide between race and class. As such, the phrase is taken as a practical demonstration that “class was a more fundamental conflict than that of race” and also as an indication of James’s commitment to Leninist leadership principles as the most profitable arena for pursuing anti-racist political struggles.108 On the other hand, it illustrates the structural and analytical synergy between race and class, and the former’s novel relative autonomy. For Nielsen, the passage suggests James’s understanding that race emerges “as a discursive formation in the service of exploitation” and “has a history that continues to exercise its influence in the present.”109 For Buhle, it reflects the imagining of a trans-racial, internationalist leftist coalition whereby “the dynamic of the white and [b]lack Jacobins would become the central epic of the human race.”110 In the midst of this struggle for analytical primacy, or the relative autonomy of race, an important subtlety is missed. Sundiata Keita ChaJua has also instructively read the passage as foregrounding the analytical and political relationship between race and class, whereby the nucleus of James’s meaning pivots around whether the “subsidiary” status of race to class implies that the former is “supplemental” or “subordinate” to the latter.111 This argument suggests that the logic of James’s theorisation of black radical self-activity, and its contribution to socialist organisation, indicates that race supplements class but only insofar as its insertion acts as a corrective to the defects endemic within orthodox class analysis. Cha-Jua’s assertion is crucial in that it presents race and class as complementary and, perhaps more importantly, decentred concepts. The endemic problems of class analysis are thus methodological problems of conceptual formulation and theoretical application, and not inherent conceptual and theoretical deficiencies. As we have seen, James has momentary strategic uses for race that are separable from a distinct class analysis and politics. In this sense, the passage encapsulates his general realisation that to privilege either race or class could not only distort their specific social and productive relations, but also perpetuate dominant epistemological binarisms that necessitate racial “supplementation” or “subordination” to class or vice versa. He says as much in his 1969 comments on the nascent project of Black Studies within the American academy: I do not know, as a Marxist, black studies as such. I only know the struggle of people against tyranny and oppression in a certain social and political setting, and, particularly, during the last two hundred years,

42 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics it’s impossible to me to separate black studies from white studies in any theoretical point of view. Nevertheless, there are certain things about black studies that need to be studied today. They have been ignored; we are beginning to see a certain concern about them. I believe also that certain of these studies are best done by black people, not by professors as such, but by the same people who are engaged in the struggle in which people were engaged then. That will make them better understand and illustrate them.112 This statement is notable for its resolute refusal to allocate racial studies any internal coherence outside of their given sociohistorical context. Yet, at the same time, James recognises that racial struggles must be studied by those involved in them. Although that gestures towards solipsism, it is in fact the assertion of the interconnectedness of race and class in that the racial representatives must also be representatives of a class in struggle: “certain of these studies are best done by black people, not by professors as such, but by the same people who are engaged in the struggle.” This statement on the value of politicised experience clarifies the problem of the substantive basis for the black Jacobins’ critical insight that arises from James’s affinity with imaginative and material methodological approaches. It suggests that their simultaneous inclusion and exclusion within Western modernity cannot be simply understood as an ambivalent encounter, but harbours a—albeit unintentional—politically beneficial effect. Taking the racialization of African slaves (according to Romantic ideas of naturalised racial characteristics and behaviours) alongside their insertion into the capitalist mode of production, the black Jacobins’ critical insight is irreducible to either a racial or a proletarian capacity. Given that “they brought themselves” and yet were transformed by racial ideologies and productive processes, their insight is a racialized propensity forged within and developed by a social experience of racism, capitalism, and dislocation. Importantly, this development suggests that the theoretical weaknesses of the inevitability of James’s black radical telos might be reinterpreted as a dialectical recognition of the possibility for wresting a progressive productive capacity from the experience of racialization. This conceptual and political articulation of race and class demands recognition. Ultimately, whether James’s portrayal of transatlantic class struggle that transcends fixed racial ontologies is historically accurate, or its veracity has suffered at the excesses of his literary and political imagination, is, in some senses, irrelevant. The preface to the first edition of The Black Jacobins enigmatically notes: “The analysis is the science and the demonstration the art which is history.”113 In retaining the particularity of each group—the Jacobins of France and San Domingo are related, as it were, by class struggle, but each maintains their own particular identity and social location—he importantly does not subsume the category of race within the structures of

They Brought Themselves 43 class. Instead, given the transportation of slaves across the middle passage, the construction of and formative influences on their racial formation across this expanse situates racial identity and subjectivity as transcending nationspace, as well as the geopolitical limitations that such entrenched boundaries encourage. James’s project to historicise the radical self-activity of the African slaves therefore constitutes black New World peoples as a diasporic racial subject.114 As such, the self-realisation of the black subject emerges from the complex interplay between the material and symbolic productive forces that stretch across space and time. It is, or should be, clear that James is an arch modernist. He bears its hallmark as a strong advocate of social, cultural, and civilisational progress and the development of human freedom through democratic principles. However, while he identifies the tragic antimonies of progress and development that lie at the foundation of modernity, he also falls prey to some of the problems of its universalism. The black Jacobins are the modern personality, and the plantation societies of the New World—and perhaps those within the Caribbean more specifically—are at the vanguard of modernity. In addition, the interstitial position of the black Jacobins, and their experience of simultaneous inclusion within and exclusion from Western civilisation, affords them a privileged and unique critical insight. This epistemic privilege is resonant of Marx’s proletariat, yet as James is well aware given his appropriation of Marx’s category of labour, the extent to which a particular group is able to represent the universality of the social collective is indeed limited. But just as James finds the class-conscious revolutionary figure of the proletarian wage-labourer a limiting category in its exclusion and marginalisation of the radical self-activity of the slaves, the positioning of the black Jacobins as the paradigmatic modern personality repeats the claim to epistemic privilege.115 Additionally, James’s recognition of the New World as an exemplary modernity raises the detrimental spectre of authenticity. In the analytical struggle between (Old World) Modernity and modernity in the New World, as well as their corresponding subjects, James confronts the tacit difficulty of replacing the normative mirage of modernity and its anomic and enervated subject with the New World and black Jacobin as the paradigmatic modern locale and personality. As this formulation threatens to replace normative Western modernity with the New World as the vanguard of true modernity, the implications are clear: James risks replicating the conceptual predicates of the very Eurocentric exclusivism that he is at pains to redress. However, given his attention to socialist internationalism imagined through the emergence of a trans-racial Jacobin radicalism across the Atlantic, James does not simply reverse the geopolitical sites and inhabitants of modernity. What we are left with is a profound tension between universality and particularity, figured in this chapter through the relationship between social class, human and racial

44 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics subjects, and the local and international sites that run deep throughout James’s work. This tension is not confined to his foundational understanding of the multidirectional flows of modernity between the Old and New Worlds. It is also fundamental to his personal and intellectual development, especially the formation of his distinctive polymath intellectualism that sought to advance an integrated understanding of human history, society, and subjects.

2

“Elective Affinities” and the Intellectual Vocation Race, Politics, and Poetics

There is by the way, an area in which a man’s feelings are more rational than his mind, and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time. You might sneer at this, but I know now. I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary In his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, Goethe draws attention to human and social relations in an age on the cusp of modernity through an exploration of tragic love. Imagining the intersection of the romantic and the modern alongside the themes of stasis and progress, Elective Affinities pivots on the entry of the Captain and Ottile into the inert and materialistic marriage of Edward and Charlotte. As Edward first discovers an attraction to Ottile, followed by a similar development between Charlotte and the Captain, the love that cannot be declared between either couple is revealed in a series of sublimations. The tragedy of Edward and Ottile’s love lies in the fact that she is his wife’s niece, and the situation is rendered insoluble by his compulsion to consider his “various relationships: with his wife, their families, society, his property.”1 While Ottile ultimately dies under the unbearable weight of silence, an inkling of the independent, atomistic modern subject, freed from conventional restraints, allows Edward to contemplate transgressing aristocratic familial ties and social conventions. These irreconcilable negotiations between contemplation and will constitute the titular elective affinities and pose a key question of modernity: What happens when the horizon of ontological

46 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics possibilities expands beyond its previous vista? How can the life that is imaginable today and was unimaginable yesterday be made real tomorrow? For Goethe, this proposition intimates that the achievement of an absolute affinity is harder to attain in human relationships, where interpersonal associations are filtered through the external demands of the social, than in the natural and physical sciences—he gives the example of the adhesive properties of alkaline salt that conclusively bonds oil and water. Unlike the instrumentalism that generates Max Weber’s notion of elective affinity, Goethe highlights a prior ontological tension between convention and desire that cannot be cathartically reconciled through reasoned negotiation able to link means and ends.2 Furthermore, in recognising the nascent stirrings of modernity—and perhaps the plausibility of imminent class consciousness—Goethe’s work encapsulates individuals’ emergent and indiscriminate demonic power that acts both internally and against nature without an external social enemy on which to focus.3 His portentous vision of modernity ultimately illustrates how personal desires and affiliations, “affinities,” are created within given social connections through a series of uncomfortable mediations. However, the constraining familial and social relations manifested within the psychosocial dissonance of elective affinities are not radically resolved within a Western modernity that heralded novel possibilities for human relationships. Instead, those tensions are redirected into a fraught reflexivity consumed by the anxieties of class and false consciousness. As a result, many radical responses to this taxing question of the relationship between the individual and the collective, alternately posed within the Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft problematic, have recognised how modernity fashions advanced social spaces that hold immense productive potentialities while they simultaneously restrict humanity from realising its collective, progressive potential. Goethe’s notion of elective affinities, and its focus on the connections between the personal and the social, provides a useful vantage point from which to view the integral triangulation of race, politics, and poetics alongside the productive paradoxes of modernity within James’s thought. As we saw in the previous chapter, James understands the black Jacobins and creolised New World social structures and cultures as a progressive force capable of recovering the radical promise of modernity. However, in his haste to rescue the ideals of human freedom and social progress, as well as to destroy the notion of the slaves’ weakness and “natal alienation,” James ignores the extent to which the antimonies of modernity are necessary negations. The modern ideals of freedom and progress are opposed by the reality of disenchantment and alienation; therefore, the displacement of the real by the ideal is a monumental task and requires revolutionary social transformation. In other words, James fails to consider the internal and external barriers to the epic agency of the black Jacobins at any depth and instead opts for a description of their genius that somewhat inevitably emerges from their interstitial social location and alienating relations of production.

Elective Affinities

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This revolutionary immanence conjures the spectres of authenticity and vanguardism, previously discussed as manifest within James’s description, as well as an analytical possibility. His recognition that some slaves bear the stamp of genius, in that their relationship to and resourceful application of social labour “made certain of the ex-slaves the astonishing figures they were”4 does not appear too distant from the very form of bourgeois individualism that he attacks. This is especially the case when we remember that it is precisely the access to forms of cultural capital, such as books and education, that supposedly gave some slaves an intimate understanding of the system they were opposing and a better opportunity to undermine it than their uneducated peers. As we will see, the resultant conflict between vertical and horizontal forms of revolutionary organisation has profound practical and conceptual implications. Given that James explicitly sets out to uncover the radical agency of black slaves against the dominant narratives of their passive suffering, this conceptual carelessness and insufficient argumentation is perhaps unsurprising. Important questions arise here, regarding James’s location within this project and the extent to which his conceptual errors and injudicious arguments are existentially informed. Put differently, if The Black Jacobins provides the historical background to the world into which James was born, what sense did he make of that world and in what ways did it act back upon him? Goethe’s notion of elective affinities is especially useful in its recognition of the paralysing disjuncture between material existence and emotional desire in the personal lives of those within a privileged social stratum; their leisured existence endows them with the contemplative space to develop independent thought, which is ironically restricted by the conventions of social status. The classical German humanist values that inspire Goethe’s identification of this ironic discrepancy are evident later in Marx, who recasts the project of modernism, its material advancements and elective affinities, in his creation of a social class disjuncture: the opposition of proletarian and bourgeoisie.5 The subsequent freedom of the bourgeoisie to enjoy the economic, social, and cultural fruits of modernity at the expense of the proletariat instigates Marx’s ambivalence towards the paradoxically progressive capacity of modernity. The creative possibilities of the “radical antithesis” incubating within modernity are evident in Marshall Berman’s assessment of Marx: “what modern poets, artists and intellectuals have only dreamed of the modern bourgeoisie has actually done.”6 While James reclaims this latent radicalism for the black Jacobins, he also implies that his own interstitial position affords him a similar critical insight. However, while James’s narration of the black Jacobins triumphantly resolves the class disjuncture, his own experience of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, and its effects on his intellectual development, cannot be resolved in the same straightforward manner. James does not repeat the black Jacobins’ realisation of their radical historicity; his own negotiation of the elective affinities of race, politics, and poetics are both enabling and disabling. Instead, I want to suggest

48 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics that James’s personal and intellectual travails do indeed resonate with a figure of the modern personality—but that of Goethe as well as his own.

PREFACE TO A HUMANIST James’s family and upbringing typified the precarious positioning of the colonial black middle class. His schoolmaster father and educated mother were firm members of the black middle class in terms of their values and professional and symbolic status; however, this did not translate into the material comforts synonymous with the metropolitan middle classes. James remembers the family struggling to make ends meet, and how they borrowed money in order to maintain the façade of their position in the community.7 James’s portrait of his childhood in his quasi-autobiography, Beyond a Boundary, uncannily shares a key signature of the youthful formation of an intellectual with Jean-Paul Sartre’s childhood memoir, Words: they were both surrounded by books that they consumed voraciously and precociously. James’s reading was eclectic, ranging from popular magazines, comics, and newspapers to classical European and American literature and the Old Testament of the Bible. His favourite, to which he continually returned because of its familiar morality, was Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Like much of his other reading, but more so, it allowed him to construct imaginative worlds as a refuge into which he could withdraw. This relentless reading had the transformative effect of instilling the capacity to catalogue and recall information in its precise order, and it established books as the basis for knowledge and understanding. At the same time, James developed a fascination with cricket and would spend hours watching games and practices from a window in his aunt’s house. Jim Murray usefully suggests that this proclivity enabled James to develop an analytical method that combined individual impressionistic perception with empirical observation, ultimately confirmed through the collective understanding achieved within a community.8 An intelligent boy, the young James secured a scholarship to Queen’s Royal College (QRC), based on the English public school model, and a path to the professions available to black men—medicine or law—or a civil service career was mapped out for him. However, consumed by cricket, he rebelled and instead forged a path towards his other passion: literature. This early biographical sketch demonstrates the vital ingredients that informed James’s intellectual development and provides an insight into the way in which he would manage the competing demands of his polymath interests. As such, his initial intellectual development can be largely understood through a triangulation of his education and upbringing, his fiction writing and journalism, and the broader milieu of nascent anticolonial struggles in Trinidad. Indeed, his recollection that he had little to learn when he eventually turned to politics speaks to the formative impact of his experience

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of the clash between race, class, and caste in Trinidad. His memories of his schooldays at QRC are saturated with this tension that, at the time, was managed through the Arnoldian tenets of sweetness and light. Instead of the gestation of what Aldon Lynn Nielsen characterises as an “international New World culture,”9 the moral and political authority of the Crown colony government reigned. The iniquitous colonial and middle-class inflection of a QRC, more suitable to provincial Britain than Trinidad, introduced him to a version of the discrepant modernity, that he would later understand was subverted by the black Jacobins.10 Within the school, the threatening diversity of Trinidad was remodelled into a manageable Anglicised normality.11 The boys were introduced to the rule of law through cricket; however apparently unfair, the judgement of the umpire was final and to be adhered to without question. More importantly, the spirit of the game, and its sporting ideals of fair play and gentlemanly conduct, were impressed on them as a moral directive that became self-regulating. The purpose of QRC—to uphold colonial hegemony—meant implicitly preserving a particular racial order while feigning meritocracy. In retrospect, it is clear to James that the school conscientiously manipulated a preparatory colonial social space, since an active racial self-perception among pupils was firmly discouraged. Nevertheless, even if unspoken in the “little Eden” of QRC, the inequities of the racial and the colonial orders existed and simmered beneath the surface, and as the boys grew older and more perceptive, James recalls that they became aware of the masters’ subtle discrimination in favour of the white and “mulatto” students.12 The enduring impact of this experience is transparent within James’s intellectual development. His point that the boys at QRC understood and believed in the moral directive imparted to them through cricket, yet felt inconsolable anger when wronged and responded by cheating as a measure of retributive justice, is crucial. It suggests that while they accepted the colonial ideals of justice as correct in principle, they realised its uneven application and were prepared to move to their own interpretation. This acknowledgment illustrates three key formative issues that connect to produce the Jamesian intellectual standpoint. The first, simply put, is that James recognised his racialization. Just as many black African and Caribbean intellectuals only fully realised their racialized identity when they first journeyed to the colonial metropole and experienced an unexpectedly cold reception, James began to appreciate his blackness as a child in the metropolitan outpost of QRC.13 The cracks began to show in the carefully cultivated “little Eden” precisely when he realised that the universal human values it preached were acceptably contravened according to class and racial particularity. This awakening underwrote the second formative development. Even though James had been drawn to the cultural worlds of classical English literature and cricket by their transcendent artistic and creative qualities, he increasingly understood his tendentious relation to them and their limited reach. The supposedly insoluble bonds at school that were secured by these

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transcendent values inculcated through classical studies and cricket were, in fact, stratified by class, caste, and race. In a poignant passage in Beyond a Boundary, James recalls meeting—and struggling to maintain a conversation with—an old school friend with whom he had been inseparable, and realising, rather embarrassingly, that the deep bond that they had apparently shared was actually quite superficial. James first remembers a sense of guilt before realising that even though the formal structure of the old school tie had been transplanted to Trinidad, it could not survive outside the hothouse environment of the school: ultimately, the enduring bonds were familial and fraternal along the lines of class and caste.14 This point, that those elective affinities forged within the rarefied school space could not survive outside, brings attention to the deep significance of the social context of the abstract ideals that form the dispositions and beliefs of a group. Therefore, James came to understand that the broader social context of the relationships he had forged under the colonial moral code was not incidental, and that the putative transcendental quality of culture also included significant political functions and effects. This lesson was firmly imparted over the apparently trivial matter of choosing a cricket club. After leaving school, James enjoyed his most successful season playing second-class cricket, which heralded his elevation to the higher ranks and presented him with the choice of which first-class club to join. This choice was, in fact, a dilemma, because each of the first-class clubs represented a specific social stratum defined along the lines of class and caste. James was (automatically and self-) excluded from joining the elite Queen’s Park Club, largely the domain of the wealthy white; Shamrock, the club of the old white Catholic families; and Stingo, a club of “plebeian” blacks totally without social status. This left Maple, whose membership was drawn from the “brown-skinned middle class” who were more fixated on colour than class; and Shannon, comprised of the “black lower middle-class.”15 James’s decision to join Maple was based on his affinities with many of its members; he had gone to QRC with many of them, and they were more representative of his cultural interests and social circles than the Shannon membership. His recollection of the tortured decision-making process suggests an intuitive sense of trepidation that he could neither fully understand nor articulate. Simply put, James, by his own admission, had made a crucial mistake. This straightforward issue that was ostensibly about cricket was, in fact, a political move: by moving towards the political right, he cut himself off from the popular political sentiments that would have a significant effect on his political development.16 This “error” is suggestive of the third key formative aspect of James’s intellectual development: that he realised his own racial identity and the concomitant social contexts of cultural products, relations, and consumption, and yet remained committed to the transcendental character of culture. The suggestion that James’s choice of club illustrates his Cartesian dilemma, in that he “anticipated a more profound sports/arts disjuncture if he joined

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Shannon” and decided by thinking beyond his immediate sporting future and relied on his inclination “to construct himself as a young intellectual” is interesting here.17 His resolution of the Maple/Shannon dilemma keenly demonstrates the extent to which he had adopted the putatively transcendental “art for art’s sake” values of artistic integrity that QRC had imparted. Despite his rebellious character at school, James accepts that its moral directives had had an effect on him; that he had accepted and taken the moral codes of Puritanism—exposed to him through cricket and literature—for granted made them “all the more effective.” And even in later life, writing Beyond a Boundary, he realises these stealthy interpellations: James recognises himself as a member of a generation that was shaped both personally and socially by the moral code, in the form of the cricket ethic, into which he was brought up. While James and his peers might be able to challenge social dispositions, their “inner self” was shot through with Victorian morality.18 It is fair to say that James retained some of the intellectual ideals from the communicative mechanisms that were used to impart this moral code so effectively. As much as he unveils the disingenuous social function of Matthew Arnold’s notion of culture as “the best that has been said, thought and done,” crucial to the pedagogical rationale of QRC, Arnold’s notion of the pursuit of human perfectibility as the ideal objective of culture remained compelling.19 Furthermore, Arnold’s concern that the practical application of culture towards material social issues threatened this very idealist human pursuit, and his understanding of the necessary corrective measures, is also important. And even though Arnold’s conservatism is radically divergent from James’s political sensibilities, James has an affinity with the foundations of Arnold’s cultural understanding and criticism: it is a transcendental idealism that is significant for understanding the relationship between his intellectual formation, social thought, and analytical insights. Arnoldian transcendental idealism refers to the method, as well as the objective content and aim, of cultural understanding and criticism. Beginning with the method of cultural understanding and criticism, Arnold argues that culture is the ability to know what is best: that requires an open-minded approach supported by curiosity, and is achieved through a specific intellectual enterprise based on reading, reflection, and observation. This methodology was inculcated into James at QRC, and he recalls reading and re-reading the classics of English literature—especially Vanity Fair—to the extent to which he was able to find passages at will or recite them from memory. Similarly, James studied cricket assiduously and supplemented his exhaustive compilation of statistics with narrative accounts of the techniques and styles of various players. This combination of quantitative and qualitative knowledge demonstrates James’s capacity to employ the broad intellectual skills he had learnt towards the development of a method that would enable him to know cricket. His education allowed him to move between the objective and subjective aspects of cricket and develop an understanding of its

52 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics intrinsic quality as a practice in itself. In Arnold’s terms, James’s quest to apprehend cricket in its essential state represents the cultural pursuit of ideal knowledge as an understanding of the inherent character of the object that constitutes a form of human perfectibility. This example is not simply a local cricket-specific one. It also indicates James’s method, whereby he consistently seeks to achieve an understanding of the material and symbolic unity of the object—whether that is cricket, West Indian literature, or proletarian organisation—within a broader historical totality. There is also the important issue of the objective content and aim of cultural understanding and criticism. Arnold’s contentions—that correct criticism was based on disinterested ideas and the exercise of curiosity; that criticism ought to pursue humanistic knowledge and intellectual concerns; and that criticism should produce ideas that were developed from the “free play of the mind”20—are not lost on James. Like Arnold, James believes that incorrect forms of understanding and criticism arrive at erroneous judgements because of their self-referential and politically oriented character. And he also broadly shares Arnold’s assertion that the intrinsic nature of the object is lost when criticism is instead immersed in its own activity. This observation is not as alarming as it may appear because of the radically different moral standpoints that inform Arnold and James’s approaches to cultural understanding and criticism. The anarchic threat to culture, in Arnold’s estimation, is based on the development of popular and working class “cultural” forms and criticism that reflect the subjective materialist interests of modern social and class divisions instead of the objective idealist essence of culture. While, for Arnold, this form of anarchic and disruptive working class culture produces an uneducated and non-contemplative politicised mass, James’s appreciation of the mediation of transcendent artistic and creative ideals through social context leads him towards another explanation of the essence of the object. He consistently points towards worthy cultural forms as truly inclusive, in the sense of Adorno’s understanding of the autonomous work of art’s capacity to combine the particular and the universal.21 James, therefore, believes cultural creativity is truly transcendent, but understands that the ideal of leisured and disinterested contemplation has an implicit material basis that obscures its class-based ideals. In the previous chapter, we saw how James’s veneration of the black Jacobins and the New World—exemplary subjects and sociocultural spaces that were faithful to the essence of modernity—raises the problem of identifying paradigmatic individuals and authentic social and cultural formations. A similar conundrum, the result of the elective affinity that James forges with the transcendental idealist conception of culture, emerges here. Goethe’s understanding of the tense process of developing personal elective affinities that require a fraught negotiation between contemplation and will is evident in James’s specific existential oppositions. The discord between his existential and intellectual knowledge is transparent in the discrepancy between the putative objectivism of his intellectual formation and the subjective racial

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and class stratification of his social milieu. This discepancy is movingly rendered as James remembers the incongruity of his classical education having manufactured his (future) alienation: “There was no world for which I was fitted, least of all the one I was now to enter.”22 The disjuncture between the universality and moral validity of transcendental idealism and its partial and disingenuous application within given social contexts demanded a form of disembodied and disinterested consciousness from James at times. This detachment is discernible in James’s adherence to the normativity of manners that pervades his early political discourse, and in the limitations it places on his analytical insights and ability to puncture iniquitous and fallacious ideas.23 James’s response to Sidney Harland’s article, which espouses a form of scientific racism as a justification for the racial stratification of colonial society, is a useful case in point.24 Responding in a measured and detached manner, James mildly reproaches Harland as a mediocre scientist diverted from good intentions by inadequate analysis in an unfamiliar discipline. This assumption of and belief in science, as a yielder of incontrovertible truths that is only corruptible through improper use, indemnifies Harland’s racist argument from anti-racist critique. By remaining in the “proper” scientific terrain to conduct his reasoned argument, James fails to realise that Harland and his sympathetic readership have long departed from it—or indeed, refused to enter—and instead prefer to remain at the level of impressionistic particularism masquerading as scientific universalism. Indeed, as James well understands from his days at QRC, the very term “it’s not cricket” (denoting an appalling transgression of a sacrosanct, supposedly self-regulating law), only exists precisely because the rule of law is not always obeyed. He understands that in the event of an unfavourable decision, if the benefits are significant enough or continued observance is simply a nuisance, the implacable ideals of law are easily contravened—yet the world still revolves on its axis with the dominant social order remaining in place. This insoluble problematic in James’s work is in some senses admirable and courageous, and in others imperceptive and naïve. The key point of contention is that James’s critique of the iniquitous conceptual basis of transcendental idealism in relation to culture is incomplete. It is not simply that there are moments when he recognises the furtive class and racial interests dwelling within transcendental culture and others when he does not, but that his own thought falls prey to this dichotomy. An instructive example is the synergy between Arnold’s gesture towards a mental and spiritual application of culture as what is best in human civilisational development in order to counteract a “diseased spirit,” and James’s lament against the “welfare state of mind” that restricted the imaginative capacity of Western cricketers during the immediate post–World War II period.25 For James, the security-conscious zeitgeist that affected the industrially advanced capitalist countries and caused their retreat to a corporatist welfare state that restricted individual creativity—a strange enough analogy in itself—had

54 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics had a negative effect on their cricketing tactics and technique, which had become increasingly cautious and less inventive. That the corrective to this malaise lay in the emergence of a “young Romantic” who would develop cricketing expression through their “classical” technique is a telling argument inasmuch as it is classical technique that will reopen the technical and creative boundaries.26 This player is a Romantic, a term James repeats for emphasis to ensure that creative hopes are not misplaced within a modernist functionary only capable of stale rational orthodoxy but rest instead with the reemergence of classical perfection. The delicate dilemma here is that on the one hand, James recognises that the welfare state of mind exists in specific contexts, especially England and Australia, and that, unsurprisingly, it is not found in the West Indies, where anticolonial and self-determination struggles are maturing. This perspective restates an argument for the determining social context of cultural production; West Indian players are able to develop their daring and expressive style not because of a naturalised tropical exuberance but because, as agents within the forces of historical materialism, they express the potential for social transformation. On the other hand, James undermines this expected political form of social explanation by his reference to the Romantic and its categorical association with the natural. The Romantic figure is the one in harmony with nature and the elements, and the perils inherent in an attempt to reclaim this harmony for a socially responsive cultural form that does not reify race are noteworthy. Derek Walcott’s prescient, if not slightly uncharitable, admonition that “existentialism is simply the myth of the noble savage gone baroque,” reminds us that the Romantic is a qualitatively different figure, depending on their relation to culture and nature and the racialization of this distinction.27 James anticipates that, depending on where the Romantic emerges, some nationalist extremists will fabricate and eulogise his primordial characteristics, instead of concentrating on his individual natural gifts, technical accomplishments, and tactical ingenuity, and he is aware of this danger.28 This very awareness of its dangers yet compulsion towards a transcendental idealist conception of culture, marks James’s fraught elective affinity with humanist principles; his fascination with the “integrated personality within society” leads him to reserve the right of an inviolate universalism, but only in its authentic and not partial state. For James, the compartmentalisation of the individual into discrete social spheres such as domesticity, labour, and leisure, creates the separation of the personality into corresponding rationalised specialisations. Against this pressure, he strives for a human creative sensibility that demands free expression outside of productive forces and the pseudo-artistic recreational activities created by the industrial-capitalist social order. It is significant that, even as a distinguished Marxist activist, he continually asserts the constitutive force of the moral and creative realm in his own development, as noted in the above epigraph on Thackeray’s influence.29 The principal point is that James

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attempts to establish an elective affinity between race, politics, and poetics despite their disparate characters and social demands, and understands them not as incompatible, but as mutual facets of a human unity. For our discussion, the objective is to consider how this compatibility is encountered and inhabited, and to explore the possible evasions and injudicious pragmatic concessions within the process of building an elective affinity between race, politics, and poetics.

“BEYOND THE WATCH AND GUARD OF STATISTICS” The inter-war years witnessed the inauguration of various black cultural nationalist expressions and movements, of which the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s in the U.S. and the Negritude movement during the 1930s in Paris are perhaps the most notable and celebrated. The emergence of the Harlem Renaissance as a coherent, if not cohesive, phenomenon is often seen as a series of significant shifts, enumerated in Alain Locke’s seminal 1926 essay, “The New Negro.” Locke noticed that black people were overcoming the social and psychic constraints of racial objectification and moving towards a fresh stage of self-understanding and autonomy. For Locke, the character of this shift was qualitative, philosophical, and subjective; it could not be grasped by the normative terms of the “Negro problem,” and contrary to orthodox sociological understandings of race relations, was “beyond the watch and guard of statistics.”30 The authors of Negritude were inspired by the Harlem Renaissance: Léopold Senghor, for one, was excited to learn of the shared concern with racial questions and the condition of black people across the Atlantic and was “deeply impressed” with the collection edited by Locke also titled The New Negro.31 These different movements indicate the escalating race consciousness among black artists and intellectuals throughout the black Atlantic, through a shared distinctive commitment to cultural politics and the question of what Frantz Fanon would later term a “disalienated” black subjectivity. But significant points of differentiation exist within these shared concerns and approaches. The disputes within the Harlem Renaissance between the “Old” and “New” guards and over the “proper” function of art are now legendary. The divergent perspectives on Negritude held by Senghor and Césaire, respective indications of an African metaphysical essence and a cultural condition emerging through given social and historical circumstances, or indeed the very salience of the concept, is also notable and contested.32 However, while the paradigmatically caustic exchange between Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston over “the reality” of black (folk) life is in one sense indicative of an enduring fissure in black U.S. letters, it also testifies to a foundational methodological and political difference.33 Wright’s methodological and political orientation are explicit in his essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in which he displays a disdain for vernacular narratives

56 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics of idealised folkloric blackness beholden to Christianity and insular chauvinism. Instead, he asserts the necessity of writers developing the social and class consciousness able to build “a more intimate and yet more profoundly social system of artistic communication between them and their people.”34 Wright is not simply formalistically concerned with literary technique. His materialism, and Hurston’s rejoinder against the atrophying effect of “protest” on his work further blighted by a salacious frenzy of racial attrition, are not simply concerned with the method of describing what black people are or how to best portray them and their lives. Rather, they are driven by fundamental methodological questions of the function and purpose of black letters.35 Similarly, the ostensibly Marxist frameworks and vocabulary littering Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism display a methodological orientation towards class struggle not shared by Senghor’s concern with a distinctive African “physio-psychology” that differentiates them from Europeans. Although situated within this new dawn of black cultural expression through his involvement in the “Trinidadian Renaissance”—more of which below—James’s amenable literary and political tenor is significant. Harlem and Trinidad can be easily linked through their mutual appreciation of artistic form and its political resonance; however, the different discursive and political approaches to race arguably problematise the notion of a cohesive black Pan-American cultural aesthetic. The racially charged intensity of debates between Harlemites over the respective artistic-creative and social-activist functions of art, arguments about the relative merits of art as propaganda, and paeans to black racial pride and subjectivity36—all these are absent from James’s measured discourse. Of course, this is not to suggest that he was unconcerned with racial justice and equality. “The Case for West Indian Self-Government” explicitly sets out the pernicious racial distinctions and myths of a civilising project used to falsify and maintain the moral and political authority of colonial government.37 And his various involvements in Pan-African organising, such as chairing the short-lived International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA)in the mid-1930s; belonging to the IAFA’s successor group, the International African Service Bureau (IASB); and editing its monthly journal, International African Opinion, are well documented.38 It is nevertheless notable that, by his account, while James engaged with Pan-African politics during his time in England, he became immersed in black politics after his arrival in the U.S. in 1938.39 More importantly, his earlier mode of engaging colonial and racial issues marks James as, in Kent Worcester’s elegant phrase, a “cordial critic.” Indeed, Worcester identifies James’s pivotal argument for self-government, on the basis of a critical mass of educated West Indian blacks able to take over the administration and governance of the region, as a key weakness of “The Case for West Indian Self-Government” and his analysis of colonialism.40 Similarly, although The Black Jacobins was intended as a corrective historical narrative and a

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revolutionary primer for African independence struggles, it is partially written from what Anthony Bogues refers to as a vindicationist position that has a corrosive effect on its polemical and analytical force.41 This is to say that, for Bogues, James fails to appreciate that the basis for the slaves’ radicalism and revolt lay in an embedded African worldview, rather than in the productive forces of capitalist modernity that James places at centre stage. In the second of three lectures on The Black Jacobins given at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta in 1971, James recognises and addresses this vindicationist tendency.42 Contrasting the discursive and analytical structure of The Black Jacobins with that of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, first published three years earlier, James notes a crucial contrast. Stating that “I was out to demonstrate that we had a history, and in that history there were men who were fully able to stand comparison with great men of that period,”43 James explains that, contrary to the accepted wisdom of the time, he “was trying to make clear that black people had a certain historical past.”44 This explanation marks the vindicationism discernible within James’s focus on demystifying the assumption of white colonial supremacy, as noted by Bogues, that is further evident within James’s concern with transforming the African slaves into black humans within a normative (“Western”) framework of the human from which they had hitherto been excluded.45 But this critique of James and The Black Jacobins is not simply an external one. James himself reflects on the significance of Du Bois’s approach to writing Black Reconstruction, in that while James felt a need to prove the existence of black history and humanity, “Du Bois wasn’t out to prove anything. He took it for granted.” Du Bois already understood and accepted that “the average Negro in a given environment is like other ordinary human beings.”46 The fuller significance of this reflexive undertaking becomes apparent in his third lecture on The Black Jacobins, in which he acknowledges that his reliance on official sources and authoritative publications led to the preeminence of third party observers—from sympathisers and non-sympathisers alike—citing the slaves’ struggle within his text instead of citing the slaves’ own personal accounts of their own lived experiences. Casting this as a serious deficiency that he would correct were he rewriting The Black Jacobins, he asserts: “We have had enough of what they have said about us even when sympathetic. It is time that we begin to say what we think about ourselves, and the historical development of our past should be said by what people in those days said.”47 James states that he would also give more prominence to the issue of mass leadership: the “2000 leaders” with whom the French had to contend as well as Toussaint as an obscure, individual leader. Nevertheless, James’s continued commitment to the importance of individual personality apparently remains, if qualified by reference to objective conditions and political responsibility. However, remembering James’s initial aim to portray black men able to “stand comparison with great men of that period,” the vindicationist tenor of The Black Jacobins remains. His

58 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics preoccupation with the achievements of great men remains a serious shortcoming that fails to fully situate the radical historicity of the masses, despite their being conceptualised as a mass leadership.48 With these limitations in mind, Bogues invites us to “think with and then beyond”49 James in order to develop a radical historiography better able to understand and appreciate the reality of the Haitian Revolution and its enormity. The issue of vindication in relation to James requires further consideration because, after all, Bogues identifies The Black Jacobins as an indispensable instrument on the path to a fuller understanding of the Haitian Revolution and the formation of a radical black historiography. And, as suggested above, the problems of black cultural-political expression of this moment—in this case vindicationism—are as much methodological and political as they are personal, if not more so. In this spirit, Bogues’s critique generously refrains from a personal judgmental tone in favour of a methodological, conceptual, and political focus: for example, James’s recognition of the slaves’ humanity, on the basis of their capacity for radical activity in struggle, fails to rework a modern/premodern divide that distorts African realities. As such, James negates the Western epistemic erasure of black people but is unable to produce an “African human self on its own terms.”50 But given that James cites an initial literary reason for writing a history of Toussaint L’Ouverture that—after reading Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution as well as works by Stalin, Lenin, Marx and others—became subsumed within Marxism and a Marxist explanation of historical development,51 the foundational methodological, conceptual, and political errors of The Black Jacobins are then, at least partially, errors of Marxism. Nevertheless, for Bogues, The Black Jacobins amends traditional Marxist analytical categories and procedures and although James rightly attacks Marxists’ inexcusable historical neglect of Africa and Africans, he is unable to make the “frontal challenge” to black epistemic and ontological erasure advanced by Du Bois in Black Reconstruction.52 The implication is clear: James’s “nuanced” and “subtle reworking” of Marxism still subjects him to certain constricting forces within its theoretical formation that prevent the complete move from a vindicationist negation of black epistemic erasure—subservient in this case to the exalted status of Marxism as a (“Western”) mode of explanation—to the positive affirmation of an “African human self.” The vindication/affirmation problematic, posed to James by Marxism, is largely explicable through three critical possibilities that may be viewed as discrete or interconnected hypotheses. One might ask whether the shortcomings of Marxism are, in turn, reflective of inherent conceptual and analytical deficiencies such as teleological simplification and descriptive generalisation; an inherent ethnocentrism echoing its indigenous weltanschauung that easily slides into racially paternalist and racist perspectives; or simply problems of (in)correct philosophical interpretation and the political operationalisation of its tenets?

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Instead of rehearsing the voluminous debates on these and related questions, it is most profitable to assess the salience of Marxism strictly through James’s work and activist engagements. Although the first hypothesis has some currency within black intellectual circles,53 it is utterly unacceptable to James as manifest in numerous assertions throughout his corpus, from casual vignette to assiduous treatise, of the indisputable status of Marxism as a historical analytical system beyond compare. However, the second proposition is less defensible for James, even if his reservations here refer to the misguided predilections of sectarian-led individual and collective protagonists as opposed to the putatively inherent structural ethnocentrism and racism of Marxism. Consequently, he consistently seems to be in broad agreement with the third position. Remembering that he characterises his involvement in black and Pan-African politics as sporadic and incomplete prior to re-crossing the Atlantic in 1938, James’s American sojourn ought to offer insights into his elective affinities with Marxist and black, anticolonial and Pan-African politics, and his management of their competing demands. In his discussions with Leon Trotsky that sought to clarify how the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) might recruit black members, James reminded the great man that blacks’ profound individual and mass suspicion of whites meant that the party, and the entire Trotskyist movement, could not engage them in a didactic manner but faced a monumental reflexive and reconstructive task.54 The SWP could only successfully recruit black members if they demonstrated the political will to engage with their struggles, illustrated a knowledge and understanding of black issues, and promoted them within its publications. James also argued that the party needed to establish an internal Negro organisation in order to demonstrate the theoretical and practical relevance of socialism to black people in a manner pertinent to their everyday lives, without resorting to simplification or over-abstraction. Furthermore, the party was charged with addressing racist attitudes and practices within white-dominated leftist trades unions as the basis of an ongoing auto-critique of white chauvinism, including the education of white workers about the black struggle and social basis of black chauvinism. This set of demands does not read as the perspective of an abject accomodationist or vindicationist. James’s perception of American blacks, as people subject to the harshest social experience that constituted them as the most radicalised (albeit not mobilised in a revolutionary sense) population within the U.S., leads him to confer upon them a vanguard status, not dissimilar to the epistemic privilege of the proletariat. Racial subjectivity, experience, and action are central to James’s political diagnosis and prognosis of black struggles and white supremacy; white chauvinism is unconscionable and must be confronted and eradicated, while black chauvinism is explicable and justifiable as a displaced form of class antagonism.55 This resolute defence of black racial particularity is, however, not without qualification. While James recognises the Negro’s right to self-determination, he argues that the crucial issue facing the SWP and Trotskyist movement is whether

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to advocate it. The reason for this distinction is important, as he acknowledges that particular racial conditions within given national and historical contexts produce specific political demands. Self-determination, therefore, has significant meaning as a slogan, but has different practical implications in the colonial world as opposed to the U.S. African and West Indian support for self-determination is, for James, part of an anticolonial politics with potentially progressive possibilities for proletarian class struggle, while conversely, black Americans’ right to self-determination is discordant because it runs parallel to their right to full U.S. citizenship and dissipates the possibility of a wider transracial proletarian coalition. Furthermore, he fears that a separate black state within the U.S. would further “divide and confuse” Southern workers who were beginning to show signs of racial integration in union organising.56 Therefore, he concludes that the SWP ought to support the Negro’s right to, and popular demands, for self-determination, but refrain from actively promoting it.57 This apparent commitment to a possibly didactic and paternalist party strategy is tempered by James’s final stipulation: that the party should investigate self-determination movements, not to dismiss or undermine them, but to generate data on the composition of their support and to assess the extent of a demand among blacks themselves for self-determination as a genuine desire and not merely as a slogan. James’s point—that if blacks “wanted self-determination, then however reactionary it might be in every other respect, it would be the business of the revolutionary party to raise that slogan”58—does not appear too dissimilar from the Communist Party USA’s support for an independent black belt in the South.59 However, two crucial caveats are worth noting: first, James argues that black people must be “won” over to socialism on the basis of their own concrete experience and activity.60 This argument crucially asserts the integrity of experience to which socialism must be attuned instead of attempting to assimilate experience into an abstract guiding analytical framework; it also emphasises the necessity of persuading black people of the relevance of socialism to their specific struggles. And second, James remains unconvinced that selfdetermination is more than a slogan of dissent against social inequity and considers racial secession as a “backward step” for a revolutionary movement aiming towards a “socialist society.”61 His deep reservation here is that such separatism would dramatically extend the historical breach between black and white workers and facilitate the further entrenchment of industrial capitalism. The theoretical apex of this argument is the demand that a black ontological condition is dialectically understood as reflective of both the “subjective consciousness of . . . an oppressed racial minority” and the “objective consciousness of labour as the great bulwark of democracy in the country at large.”62 The complex demands entailed in maintaining such a commitment to the mass of blacks as racialized proletarians is amplified by the desire to understand what they want, as a Jamesian elective affinity between

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racial particularity and political imperative that is necessary yet nonetheless difficult to sustain. But the conceptual and practical (in)efficacy of this elective affinity is deeply ironic. Trotsky’s tactical trepidation over approaching “thirteen or fourteen million Negroes” with abstractions instead of substantive positions and concrete policies, nevertheless fails to recognise that the conceptualisation and categorisation of a black mass is itself an empirically unreliable abstraction. This shortcoming is borne out by the sheer variety of black radical approaches, ranging from the separatist militancy of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) founded by Cyril Briggs; to Communist Party workers in various national contexts under the mantra of “Black and White Unite and Fight!”; and Harold Moody’s more accomodationist League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), firmly located within an establishment milieu. And this inadequate conceptualisation of black people en masse is not reserved only for Trotsky; as we will see, affirmative unitary notions of an “African human self” and the radical black intellectual are also abstractions that face severe descriptive stress when confronted with internal differentiation. Pulled in different directions in the midst of this morass, James is not sure what “the people” want. Intuitively and impressionistically, he feels that black Americans really desire full American citizenship and that “self-determination” and “back to Africa” are slogans of revolt against their immediate condition, but he does not claim to know beyond doubt. Therefore, his preparedness to sociologically gather and analyse empirical evidence of support for selfdetermination in order to test his intuitive and impressionistic hypothesis is not an uncharacteristic adherence to positivist modelling, but represents the best exercise he can imagine wherein the people speak for themselves—not as interpreted by party functionaries or decreed by race representatives, but for and by themselves.

“I AM A BLACK EUROPEAN” If James, however obliquely, recognised the “cordial” and “vindicationist” modality that pervaded his early thought and writing as a critical limitation, he never quite saw his abstention from affirming the “African human self” of the black Jacobins as any form of failure or shortcoming. His retrospective wish to record what “they” and “we” had to say about “themselves” and “ourselves” does not establish a necessary ontological correspondence between African slaves and their Caribbean descendants. Although descended from and thus linked to “them,” James’s “we” are qualitatively different people, not just historically but subjectively. This understanding of the Caribbean is reminiscent of Edouard Glissant’s point that through dispersal, transplanted peoples change into something else which, seen through the lens of creolisation, signifies a process of metamorphosis that moves away from notions of diachronically fixed being.

62 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics Unable to sustain the impulse to “revert” to Africa, the black diasporic memory of the ancestral land fades; while this fading does not signal an easy resettlement without tensions, Glissant notes the emergent practice of “imitation” when “coming effectively to terms with the new land, the community has tried to exorcise the impossibility of return by . . . the practice of diversion.”63 Therefore, the formation of a black Caribbean subjectivity is physically and imaginatively experienced across the middle passage and in the New World as the creolised processes of reversion and diversion. There is no teleological and hermetically sealed “African” subjectivity to be conjured, no deracinated pit of assimilation to fall into; instead, ultimately and hopefully, there is the “free invention of new cultures.”64 James’s compulsion towards the particularistic demands of both racial identification and political activism demonstrates the extent to which the vindication of a “black proletarian” subject or affirmation of an “African human self” contains a set of ontological and evaluative assumptions. Instead, what one witnesses within James’s intellectual development through the prism of elective affinity is the very struggle to work through these competing demands, not in the sense of definitive resolution to one end or another, but in the ability to manage different, allied, and competing interests within specific moments. The zero-sum notions of “African”/”Western” thought or African/European ontology were quite simply lost on him; situations—geographical, historical, and otherwise—were pliable entities to be remade from given political interests and positions. “Western civilisation” was indeed decaying, but not because it was decadent; on the contrary, its decline was attributable to a failure to fulfil its ideals. James’s response to this situation is evident in his telling rejoinder to a group of comrades cataloguing Europe’s evils during the late 1960s: “I am a Black European, that is my training and my outlook.”65 John Bracey, a recipient of this riposte, interpreted it as a caution against a rejection of Europe—that arbitrarily discarded everything created in or inspired by Europe, including people like James—and “a significant part of our own cultural and intellectual baggage.” Bracey continues to note, perhaps most tellingly, that James, “as a good Marxist, upheld the best of what earlier societies produced in terms of literature, art, philosophy, and values.”66 But as much as this honours James as “a good Marxist,” it also identifies him as a humanist; indeed, following this comment, Bracey recalls James’s exhortation that “[t]o be a humanist in the twentieth century was to be a Marxist.” James’s famous statement that “Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness” is most significant in his preceding remark, that “If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilisation were of the slenderest. He saw what was under his nose so well because he saw no further.”67 Toussaint’s hesitation between faith in the new French Republican egalitarianism and fear of the restoration of slavery was not the vacillation of an

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indecisive leader, but was symptomatic of his commitment to freedom as a universal moral ideal. And if this noble ideal was debased by the struggle for supremacy between the ancien régime and their bourgeois usurpers, then Toussaint’s investment in French civilisation was an Achilles’ heel as much as Dessalines’s ignorance of its sophistry was an advantage. Nevertheless, Toussaint’s errors of leadership demonstrate a tragic flaw, far more attributable to the historical development of civilisation than to his own individual mortal personality. For James, Toussaint thus partially shares a tragic grandeur with the characters of the great dramatic tragedians such as Racine, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare, whose travails eloquently signify that [t]hey are faced with things that for them are impossible to do, and in attempting to do the impossible they show qualities of human character, human bravery, human endurance which go far beyond what people do in the ordinary ways of their existence. And that is why those tragic characters are what they are. It is because with tremendous energy and force and determination not to be defeated they hurled themselves at things they cannot solve.68 Although it was Dessalines who, as a “barbarian,” hurled himself at the French instead of Toussaint, he was only able to do so because of the Toussaintbuilt state and army at his disposal. However, James does not deprecate the failure of enlightenment or civility per se, but the failure of enlightenment and civility at the hand of an aristocratic and bourgeois French civilisation. The especial character of this failure is borne out in David Scott’s suggestion that Toussaint was constrained by a cognitive universe of the modern Atlantic world that he could neither fully claim nor reject—the justification for his enslavement and freedom were both to be found within the high ideals of Western modernity.69 Thus, for Scott, Toussaint is a paradigmatic modern personality whose tragic trajectory is amplified by the contradictions of modern reason and freedom exemplified within colonialism and Atlantic slavery. Toussaint’s “choice” was anything but, and caught between a deep commitment to liberté, equalité, and fraternité and a fear of the ancien régime and the restoration of slavery, his vacillation was borne of his “conscription” to modernity, although he was acutely aware of its flawed promise. Therefore, French and Western civilisation, after the conquest of its insidious deviation, faced the monumental challenge of opening up a more sincere version of Republican egalitarianism. In short, for James, this entails realising the moral ideal of freedom as part of the “new universal” that he understood as the destruction of the modern social contradiction between “being” and “knowing.”70 With the advent of labour and thought as free, creative, and revolutionary, the apparatuses of vertical political organisation and the instrumental rationality of a “right to conquest” would be abolished. James situates black intellectuals squarely at the forefront of this challenge. Speaking in London in 1971 at an event to mark his seventieth

64 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics birthday, James points out the significant contributions of figures such as Du Bois, Césaire, Padmore, and Fanon, opining that their education—academic and social—enabled them to make serious interventions within the Old World. But instead of reiterating the vindicationist perspective, James offers a different focus: the activist-scholarship of black intellectuals also represented a liberating force capable of reinvigorating a decaying Western civilisation.71 Instead of a particularised focus on racial uplift, anticolonialism, or affirmative cultural-nationalist projects, a broader humanistic reach is evident in a variety of interventions. One such example is imparted to James by Du Bois in Black Reconstruction. By placing a specific event, such as Reconstruction and its sectional racial struggles, in a broader historical context that situates it alongside epochal events, such as the Reformation or French Revolution, James understood that the moral authority and rhetorical force of Black Reconstruction is enhanced through its depiction of a general human and political struggle, which extends in relevance beyond immediately involved parties.72 Therefore, while The Black Jacobins ends with an emphasis on African liberation, Du Bois presents an upheaval of humanity; arguably, it is Du Bois’s prior acceptance of black humanity that enables him to make this worthy commitment, while James’s need to prove a black historical past partially constraines him within a racial focus. Similarly, in a 1968 talk at Makerere University College, Uganda, James seizes on the universalist application of Césaire’s Cahier as a cross-racial incorporation of an African way of life into the rejuvenation of humanity.73 For James, this much-ignored aspect of Césaire’s epic poem notably asserts that “no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is place for all at the rendezvous of victory.” The translation is his own, taken from the 1963 Appendix to The Black Jacobins, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.”74 James translates Césaire’s conquête as “victory” instead of “conquest,” even though Césaire makes no reference to victoire in this passage, and in the previous passage, he translates Césaire’s verb conquérir as “conquer.”75 This translation of the noun conquête as “victory”—while retaining the verb conquérir as “conquer”—is a notable amendment with such a significant impact on meaning that it demands further attention. Césaire’s use of the verb refers to an individual event, albeit with a broader resonance: “and man has yet to conquer every prohibition paralysed in the corners of his fervour.”76 Conversely, the noun of conquête/“conquest” is situated collectively, whereby there will be “room for all,” giving it an unmistakably and explicit social context. While James neither recognises nor explains the rationale for this creative translation, one might speculate that it marks an attempt to replace the domineering connotation of national/racial conquest within an inclusive communal metaphor of human social triumph. Indeed, James writes and speaks in admiration of Césaire, and for the specificity of the Caribbean condition that has something (as do other groups) to contribute towards the development and fulfilment of humanity. Tellingly, at

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this precise moment, there is a subtle humanist move in his interpretation of Césaire’s verse and of Negritude as a projection towards Africa—not as an insular self-referential mythology, but as a critical response to the alienating tendencies of the instrumental reason of modernity. In an earlier 1964 address to the West Indian Students’ Association in Edinburgh, James audaciously states that Césaire’s articulation of Negritude is a distinctively West Indian concept while, conversely, as a “native of Africa,” an African has no need for Negritude.77 James emphasises Césaire here as an important member of a broad tradition of (literal and figurative) outsider-critics of French civilisation, including figures as diverse as Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. Therefore, even though James wants to retain national and cultural specificity—the Caribbean is not Europe—it is situated within a human commonality. This universalist affinity gestures towards an ideal-typical human generality cognizant of particular difference which, as Lorenzo Simpson usefully suggests, is “an unfinished project” that “is to be understood in a postmetaphysical fashion, as forged rather than found.”78 Within black and radical intellectual history the stakes of such an intervention are high. On one hand, the vindication/affirmation dichotomy reappears and takes James’s concern with universalist human principles and transracial political synergy at the expense of a race-based or -centred perspective as grounds for denigrating him as an “Afro-Saxon” or “Uncle Tom.”79 On the other hand, it enables the suggestion that James “explicitly rejected” black cultural nationalism in favour of more “universalist and rationalist” Marxian-influenced positions.80 While this latter position is true to an extent, it is flawed in the suggestion that James never subscribed to any cultural nationalist sentiments and that cultural nationalism is obviously antithetical to universalism and rationalism. In “The Caribbean Rejection,” James asserts that a viable anticolonial politics must address the intangible social and cultural forms of colonial dominance—customarily ignored as leisure, recreation, or entertainment—as well as the customary institutional, constitutional, and economic sites of power. This requires an epistemological and historiographical project with a transformative imperative that constitutes a “rejection.”81 In terms of the West Indies, this project entails the rejection of European literature, politics, philosophy, and languages in the European social contexts within which they were learnt. Instead, James argues that in order to develop alternative imaginative literatures relevant to their experience, West Indian writers have to reject the fundamental expressions of what they had learnt while continuing to use the English language and the novel as communicative forms. This contention is notable in two key senses. The poetic and critical possibilities of this project are instructively illuminated within Nicole King’s assessment of James’s narration of the black Jacobins as written history and performed play; it transcends the specificity and conventional comforts of genre and blurs the normative distinction between the factual and

66 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics the fictive.82 The impact is profound: it broadens the prospective audience, and encourages the reader/audience to consider and explore the qualitative aspects of Atlantic slavery and colonialism as ethical and political questions. Meanwhile, its dramatic performance “highlights James’s need to identify cultural mechanisms as an integral aspect of political action.”83 Secondly, this notion of rejection as an epistemological and historiographical modification encapsulates James’s attempt to recognise West Indian specificity within a broader totality. Although this may represent an untenable equivocation for the vindication/affirmation paradigm, or at least an intermediate step that needs to be thought with and then beyond, it attempts a subtle balance between the extremities of race. On one hand, race is “the modality in which class is ‘lived,” as Stuart Hall notes, and on the other hand, race is, as Fanon notes, phenomenologically tangible as the visceral psychosomatic embodiment of racism.84 James’s precarious position here serves as a potent reminder of the prerogative of developing gestural accounts of race—as situational, relational, and comparative—into a more conceptually sophisticated dialogical explanation. In addition to these theoretical demands, a broader problematic of the status of black intellectual formation and tradition comes into view. The diversity of radical black intellectual production, engaging racial equality and justice alongside anticolonial, feminist, and Marxist imperatives, to name just a few, raises the question of how, or indeed if, it can be categorised as a whole. In Who Is Black?, F. James Davis identifies an instructive definitional problem: he notes the historical basis of the term “black” within the insidious “one-drop rule,” as the imposition of a determining external racializing mechanism that itself becomes the basis for the amelioration of its effects.85 The intellectual effects of this paradox are especially ironic here. Considering that black intellectual notaries contributed effectively to the post–World War II internationalist anticolonial movement and the Bandung Conference (Richard Wright, for example, began to extend his perspective beyond black America and Africa towards Asia and other regions86), the concentration on black subjugation at the hand of white supremacy has the ruinous effect of asserting the primacy of black oppression and struggle. Among the worst excesses of this black ascendancy is Senghor’s juxtaposition of African and European sensibilities through the binaries of emotion/ reason, traditional/modern, collective/individual, and natural/social. His metaphysical sketch tightly rotates on an African-European axis that not only ignores the greater part of the globe, but leads to outrageous examples of conceptual inflation and African preeminence—such as his declaration of pastoral aboriginal practice oriented towards a holistic and reverent cosmological relationship with nature, and the elements as African practice to the exclusion of other indigenous groups.87 There is another incommodious and deeply ironic corollary to be found here. Césaire’s explanation of the ambivalence that he shares with Senghor towards Gobineau easily dismisses him as a progenitor of scientific racism—it is worth remembering that Césaire’s

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statement in Cahier that “No race holds a monopoly” is a direct rejoinder to Gobineau.88 However, it was also perfectly acceptable to concur with Gobineau’s foundational reification of race, because it supports particular essential ideals of black sentience and artistry central to certain visions of Negritude. Césaire’s recollection, then, that Senghor understandably liked Gobineau a great deal because of his statement that “[a]rt is black,” is at once perplexing and entirely consistent.89 This demonstrates an example of what Paul Gilroy sees as the incongruous and yet logical alliances possible under the perversity of raciology when, disparate interpretations aside, a concept of racial essence assumes a position of ontological and analytical primacy.90 Within this logic, Marcus Garvey’s attitude towards miscegenation that concurred with racist laws and “appallingly sportsmanlike respect for the Ku Klux Klan”—with whom he attempted to broker a deal to secure the operation of his Black Star Line of ships—could not be faulted as an administrative strategy, given their shared separatist interests.91 Nevertheless, the numerous objections represent a telling commentary on his perturbing moral stand. Alongside the “one-drop rule” as a key determining factor of blackness, F. James Davis also notes that the American historical and social legacies of slavery, legalised state violence, segregation, Civil Rights and post–Civil Rights struggles, and so on have produced a highly context-specific notion of it. This specificity suggests a disjuncture between black racialization and identification, within an American context and its historical emergence elsewhere, as an important issue in approaching and understanding radical black intellectual thought and tradition. If Ralph Ellison’s recognition of black Americans’ “passionate belief” in democracy and generalised American values works as a cogent description, it is worth considering whether, intellectually speaking, this strain of Americana is at all reflective of a broader American geopolitical dominance—to the extent that black America assumes a hegemonic position as the theoretical and narrative vanguard of diasporic black thought.92 Carl Pedersen witnesses this hegemony in black letters, wherein the dominance of American writers effectively marginalises the contribution of Caribbean writers such as James, Glissant, Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, and Derek Walcott.93 Therefore, rather than accept the categorical salience of “black,” even before the demands of constituting coherent sub-groups such as intellectuals, the various regional and national specificities illustrate the problems facing the construction of a comparative analysis. These problems raise the question of how efficaciously the intellectual is able to use blackness, understood in a personal and local context, as a conceptual resource with which to understand external global events. For James, this poses a continual problem: as we will see in the next chapter, he confesses he neither understands American racial etiquette nor perceives the infinitesimal varieties of racial micro-aggression that prove the pathological problem of race and racism. Faced with competing interpretations of radical black intellectualism by radical black intellectuals, we are left to contemplate

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the extent to which their situational standpoints provide an (in)efficacious basis for the holistic assessment of black radical thought. Again, James’s reclamation of Europe, as a “Black European” against a group of young black American radicals, is instructive. He sought to replace their broad perception of Europe as an exclusionary white domain with his account of its significant formative impact on him and its failure to dilute his blackness. There is another point to be made here: the verity of Europe’s multiracial and multicultural history, however fraught, demands recognition—especially on the grounds of the migrants’ travails in its creation. Through James and Paul Robeson, Bill Schwarz makes this point, illustrating the migrants’ significant presence in the formation of English modernity and the cosmopolitan metropolis of London, even as counter-cultural or vernacular expressions.94 Dismissing this for the normative fiction of “white Europe,” whatever that actually means, erases vital aspects of the diverse historical and social circumstances of black peoples; it retreats to the comfortable sanctuary of the black/white Manichean metaphysical divide able to circumvent difficult questions of ethical and non-racial bases for individual identity, collective belonging, and political commitment.95 Ultimately, what is lost exceeds disputes over what radical black thought is and who its correct prophets are. The visionary quality of thinkers such as James becomes a casualty when their humanistic concern is distorted as treachery instead of monumentally magnanimous gesture. Just as James laudably notes that the myth of colonial supremacy continues to stifle the British people, even as they “as a whole are ready for new relations, human relations, for the first time in four centuries,”96 and Césaire famously laments that colonialism and its racial violence dehumanises and brutalises the coloniser,97 their conciliatory generosity is sacrificed for pragmatic racial purposes. To this end, Robin Kelley remarks that although Césaire implies throughout Discourse on Colonialism that there was “nothing worth saving” in Europe and that the (white) European working class had continually been in league with European bourgeois racism—imperialism and colonialism thus proving themselves unworthy of empathy—the concluding support for proletarian revolution within his text signals an immense disappointment.98 But why is this so? Are there racially arranged issues of power, political and intellectual, at hand here? Undoubtedly yes, but to address this problematic as a singularly or mainly racial one is to miss the point. Working class white Europeans’ continued support for racism, imperialism, and colonialism is not self-explanatory, which, alongside other causal explanations, leaves the conundrum of whether it is because they are white or because they are racialized as white in relation to subject colonial populations.99 However, given the critical eloquence and remarkable poetic force preceding it, Césaire’s closing gesture towards the Soviet Union as an exemplary new society is incongruous, to say the least. Nonetheless, if the history of Marxism tells only one thing, it is that socialism and what is done in its name

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are seldom the same thing. Although Césaire’s resignation letter to Maurice Thorez does set the record straight, the indelible imperfections of Discourse on Colonialism stand as a testament to his debt to Marxism and the price of intellectual independence. And while Kelley notes Césaire’s disenchantment with the “old humanism,” Césaire’s intervention might be taken as proof of the bankruptcy of humanism per se or, furnished with hindsight, an invitation to form a new variant. James attempts this project of assembling a reinvigorated humanism that, in his estimation, entails a comprehensive methodological and principled undertaking that moves between race, politics, and poetics. Whether this corrective constitutes the acceptable face of black radicalism or not, James cannot be denied. Indeed, maybe this analysis is one of his most conciliatory offerings: in contributing towards the internal multiplicity of a radical black intellectual tradition, he may well persuade us of its maturity and ability to countenance diverse opinion as a place for cordial criticism.

THE CULTURAL (RE)TURN If Harlem represented the capital of the black world in the inter-war years, a similar emergent cultural political force is discernable in Trinidad during the moment of the “Trinidadian Renaissance.”100 Beginning in the late 1920s in Trinidad, James, and writers such as Alfred Mendes, Albert Gomes, C. A. Thomasos, Percival C. Maynard, and others, sought to create a forum for the exchange and development of their work and ideas. They formed a loose literary circle leading to the establishment of two journals: Trinidad, which only published two issues, Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930; and the Beacon, which enjoyed a run of twenty-eight issues between 1931 and 1933. James published short stories in Trinidad, edited with Mendes, and in the Beacon, published by Gomes, that sought to establish a West Indian literary tradition, distinct from the canon of English literature. More significantly, while Trinidad was ostensibly literary in orientation yet nonetheless controversial in its graphic portrayal of “slum life” and “prostitute-type women,” the Beacon adopted a more assertive political stance, pursuing the representation of the ordinary folk as acceptable subjects of social realist fiction.101 As such, the Beacon was not solely a vehicle for prose fiction in the classical European tradition, but was also an explicitly political publication. Its editorials critiqued Crown Colony governance, addressed the issue of a West Indian Federation, and issued support for Indian independence and Russian socialism: “In outlook it was anti-capitalist and anti-ecclesiastical, bohemian and iconoclastic.”102 It is also notable that while the literary circle that provided a critical space for the advancement of this incendiary cultural politics was committed to developing indigenous forms of literary expression and social and cultural criticism, it was not dismissive of Western intellectualism. For James,

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the emergence of Trinidadian literature and criticism during the 1930s was forged through the synergy between Western philosophy and history and Caribbean social history and politics: that interface crucially allowed for the development of both a distinctive West Indian literature and a penetrating critique of European modernity. But congruent with his understanding of Césaire and other critics of Western civilisation, James’s cultural criticism would develop in ways that would enable him to supplement disapproving analyses of the various failings of Western modernity with positive accounts of the emergence of its dialectical opposites of emancipatory thought and expression, even if only in embryonic form. Given James’s totalising historical and analytical framework, the project of combining negative critique with positive insight and prescription required an expansive understanding of social structures and relations spanning political, economic and cultural realms. Furthermore, considering that during a period in the 1930s, James was writing cricket reports for the Manchester Guardian, thinking about The Black Jacobins, and reading Marx and Lenin—even though one can separate out these distinct projects—the literary excesses and representational politics within The Black Jacobins demonstrate how James’s totalised concerns themselves have a totalising impact. Simply put, The Black Jacobins has an emotional and moral resonance far beyond an inventory of a past. This confluence of ideas and concerns is crucial, because the meaning and political significance of James’s creative writing has been hotly contested, especially in terms of its relationship to the explicit political insights developed after his Marxist turn. Indeed, disagreements over the relationship of James’s literature with his political work sometimes separate his “culturalism” from his “political” Marxism.103 The link between the literary and the political has been understood, in turn, as tendentious and embryonic, which questions whether his fiction can be accepted as part of a coherent cultural nationalist project or is a strictly formalistic textual and creative exercise. However, whether James’s literature is characterised as a reflection of an anticolonial moment and the literary circles within which he moved, or as an expression of the black diasporic tradition of orality through a literary device akin to magic realism preceding Alejo Carpentier’s connection with the term by over a decade, it is difficult to simply dismiss this moment as his “literary period.”104 James’s creative writing from this period might be separate from and lack the specific analytical qualities of his later political concerns and engagement but that does not mean it is devoid of any political content or significance. His early short stories—“La Divina Pastora” (1927); “Triumph” (1929); “Turner’s Prosperity” (1929); and “The Star That Would Not Shine” (1931)—as well as his novel, Minty Alley (1936), are literary examples of social realism, depicting urban barrack yard and working class life in Trinidad. His appreciation of the barrack yard folk and conviction that their lives were worthy of literary representation, even if it lacked explicit political and social critique, recognises both the significance of the Trinidadian

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working class as a group equal to any other depicted within canonical English literature and the distinctive contribution of West Indians to the English language.105 In addition, James’s barrack yard fiction is widely accepted as foundational work within the folkish genre that constitutes the emergence of a West Indian literature. The debates surrounding the meaning and significance of James’s creative writing are important for assessing its political value, and the tangent(s) at which his concern with the “folk” intersect with the specifically Marxist insights of his later politics. The first set of insights here point to the tenuous political quality of his fiction; for example, the break between his literature and political writing is only connected by his preoccupation with “personality.”106 However, a stronger critique is based on the authorial and social position from which James’s literature speaks for the subaltern and rewrites distorted Eurocentric histories from a separate and detached class position.107 While this solipsistic critique is misguided in its presupposition of knowledge as an absolute right of experience, which evokes the problematic forms of epistemic privilege outlined in the previous chapter, it importantly raises the issues of intentionality and political purpose. In other words, to what extent did James intend to write fictional works that would be read as politically significant? Or, alternately, is his literature a passive reflection of the political environment and/or retrospectively readable as a text with a broader political significance? An explanation might begin with James’s comments on the creative impulse for Minty Alley, where he recalls living in a similar household to the protagonist Haynes during his late twenties: “the people fascinated me, and I wrote about them from the point of view of an educated youthful member of the middle class. The political implications I was not aware of. They seemed to be interesting people, and what was going on was very dramatic.”108 James’s admission—that he was unaware of the political implications in his writings and the suggestion of the folk as dramatic characters instead of political agents—can be read as a framing of his characters as literary objects instead of social subjects. This subject/object relation is borne out by the methodological implications of this background to the writing of Minty Alley. Although the novel came out of James’s experiences of living in a similar environment, his cultivated distance from the other inhabitants of this domestic and social space sustains his fascination with them, and arguably displays elements of an ethnographic gaze. The exhilaration of living among the “folk” demonstrates a sense of Arnoldian curiosity, whereby class differences enter the realm of the exotic instead of the racial or ethnic. This critique is primarily interesting not in terms of its putative accuracy, but in its demonstration of the dilemmas involved in combining a transcendental idealist notion of cultural creativity with a historico-materialist sense of politics—that makes clear reference to, and ethical judgements on, social context. And given James’s assertion that the great writer is able to express the tensions within the transformative process between historical epochs,

72 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics the issue of intent, or indeed, a conflict between transcendental and specific intention, is of crucial importance.109 As such, sympathetic readings of the political import of James’s literature point to the correspondence between the creative and the social imperatives within his creative writing.110 In this sense, James’s literary concerns are situated within a broader set of concerns shared by many black American and colonial intellectuals during the interwar years, and they demonstrate the problematic of how to represent the “folk” as a social mass and in relationship to their political leadership.111 This problematic signifies the entanglement of literary pursuits and political engagement within James’s fiction that charges literature with a social reformist role, and it frames his concern with the barrack yards and the “folk” as a demonstration of his determination to incorporate an oppositional politics of representation into his literature.112 There is also the sense in which, even as distinct intellectual projects, James’s early “yard-fiction” prepares the ground for his mature work that seeks to establish the grounds for a broad socialist coalition through the recovery of the integrated personality. His concern with the barrack yard “folk” is seen to demonstrate an “embryonic dialectical reasoning” which recognises the “attributes of spontaneity” that would become key tenets of his mature independent Marxism.113 A lesser-observed coherent thread runs between James’s early literature and mature social thought: his concern with the issue of “happiness.” The apparently innovative register of American Civilization, written in the late 1940s—which outlines social disillusionment with the degradations of a restrictive capitalist modernity and embraces the regenerative escapism of popular culture as a substitute for happiness—borrows freely from the creative, (dis)ingenuous attempts of people to escape poverty in James’s early fiction. The creative tactics of his characters range from the parents’ dilemma over “selling” their son to Hollywood as a child actor (“The Star That Would Not Shine”); to Turner’s attempted deceit to end his financial problems (“Turner’s Prosperity”); and Anita Perez calling for spiritual intervention to realise her romantic longings (“La Divina Pastora”). These tales display the routes to (sometimes temporary) financial security, and question the extent to which human satisfaction and fulfilment can be realised through a dependence on material acquisition. Although these narratives are tinged with a familiar sentimentality issuing moralistic undertones (which calls into question their imaginative originality and literary merit), they address the question of happiness, how it is imagined, the creativity it generates, and the problems of reifying it as an uncomplicated, objective state. A key problem with the arbitrary separation of James’s “culturalism” and “political” work is its tacit acceptance of the material/political and the idealist/cultural spheres as separate and distinct. Grant Farred importantly recognises that James, to his credit, takes cultural politics seriously; however, this seriousness is not necessarily attributable to what Farred understands as James’s “eclecticism.”114 James’s totalising view renders the association

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between the cultural and political as necessary and not contingent. Gramsci’s theorisation of civil society and analyses of cultural politics formulated in that same inter-war moment, though so obvious as to appear banal, still instructively informs us of the grave dangers and limitations associated with conceiving of politics and the political as a specific formal social realm separable from the cultural. Alongside the imagined correspondence between James’s literature and the artist-activists of the Harlem Renaissance, there is a strong, and yet incomplete, association between James and Gramsci and their concerns with the multiplicitous forms of power that traverse various social categories and cultural processes. Gramsci’s understanding of the mutating hegemonic power of a ruling class within a historical bloc presents an important parallel with James’s thought, because it recognises the fluidity of political management across the entirety of society. Indeed, Gramsci’s crucial understanding of the formation of “common sense” as a fragmented set of folkloric statements that, taken together, constitute customary group dispositions is, in its specific form, germane to James’s project of critiquing and dismantling the multilayered orders of colonial dominance.115 For example, James’s later observation of the revolutionary process in Ghana appositely notes the maintenance of colonial dominance through control of the ostensibly ideological apparatuses of social governance and economic means of production, supplemented by (the lingering threat of) force as well as the moral authority of colonial cultural norms and values. In Gramscian terms, James identifies the colonial project of social unification and popular consent as a political project that is in part a moral undertaking, continually expanded through barely perceptible means. The “myth” of the superiority of the coloniser and the inferiority of the colonised then acts as a selfregulating normative social discourse and moral statement that reinforces colonial dominance and reproduces colonial hegemony.116 If this locates, or ought to locate, James squarely within the pantheon of Western Marxists, then his distinctive articulation of the subjective problematic of twentieth-century modernity—conceptualised as a range of problems: hegemony, reification, commoditisation, massification, and seriality—probably attests to part of the reason for his exclusion. James not only resists the dominant paradigm of the repressed and manipulated individual that restricts radical proletarian self-activity, but seeks to demonstrate the practical birth of the modern, socially emancipated subject after a difficult period of gestation. Commentary on this subject largely takes two forms: either human relations are commodified to the extent that the objectification of human needs and gratification is no longer discernible, or there is the potentiality for an emergent cultural association to create a “necessary organ” that would advance proletarian class aims.117 Placed in conversation with these formulations, James understands that social actors are cognisant of their ominous state and prepared to react accordingly. The potentiality of seditious cultural forums is therefore already

74 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics existent, albeit in an underdeveloped form, within American popular culture. Thus, while he accepts the descriptive account of the “culture industry” critique in terms of the financial imperatives that inform film studios’ production and distribution schedules, James nevertheless discerns the escalation of its dialectical negation as a counter to its pervasive totalising dominance: The modern popular film, the modern newspaper . . . the comic strip, the evolution of jazz, a popular periodical like Life, these mirror from year to year the deep social responses and evolution of the American people in relation to the fate which has overtaken the original concepts of freedom, free individuality, free association, etc.118 In stating what is now a customary refrain within contemporary cultural studies, James identifies resistance within oppression. Popular culture thus symbolises a space where the masses participate in the formation of society, express dissatisfaction and dissent, and seek “individuality in a mechanised, socialised society where his [sic] life is ordered and restricted at every turn.”119 Given the systematic imposition of social orders and restrictions, James does not propose an unfettered voluntarism; nevertheless, he recognises that the masses are not purely manipulated through the representational politics of popular culture. Their intuitive social disenchantment and latent radicalism drives a demand for popular entertainment that retains a degree of autonomy from the dictates and hegemonic intentions of the culture industry: “To believe that the great masses of the people are merely passive recipients of what the purveyors of popular art give them is in reality to see people as dumb slaves.”120 James’s dialectical method, and his eagerness to distinguish a degree of autonomous voluntarism within cultural consumption (and its subsequent symmetry with radical political activity), place him on a collision course with many of the central tenets of the culture industry critique. The supposed production of popular culture as a direct response to consumer-led wants and choice is summarily dismissed as a mirage that disguises deterministic repression as voluntaristic agency.121 Furthermore, the dissention and transgressive creativity that James identifies in jazz, for example, is instead rejected as an illusory “continual revolutionising” that pretends towards a vital reflection of a tumultuous zeitgeist, yet is simply a formulaic and clichéd deception, oriented towards the commercial imperatives of the culture industry.122 James eschews this either/or formulation and recognises that cultural politics are an extremely significant realm for the germination of radicalized popular sentiment that is either denied access to the formal political sphere or restrained by bureaucratic and hierarchical organisation. Anticipating deterministic objections, he delineates the transgressive components of popular culture as dialectically emergent, unresolved elements, as opposed to free expressions unchecked by state capitalist society. This dialectical interplay

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between the culture industry and the consumer is evident, in that while the evasion of pressing social issues and questions, such as the Great Depression in modern American films, might be interpreted as “deliberate sabotage by those who control the economic life of the country,”123 these issues are not presented in distorted or unproblematic ways. In determining cultural production, the masses would not stand for misrepresentations of “their” society, and an attempt on the film industry’s part to address issues of social apprehension and disquiet, such as war or the Depression, would open an unbridgeable breach. As a result, James attributes the circumvention of these issues to a “mutual understanding, a sort of armed neutrality.”124 He then argues against propagandist critiques that present filmmakers as purveyors of movies that specifically maintain the capitalist social order, and suggests that they would make pro-worker movies if assured of a profit. Ultimately, James’s understanding of the dialectical emergence of mass radical self-activity owes a debt to the “Eighteenth Brumaire,” in that through individuals’ investment in popular culture, they “have expressed themselves in negative and concealed form, but clearly enough within the limitation allowed them.”125 As such, the sadistic brutality and bitterness among the post-Depression masses, governing the bloodlust sated by their gangster films and violent comic strips, is the mass expression of social antagonisms that have not yet evolved into a fully formed political class-consciousness.

ELECTING AFFINITIES The meaning and significance of Goethe’s notion—it cannot accurately be labelled a concept—of elective affinities has been the subject of fierce debate within literary theory and criticism, but it need not concern us here.126 Nonetheless, bearing Weber’s later use of the same term in mind, there is an important broad observation to be made: the process of electing affinities is, for Goethe, not the straightforward rational calculation of transparent preferences to clearly identifiable ends. Electing affinities, instead of signalling comfortable reconciliation, is a rather deeply problematic enterprise that is most significant as process as opposed to outcome; indeed, as the character Edward asserts, “the complex cases are actually the most interesting. From them you can really begin to understand the degrees of affinity, be they nearer and stronger or weaker and more remote. It really starts to get fascinating when the relationships bring about separations.”127 This is to say that the putative separation of different phenomena does not preclude attempts at their reconciliation on the basis of an imagined correspondence. Even if they are not fully reconciled, the extent to which they are brought together alongside the degree to which they remain apart, and the character of their interrelationship, is of key concern. In relation to James, the project of synthesising the separate spheres of race, politics, and poetics illustrates a deep commitment to reimagine their

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association that is as politically important as it is an imaginative leap. The attempts to understand, articulate, and realise sentient desires—animated in Goethe’s characters—intimate a struggle that resonates with James’s attempt to reconcile the supposedly incompatible demands of racial, political, and poetic concerns. As this chapter has argued, the compatibility of these concerns for James was not incidental but unavoidable; each sphere is a mutually producing and reinforcing one, and to understand one—or, more broadly, to understand modernity—is to understand them all. Therefore, James was left with no real choice as to their interrelation; rather, he was compelled to combine them within his work. As a result, the comprehensive methodological and principled concerns, especially evident within his later work, that sought to reconnect the customary analytical dichotomies (such as subjective/objective, material/ideal, mental/physical and so on) emerge directly from this focal concern with managing race, politics, and poetics as a holistic triumvirate. Although seldom coherent and successful in the strict sense, this wideranging project is nonetheless reinforced by James’s always-elegant phrasing and secular appeal to a human spirit of creative fulfilment and psychic peace. However, the interaction between the humanist and poetic, as well as the racial and political within James’s thought, also demonstrates the travails of electing affinities; on closer inspection, James’s desire to formulate an approach characterised by an expansive social vision yields certain, to crudely paraphrase Goethe’s wording, separations that are manifest as analytical oversights. Just as he overcame economic forms of overdetermination, James remains subject to alternate forms of weak teleological thought—where instead of an economic reductionism, his enthusiasm to demonstrate radical self-activity and the seeds of popular dissent lead towards a fetishisation of agency. This is transparent within his cultural criticism. The contestation, advanced within American Civilization, of popular culture as an instrument of discipline and repression has been roundly critiqued as James’s naïve misreading of the specificity of the post-war American cultural terrain, fatally restricted by its meta-political insistence of the existence of radical dissent within capitalist domination.128 While these substantial objections are not without merit, they emerge from James’s attempt to move positively and prescriptively against the current of negative critique common to modern sociological and Marxisthumanist thought. However, in reclaiming the possibility of radical social redemption, James rejects the messy, oscillating struggle for control of civil society in favour of an unfolding dialectical materialism that presents the success of proletarian class struggle as a development supported by a foundational ethical truth. This meta-position leads him, in haste, to uncover radical and subversive undercurrents within prevalent social structures and relations, without paying enough critical attention to epistemological form and function and the social production of individual and mass consciousness.

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The political and critical immaturity of modern Americans’ dissent, lacking in class-consciousness, provides a cogent example of this weakness. James recognises that while the American masses adhere to a positive, prescriptive model of individual freedom, their rejection of its dominant, sentimental idealisation is “sufficiently established.” But without the conceptual apparatus to consider the function and effects of hegemonic processes of interpellation, the residues of prevailing epistemological concerns within negative expressions of disquiet are difficult to trace. Therefore, when James notes the sadism and brutality depicted within popular culture as the representation of a valuable release from established social inequity and barbarism, the underlying hegemonic discourses within that sadism and brutality—that reinforce the very barbarism he would dismantle—are left undisturbed. As a case in point, James, in a précis of the gangster movie genre, notes that Gangsters get what they want, trying it for a while, then are killed. In the end “crime does not pay” but for an hour and a half highly skilled actors and a huge organization of production and distribution have given to many millions a sense of active living, and in the bloodshed, the violence, the freedom from restraint to allow pent-up feelings free play, they have released the bitterness, hate, fear and sadism which simmer just below the surface.129 As this analysis unfolds, it is easy to imagine Adorno’s expected rejoinder a propos the manipulative vacuity of the culture industry as a resounding echo, but a different contradictory view, raised from an unexpected and more conservative quarter—within the same historical moment—is perhaps more striking. F. R. Leavis’s critique of such popular cultural products—as entertainment oriented towards a shallow and immediate gratification that engenders superficial emotional responses is indicative of the “levellingdown” of culture that has profound effects on the individual’s capacity for independent and critical thought.130 For Leavis, the consumption of popular culture restricts personal development and promotes an acceptance of fantasy and escapism that evades real life and replaces it with “substitute-living,” which intentionally distracts the individual from contemplating their social environment. James’s recognition that gangster films facilitate individuals’ “freedom from restraint” through “free play” and promote “active living” arguably lacks the penetrative insight of Leavis’s intervention. And it is startling that Leavis’s critique, advanced from an ostensibly intellectual concern, raises the need to develop training in a form of “practical criticism” that moves beyond the textual formalism of literary studies and serves an educative function in challenging the cultural decline and its debased social environment. Although Leavis’s intercession contains a reactionary nostalgia for an English pastoral idyll, he nevertheless calls for a penetrative sociocultural analysis that interrogates impressionistic social understanding in a manner that James’s fatalist dialecticism is unable to countenance.

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The superficiality of James’s critique is apparent in his suggestion that gangster films act as a form of social catharsis, demonstrate the role of culture as a sublimation of violence, and provide valuable release for the “stresstensions” amassing within the tumult of modern society.131 However, the fact that ultimately “crime does not pay” within the gangster genre upholds the dominant ideals of law, order, and due process, even if only morally, and more fundamentally, it leaves the basic tenets of capitalist civil society and private property undisturbed. But not only is the edifice of capitalist society left intact; so is the manner in which it is (dis)engaged. The broader significance of this political contradiction within James’s cultural critique is amplified by Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s reading of James’s understanding of the expansive task facing the project of radical social transformation in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. In suggesting that James reads Melville’s Moby Dick’s resisting the portrayal of a mutiny on board the Pequod as a commentary on the responsibilities of counter-totalitarian politics, Nielsen argues that James suggests that Melville believes such a revolt . . . directed solely against the particular monomaniac at hand, would leave the social and political structures within which Ahab seizes power intact, that the crew would return to inhabit (and be judged by) the very orders that had constituted Ahab as the captain of their fate.132 Nielsen’s point is emphasised by the suggestion that, for James, Melville asserts the need to identify and address the tacit structures of power that imperceptibly assist and affirm the reproduction of dominance within a totalitarian social order.133 However, in the absence of working concepts approximating ideology, interpellation, and hegemony, it is difficult to formulate a revolutionary theory, let alone a mode of praxis that accounts for the contingencies that emerge in struggle against the dominant power. More significantly, it is difficult to develop such theory and praxis as revolutionary means if one is unsure of the revolutionary ends themselves. Put differently, if the design of the post-revolutionary society “will be determined at that time by the workers,” then it is simply a vague, politically insubstantial sketch. Although admirably correct in its suspicion of the socially divisive effects of hierarchical bureaucratic structures, this spontaneity abdicates political responsibility to an untrammelled dialectical fatalism—ironically, James and the JFT found the same thing unacceptable within Trotskyist orthodoxy. The deference to organicity within Jamesian spontaneity leaves social transformation at the mercy of the intuitively progressive sensibilities of the workers; it is at best a miscalculation and at worst a charter for the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is akin to a revolt against Ahab that leaves the command structures of the Pequod intact; a regressive politicointellectual vanguard is simply replaced by a workerist one, able to redirect the paternalistic and exclusionary disposition of the former onto new targets as irreproachable “friendly fire.”

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Given these obvious obstacles, one might reasonably ask why James forces such a reading of popular culture. While theoretically weak, his attempt to link disquiet with dissent towards the stirrings of radical agency is, justifiably, politically driven. This political imperative is evident in his promotion of an elective affinity between race and class in the pursuit of an expansive revolutionary politics. Poignantly and ironically, it appears in the Marxist preoccupation with the correct practico-theoretical tools of social analysis and political organisation, and the compartmentalisation of individual and social life that it demands and reproduces. The choice between class and other forms of particularity, and the enforced universality of Marxian explanation placed James and many other black intellectuals in the difficult position of attempting to maintain a false distinction between modalities of social experience. Césaire, in his resignation from the Parti Communiste Français, eloquently states the untenable repercussions of this dilemma and his resistance: I’m not going to entomb myself in some strait [sic] particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism. There are two paths to doom: by segregation, by walling yourself up in the particular; or by dilution, by thinning off into the emptiness of the universal. I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.134 Similarly, regarding the conceptual arrangement of racial and class groupings as a radical black intellectual enterprise, James’s aptly summarises his position in a 1970 interview: I should like to say that I don’t believe in race as a basis for intellectual dissension. But I believe that it is the black men [sic], black men who live in the black community, who are connected with it and have the black experience and are sensitive to it, who are best able to do the kind of studies the black race needs. They are not the only ones able to make such studies, but they are best able to do an analysis, not only of black people, but of white people who were concerned with the black experience.135 This emphasis on experience as a basis for analysis is crucial—and it is also notable that although such experience is racialized, it is not intrinsically racial. James does not simply recognise the importance of experience per se but notes that it must be of a specific ilk; in specifying sensitivity towards and concern with a racialized experience, he asserts a reflexive involvement instead of a simplistic realist solipsism. Therefore, if race cannot be taken to explain race, the political and moral resources to reflect sensitively on racialized experience emerge from a holistic appreciation of human social

80 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics experience. For James, concentrating on one sphere of social experience at the expense of others leads to a misunderstanding of human particularity and the social whole. James emphasises this point in an essay on Shakespeare’s Othello, where he argues that the dilemmas of the eponymous character are not racial but the result of his status as an outsider: “you could strike out every single reference to his black skin,” James confidently asserts, “and the play would be essentially the same.”136 The prime concern here is a delicate problematic: “our race-ridden consciousness” prevents us from understanding the formation of Othello’s character and situation, yet race is not irrelevant. Othello’s “black skin accentuated his problem, but the problem posed was more fundamental than the colour of his skin.”137 While Ernest Mandel assuredly states that Trotsky was correct to assert the “unrestricted right of self-determination” of black Americans to choose separatist autonomy should they wish as an “elementary democratic right,” he does not consider the substantive basis and ethical implications of such sentiments.138 The polite consensus and underlying disparity in James’s Coyoacán meetings with Trotsky pivot on this precise point: while Trotsky pays noble deference to the desires of racially subjugated populations, James is concerned that the experience of racism might lead to a false and reactionary racial unity. Richard H. King’s description of James’s conceptualisation of the synergy between race and class as “evasive”—because it fails to recognise that white people will not resort to infighting when “faced by the opposition of a considerable number of people of color” but will “generally close ranks” against them—encapsulates the problem.139 If King’s hypothesis is descriptively correct, it does not offer an adequate explanation of why this would or should be the case—indeed, without recourse to a racialized notion of human nature, one is left to consider the material basis for such a closing of racial ranks. Eschewing such naturalised racial forms of social explanation and political prescription, James engages the analytical problem of comprehending the appeal of such racial insularity and, with proletarian unity and democratic sociality in mind, he considers the conditions necessary to replace reified racial solidarity with negotiated group affinity and principled political commitment. This Marxist methodology importantly intersects his humanistic concern. The ideal of racial justice, for James, is inseparable from, and in a sense antithetical to, human freedom. It becomes especially problematic when reduced to a racialized ontology that is easily extrapolated into a racial metaphysics that deepens the political and social separation between racial group membership and full citizenship rights. While Mandel notes Trotsky’s aversion to the white socialist movement’s imposition of nationalist selfdetermination as the promotion of a separatist “ghetto,” James is concerned with avoiding the racialized ghetto altogether. If the insidious hegemonic ideals of racial unanimity might voluntarily usher black peoples towards separatism then the basis of such popular black sentiment deserves analysis and critique. James’s “courage” as a “founding father of black radicalism,”

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in expressing his reservations about and qualified political support for black power, must be seen specifically as the courage of his humanistic and radical convictions.140 Given his lifelong Marxist beliefs and commitments, he has no alternative. Ultimately, James desires a way to recognise the specificity of racialized experience within human universality and a democratically inclusive social sphere. And even if naïve and implausible, it is precisely the political necessity and humanist imperative of his imaginative leap that renders James’s radical vision as an attempt to assess the complex degrees of elective affinities in the spirit of Goethe.

3

The Perilous “Pleasures of Exile” Bad Faith, Failed Gods, and the Diasporic Life

Me and my clippings on W. G. Grace, Victor Trumper and Ranjitisinhji, and my Vanity Fair and my puritanical view of the world. I look back at the little eccentric and would have liked to have listened to him, nod affirmatively and pat him on the shoulder. A British intellectual long before I was ten, already an alien in my own environment among my own people, even my own family. Somehow from around me I had selected and fastened on to the things that made a whole. As will soon appear, to that little boy I owe a debt of gratitude. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary The pleasure and paradox of my own exile is that I belong wherever I am. My role, it seems, has rather to do with time and change than with the geography of circumstances; and yet there is always an acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head. I can only hope that these echoes do not die before my work comes to an end. George Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking” As James’s life and work has been increasingly discussed and interpreted, he has come to reinforce the archetypal figure of the twentieth-century diasporic (post)colonial intellectual. His confident and precarious straddling of different geographical, political, and creative spaces complements his polymath intellectualism spanning a diverse range of humanistic disciplines.1 Recognising James—and other diasporic intellectuals—as one who straddles these spaces in such a way suggests a creative tension that challenges and recasts the assumption of an irrevocable alignment of individuals to distinct national and geographical locales. This reconstruction of the meanings of migration and continual relocation has also generated influential debates on the fluid formations and interactions of race, nation, and culture. Situating the intellectual tangentially to these debates, Edward Said instructively points to the imperative that the intellectual harbours a personal capacity to endure dislocation in order to fulfil their vocation to speak truth unto power.2 Said depicts the migrant intellectual within a refraction

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of the hegemonic political and cultural codes of fixity and affiliation to a distinct national locale, where exile in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back home to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation . . . the intellectual as exile tends to be happy with the idea of unhappiness, so that dissatisfaction bordering on dyspepsia, a kind of curmudgeonly disagreeableness, can become not only a style of thought, but also a new, if temporary, habitation.3 This position holds an immense amount of currency in much of contemporary postcolonial and black intellectual history. The ideal of the intellectual as a transient figure who transcends discrete national and cultural boundaries to issue penetrating and, at times, painful insights, is indeed compelling. This attraction is largely drawn from the potent affinity of this intellectual persona with the project of anti-essentialism and, in different ways, the discourses of cultural diversity, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism. However, noting that “[i]n the outpouring of studies about intellectuals there has been far too much defining of the intellectual, and not enough stock taken of the image, the signature, the actual intervention and performance, all of which constitute the very lifeblood of every real intellectual”, Said hints at the possible myopia of casting the intellectual as a representative figure without paying attention to their mundane existence.4 When biography is inserted into the representation of individual intellectuals, their image and signature, it becomes crucial to critically examine the impact of exile on James’s life, and its function within his intellectual representation, that becomes rearticulated in his image and signature, interventions and performance. Having said this, in the absence of displacing terrors such as war and persecution, it is difficult to identify James as an exiled or diasporic intellectual in the strictest sense—especially considering that his dislocation is the result of his political alienation, and how his remove from his homeland is voluntary.5 Nevertheless, James’s movement as a migrant intellectual to exile and diaspora is a metaphorical marker of his asymptotic relationship to the Caribbean, metropolitan arenas, and the left. The coalescence of studies in (postcolonial) intellectual history with an anti-essentialist project has been susceptible to the exercising of a romantic and celebratory register, which circumvents a concerted critical engagement of the biographical tensions of the migrant life and its resonance within intellectual production. This tendency towards the reification of post/ colonial intellectual life is an important issue, because James’s experience of continual dislocation and relocation is not solely an existential affair; it also has a significant impact on his social thought and political interventions. An examination of the relationship between his personal and intellectual

Pleasures of Exile 85 development—in terms of the descriptive and explanatory synergy between race, politics, and poetics in the development of his social thought—traced in the previous chapter, continues below in a critical engagement of the contradictions and fault lines within his work that are precipitated and exacerbated by exile. In recognising the productive elements within the West Indian condition of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion from the West, which enables James to enrich western letters, culture is asserted not as a static monolith, but as a mosaic formed through differentiated influences.6 Nevertheless, I recognise the structural and psychological relations of dominance within this syncretic mosaic, and believe that what Aldon Lynn Nielsen refers to as this “tremendously ironized sense of cultural doubling and redoubling, that position of being simultaneously insider and outsider, that James speaks of so frequently in his writings and interviews” should be interrogated in order to explicate the existential discomfort of this inbetween space of habitation and the subsequent intellectual dilemmas that it produces.7 The ontological tensions and dilemmas incurred by precariously straddling the Old and New Worlds prompted James towards specific avoidances, silences, and inconsistencies. These gaps can be understood as manifestations of the subjective evasions that Jean-Paul Sartre conceptualises as mauvais foi (“bad faith”) which, in James’s case, is not simply a character deficiency, but part of the price of exile. This is to say that James’s thought—as with that of any intellectual—contains contradictory statements and positions which, for this discussion, invites the compilation of an inventory of his general position(s) and broad analytical tendencies alongside a consideration of the possible explanations for the analytical and political discrepancies. As it is undertaken here, this exercise is primarily concerned with the theoretical and political, but makes use of the biographical as a means to explore the existential struggles that informs the forging of intellectual elective affinities.

THE HOMECOMING OF A “BRITISH INTELLECTUAL” Given his confessed extensive knowledge and profound ignorance about Britain, a curious homecoming lay on the horizon as James left Trinidad for Britain in March 1932. The journey was nevertheless a form of “homecoming,” however peculiar, primarily because James understood its symbolic resonance as such: “I was about to enter the arena where I was to play the role for which I had prepared myself. The British intellectual was going to Britain.”8 Britain, for James, was where the discordant eclecticism of his elective affinities—fusing classical literary, poetic and aesthetic interests— would find a compatible home, rescuing him from his alien residency within his family and inhospitable homeland. In other words, he would have to leave his birthplace and native home in order to enter his rightful intellectual

86 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics home. However, as James set sail for Plymouth—unaware that he would not return to Trinidad for twenty-six years—he entered a protracted, but incomplete, exile. Given what George Lamming notes as the prevailing inability of the West Indies to sustain and nourish creative writers, the social and cultural forces that thrust James towards London as the logical avenue to the fulfilment of his literary aspirations are well documented.9 However, the inevitability of his relocation to England also demonstrates the centrifugal forces of the colony and the centripetal pull of the metropole. This is not to say, however, that the pull of the metropole is reducible to social and economic structures, or to the favourable cultural environment that it perceivably offered intellectuals and creative artists. For Frantz Fanon, the attraction of the metropole also exercised a significant psychic realm insofar as the “position of the West Indian was authenticated by Europe. The West Indian was not a Negro; he was a West Indian, that is to say a quasi-metropolitan.”10 In Europe, West Indians were perceived as more “Western” and metropolitan—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “urbane”—than Africans whose purported pre-modern traditionalism marked them out as less civilised. But some West Indians also held this hierarchical perception of West Indian cultural superiority over Africans, and Fanon points out that West Indians often despised Africans with a greater intensity than Europeans, who could allow themselves a certain latitude in their relations with Africans. This mirage of cultural pre-eminence is, in essence, the insoluble quandary presented by quasi-metropolitan status; on the one hand, the West Indian is elevated above the African, but on the other, can never achieve parity with their metropolitan hosts. And it is precisely this asymptotic relationship to the metropole, reflecting the material and symbolic structures of dominance between coloniser and colonised that is deeply problematical and enervating. As Fanon demonstrates so eloquently in Black Skin, White Masks, the black person who is excluded from the white colonising society, and cannot find an acceptable reason for their rejection, often atrophies with an inward bitterness and self-loathing.11 For the West Indian quasi-metropolitan intellectual there are additional possible responses. There is the acceptance of West Indian inferiority that the quasi-metropolitan avoids by distancing themselves from their background. A perhaps obvious example is V. S. Naipaul’s infamous statement that nothing of value to civilisation ever came out of the West Indies.12 Lamming generously questions the historical validity of Naipaul’s recognition of West Indian philistinism and then explains his attitude as a response to the quasi-metropolitan condition: “I reject this attitude; and when it comes from a colonial who is nervous both in and away from his native country, I interpret it as a simple confession of the man’s inadequacy—inadequacy which must be rationalised since the man himself has come to accept it.”13 Lamming’s indictment of a nervous disposition inside and outside of one’s native country forms the basis for a different response to the

Pleasures of Exile 87 quasi-metropolitan condition. For Lamming—as has become almost de rigueur within analyses of the postcolonial intellectual—“home” is not a sedentary geographical location, but an inhabited, transitory space that provides sustenance for the life of the mind and intellectual communion. This transient home can be somewhat discomforting, as Edward Said relates, and Lamming pointedly states that quarrelling is a “distinguishing feature in exiles” and “becomes a normal way of being together.”14 In this scenario, the quasi-metropolitan profits from their interstitial condition by establishing a fertile intellectual environment—not by reacting bitterly and destructively against their inferiorisation. As such, the quasi-metropolitan intellectual rejects their ascribed lesser status and forges a community of exiles, that is predicated on the development of a space for the ebb and flow of ideas and creativity and that rejects the stasis associated with the establishment of a rooted and comfortable existence. James’s homecoming navigated a path between these two poles. For one thing, Lamming sees him very much as a member of this querulous community of West Indian intellectual exiles, and James’s continual relocation and engagement with wide-ranging intellectual and political questions in various moments and places certainly indicates productive aspects resulting from the inhabitance of a transitory space. However, I must stress that to suggest James adopted a course between Naipaul and Lamming—if one can use them as alternate exemplars of the quasi-metropolitan—is not to say that he displayed Naipaul’s embittered aversion to the West Indies. If, as Lamming suggests, Naipaul’s experience of quasi-metropolitanism surfaces as a revulsion towards the West Indian as a rationalisation of his unease, the public manifestation of James’s itinerant experience emerges in a more ambivalent manner. On an intellectual level, James recognises the contradictory aspects of his understanding of and relationship to Britain, but in the spirit of his black Jacobin ancestors, he focuses on the critical foresight gained by this inconsistency: I am pointing out that because we have the same language as the British and the outline of our civilisation is based on theirs, we are in the same situation that has created the great writers of the twentieth century. We are members of this civilisation and take part in it, but we come from outside. . . . And it is when you are outside, but can take part as a member, that you see differently from the ways they see, and you are able to write independently.15 However, this intellectual conviction was tempered by James’s personal experience of subtle varieties of inferiorisation and racialization that insidiously undermined his journey to Britain as a triumphal homecoming. His reconstruction of himself as a British intellectual long before the age of ten is based on an ideal-typical intellectual representation. The purely cerebral ideal-type ignores the necessary social and economic accoutrements and

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leisured habitus that underwrite the vocational life of the mind—QRC may have been better suited to Portsmouth, but it was in Port of Spain nonetheless. The problematical distance, and lack of equivalence, between authentic and simulated British intellectual and cultural sensibilities is not lost on James: he recognises that his subjectivity was formed in Trinidad, yet is the result of the creative clash between the New and Old Worlds.16 A subtle aspect of this disjuncture is evident in one of his earliest impressions of London literary life, where James surveys the Bloomsbury intellectual scene as if to the manor born.17 He recollects sparring wittily with Edith Sitwell, confounding her on the relative merits of passionate eloquence and technical accomplishment in poetic composition and expression, which reduced the celebrated writer to responding facetiously as a “skilled controversialist.” However, while he gallantly deferred to her as the featured speaker of the event, his moral victory—for to James, it was clear to the audience that he had let the issue pass and had bested her—and charitable concession were somewhat misplaced. The commanding self-portrait that James paints is a caricature; his moral victory and magnanimity are unsupported by the requisite social authority which is manifest at his delight when summoned by Sitwell—through an intermediary—to approach the platform and speak with her after her presentation. For all his intellectual prowess and cultural capital, James lacked the social capital that tacitly confirms intellectual status, without resorting to the explicit performative demonstration of knowledge—in terms of social etiquette, James’s display in that particular setting was rather inappropriate. Indeed, the polite reception he received in London literary and political circles and the recognition of his refined sensibilities and tastes marked him as a particularly commendable Fanonian “quasi-metropolitan.” Louise Cripps, who met James at a 1933 dinner party for the members of an informal political circle and later became his lover, describes him as a handsome, physically prepossessing man with a commanding intellectual presence.18 His charismatic personality is evident in that his monopoly of conversations was not irritating to those present; on the contrary, they were all fascinated by his oratorical skill, and had attended the dinner party specifically to hear James speak. In addition to the engaging political thinker that Cripps describes people gathering to hear, James has also been represented as a gentleman aesthete: the raconteur and bon vivant, whose combination of intellectual qualities and social graces is captured in Frederic Warburg’s inestimable characterisation: His memory was extraordinary. He could quote, not only long passages from the Marxist classics but long extracts from Shakespeare, in a soft lilting English which was a delight to hear. Immensely amiable, he loved the fleshpots of capitalism, fine cooking, fine clothes, fine furniture and beautiful women, without a trace of the guilty remorse to be expected from a seasoned warrior of the class war.19

Pleasures of Exile 89 Warburg’s later remark—that after occasionally playing for their village cricket team, the people of West Hoathly held James in high regard, “referring to him affectionately as ‘the black bastard’ ”20—demonstrates what we might charitably recognise as the novelty of a C. L. R. James within rural England and the Bloomsbury literati during the 1930s. However “English” and “gentlemanly” James might have appeared and sounded due to his accent, education, knowledge, and tastes, Warburg’s recollection that he was “colourful in more senses than one” also serves to differentiate him from his hosts along tacit racial and national lines. As a quasi-metropolitan, the novelty of James’s thinking, sounding, and acting like an “English gentleman” is all the more thrilling for his cultivated and urbane circle because the stark colourful contrast marks him out as so obviously different, as not “English.” Given that he recognised his status as a curiosity in the eyes of some metropolitans, James was left with a disparity between his internal selfunderstanding and external self-perception. In addition to this recognition, James was required to manage the disjuncture between his understanding of himself as an urbane and erudite intellectual, and others’ sometime perception of him as an urbane and erudite black colonial intellectual. The extent to which James recognised this disjuncture is speculative and cannot be definitively verified. Nevertheless, a total ignorance of the void between self and external perception would have required a monumental feat of imperviousness. Indeed, his wry recognition of the astonishment that often greeted his command of the English language, and his raising of the (mis)perception of black male hyper-sexuality among white women, are clear signs of his awareness of pernicious racial representation.21 James long maintained (or attempted to maintain) the fascia of a cultured metropolitan intellectual, who viewed vexing questions with a detached and dispassionate reserve. But in doing so he confronted his paradoxical incongruity with his “new” environment; this milieu, after all, was the very one that ought to have been sincerely hospitable. Beneath the façade of his calm and measured superficial persona, perhaps James’s recognition and management of his precarious intellectual position was habitually filtered through bad faith. His continual insistence on the irrelevance or negligibility of race is not borne out by his more private or reflective statements that indicate the significant effects such disparate perceptions of him had on his intellectual vision. This concern with the manifestation of existential tensions at the intellectual level is crucial when steering clear of a biographical project in favour of one that establishes a correspondence between the biographical and the intellectual. Dominick LaCapra instructively applies the salience of this correspondence to Sartre: he refuses to regard the biographical and the textual as mutually informative and wholly separable entities, but rather, he interprets Sartre through the interaction between his “ordinary life” and writings.22 An underlying racialization, especially through a strong connotation of exoticization, is manifest within James’s “ordinary life” in Britain. The

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correspondence between this personal experience and representation, and the production of James as an intellectual and political activist, is evident in Cripps’s characterisation of the beginnings of their affair. She prefaces her recollection of their affair with the statement that their relationship was built on shared social concerns and ideas and, while she acknowledges his physical attractiveness, she emphasises being drawn to James’s intellect and political commitment. However, an exotic racial frisson added allure to the sexual aspect of their relationship. Her emotively eloquent recollections of the pleasure they took in the visual contrasts of their bodies, along with her tendency to refer to him as “my dark lover,” demonstrate the erotic charge of racial signifiers within their relationship. Amorous details aside, the operation of power within articulations of the erotic and the tacit processes of exoticization, that can only be interrogated from particular interested standpoints, is significant here. A case in point is James’s comment on the issue of exoticization and sexual objectification. In a draft section of his unpublished autobiography, he mentions a preoccupation among the young (white) female London University students with the “superior sexual capacity of black men.”23 Suitably appalled by James’s inference, which she understands as a totally misinformed one, Cripps offers a strong rejoinder; she argues that there was no such preconception, and notes the sexual propriety of the young female students—they were above conducting the comparative “scientific experiment” necessary to satisfy such curiosity. The key issue here is not the veracity of either account, but rather James’s reason for raising this question and what it suggests about his understanding of his (exoticized and sexualised) perception within British society—real or imagined.24 Even though Cripps notes that she could only comment on James’s sexual performance in relation to that of her husband, as a comparison between two individuals instead of a broader, racial one, she fails to realise that the representation and experience of racial and sexual identity is as much informed by imagined and invented representations and symbolic perceptions as it is concretely real. In this vein, Cripps asks whether James thought about this “preoccupation” due to a lack of self-confidence or a sense of competition and rivalry with her husband.25 Her question is of course difficult, if not impossible, to answer categorically, but what it does tell us—despite his familiar protestations to the contrary—is that James indeed recognised or felt the racialized (and sometimes exoticized) external perceptions of himself and other black men. That James saw fit to raise the notion of black hypersexual performance arguably demonstrates his recognition of the broad issue of racial exoticization, and given his relationship with Cripps and her association with London University, an awareness that he may have been subjected to it. I mean neither to denigrate Cripps nor to analyse James’s sexual predilections; that is of no concern to this book. Rather, the situation serves as a basis for considering the impact of such perceptions in relation to James’s asymptotic

Pleasures of Exile 91 experience of his metropolitan habitus. The orders of authority and control implicit within the internal formation of the quasi-metropolitan and tacitly and tactfully played out externally through sexuality and exoticization demonstrate what Kevin Davey, in reference to Nancy Cunard, has called an “inverted colonialism.”26 Central to Cunard’s inverted colonialism, her recognition of black Americans’ confusion of “civic nationality” with “blood nationality,” that led them into a deracinated, non-Afrocentric existence, is her understanding that she was better able to recognise the Western dangers to black essence than its holders. The paternalism of this inverted colonialism is repeated in certain aspects of Cripps’s relationship with James, for example, her appraisal of his misguided departure to the United States in 1938, where she questions whether they might have been happier going to Trinidad.27 She bases this belief on her understanding that his move to England was initially good but that his sojourn in the United States was counterproductive and that he would have been better advised to return to Trinidad. Upon such a return, he could have supported himself as a teacher and engaged in political activity that may have led towards him becoming Trinidadian Prime Minister and a major Caribbean politician. Making it clear that she “would have liked James to use his many talents,” Cripps again assumes an authoritative role: that of the parent who chastises their wayward and uncommitted child for making injudicious life choices. Her parental attitude towards James is supplemented by her suggestion that his disinclination to return to Trinidad fatally separated him from his black “roots” and his “countrymen,” which places him firmly within the peripheral national sphere as opposed to the principal international arena. She imagines being able to have moved to Trinidad with him, where she would have helped edit his periodicals and write her own books on the region. Like Cunard, Cripps’s appreciation of the separation of the black man from their essence, their folk community, as a terminal division exercises an inverted colonialism. It assumes the authority to determine the life choices and existence of the colonial, who is unable to do this adequately for themselves. And it also emphasises and confirms the asymptotic relationship of the black, quasi-metropolitan colonial intellectual with the centre. The quasi-metropolitan is made at the periphery in the image and at the behest of the centre, but as much as they may think, read, and know in much the same manner as their colonial masters, they can never quite gain parity. Although, there is a point to be made here, to paraphrase Gramsci, about the organicity of James’s style of activist-intellectualism—I will address it later in this chapter—this is not really Cripps’s point. She argues that James was unable to function fully and effectively outside of his “home,” and that his theoretical and political insights required grounding in black nationalist politics—albeit of a leftist variety. This suitability to the local, the national, and the particular is a strange contradiction to the postcolonial diasporic intellectual who straddled both New and Old Worlds, enthralled educated

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metropolitan audiences, and inspired political commitment and engagement among his comrades. The putative World Historical character of a James blessed with a double consciousness, and the critical insight it affords, is suddenly shrunken and returned to his parochial corner of the New World, far removed from the dramatic theatre of World History.

ENTERING THE METROPOLIS, STAGE LEFT . . . Inevitably, any such interpretations or readings of the interaction between James’s “ordinary life,” intellectual development, and production impute speculative meaning to a series of events. Nevertheless, as Bill Schwarz has observed, even though the relationship between the psychic, philosophical and political crises James experienced during his turbulent life in the late 1940s and his subsequent work is indiscernible on the surface of his texts, personal experience cannot be dismissed as an inconsequential factor of intellectual development.28 Similarly, James’s formative experiences including his time at QRC, his dilemma over which first-class cricket club to join, and his involvement with the Beacon group involved the negotiation of a correspondence of elective affinities between race, politics, and poetics that would, as noted in the second epigraph, “make a whole.” He is not voluble on the precise character of this coherent “whole,” but whether it is meant to refer to a self and/or a set of interests and concerns, it entails some tortuous dilemmas. How, for example, might he pursue his ostensibly poetic literary and cricketing interests without compromising the integrity of his racial or class particularity? Or, given the deep stain of his Puritanism, how could he envision a form of radical social transformation? These quandaries constituted a significant aspect of James’s formative colonial environment, where his educational training, symbolic social status, and concrete opportunities bore the stamp of the clash between class, caste, and race. In managing these conflicts, James consistently and notably assumes an almost disembodied consciousness; he becomes personally distant to the given contradiction or is internally unaffected by its visceral energy. His recollection of the erroneous decision to join Maple is interesting here. He made the decision following the counsel of a respected elder, Mr. Roach, which means that although James recognises it as a mistake, it was made on the basis of well-intentioned advice given from an acceptable quarter, thus spreading the responsibility. Indeed, as Richard Small writes, James does not directly discuss making the decision—he uses a cricketing analogy instead—which demonstrates the sense in which his classical education and cultural training isolated him from the concrete situation surrounding him and the social implications of his decision.29 Alternately, instead of making these subtle evasions, James might have laid bare and explored the seductive lure of the poetic and its relation to social status that led him into a compromising racial and political position.

Pleasures of Exile 93 To expect such candour from a memoir is, however, not altogether reasonable. It is one thing to cast the critical and deconstructive eye outward into the world, but quite another to turn that same gaze inward to the self— let alone to then share the unflattering conclusions with the world and its disarming scrutiny. But if approached from a different tangent, one might question the process of evasion that allows for the avoidance of an obvious contradiction rather than become fixated on the discovery of a truth that is difficult to verify and (certainly with respect to the objectives of this book) not particularly interesting in and of itself. In this sense, Sartre’s concept of “bad faith” is a useful tool to identify the evasive process by which James manages the personal and intellectual contradictions that emerge within a discrepant colonial society. After constructing a genealogy of the “lie” as the wilful withholding of a truth from another in full consciousness, Sartre begins to articulate “bad faith” as the hiding of a “displeasing truth or presenting truth as a pleasing untruth.”30 He then notes: “Only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.”31 In relation to James, I expand Sartrean bad faith from a singular, internal expression of a repressive consciousness to articulate it with the systematic wilful withholding of a truth as an external ideological formation. This is to say that the external repertoires of bad faith are central to the construction and maintenance of colonialism and its inherent contradictions—such as the combination of a meritocratic ideal with the imposition of crown colony government. And it is important to note that in order to forge a personally habitable social and cultural space, James had to carefully negotiate the moral and political authority of the colonial regime and its systematic bad faith, which, at times, involved his own deployment of bad faith. Like his recognition of his enduring Puritanism, James’s tendency towards bad faith during his formative years became a strategy he would use throughout his life that, in turn, would have a discernible impact on his work. At this point it is perhaps important to note that the conceptual integrity of bad faith is relevant and applicable to a sociological study of the intellectual. Although Sartre’s concept of bad faith offers a basis for advancing a judgement on the truthfulness and honesty of an individual, it is sociologically useful in its capacity to act as a reflexive aspect of the construction of an evaluative statement; it can be used to demonstrate the presence or absence of individual predilections within sociological summation.32 In this sense, bad faith can be employed to uncover the method for evading substantive existential conflicts that, in turn, become manifest in alternative arenas. Bad faith is a possible explanatory device that can be used to assess the relationship between personal experience and intellectual development and production—it is not simply a tool for the biographical or psychoanalytical illumination of the personality. An example of its broad utility and effectiveness is the sense in which it might be conceptually applied to Sartre himself to reveal the contradiction between his acclaimed intellectual concern with

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the sincerity of human will and the management of his personal existential tests. This contradiction is transparent when one considers his marriage proposal to Simone de Beauvoir—after he learnt of her passionate involvement with the American writer Nelson Algren—as an uncharacteristic and surprising move that contravened the open, nonconformist tenets of their relationship. Indeed, it can be understood as an act of the very bad faith that he intellectually repudiated.33 James’s sinecure in London could not last. With diminishing funds and no income, he accepted Learie Constantine’s invitation to join him in Nelson, Lancashire, where Constantine was playing league cricket. During this time James worked as a cricket writer for the Manchester Guardian, but his role was ostensibly to work on Constantine’s memoirs. However, political discussions with his old friend, and their shared concern with West Indian independence, diversified James’s writing beyond cricketing reportage and Constantine’s memoir. It led him to complete his draft of The Life of Captain Cipriani, which was published in Nelson in 1932 with Constantine’s assistance. It was later reproduced, in abridged form, in the Hogarth Press “Day to Day” pamphlet series as “The Case for West Indian Self-Government” (1933). While living in Nelson, James became exposed to a working class militancy that would provide an immeasurable influence on his understanding of the colonial question, his lifelong intellectual method, and his political standpoint. His meetings with groups of industrial militants introduced him to the Marxist system of social explanation, to the works of Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and to socialist politics. However, it is crucial to note the absence of the implicit social stratification that reflected the hegemonic colonial order and characterised the London literary salons he had patronised. Although the Trinidadian household in Nelson had been subject to local curiosity and initial prejudice, it soon dissipated, and, valuably assisted by cricket as a transcendental cultural medium, James and Constantine established an affective bond with the townspeople. The explicit local expression of discomfort with racialized difference in Nelson that was, through contact and understanding, largely replaced with affection and fraternity was different from the insincere cosmopolitan urbanity of London. The experience of class antagonism that James tacitly shared with his northern hosts enabled a conversation between anticolonial agitation and class struggle. Ironically, moving full circle from his self-important entrapment of Sitwell, James acknowledges that those gracious and unassuming workers helped puncture the abstraction of his socialist ideas and bookish pretensions.34 This account is, of course, rather romanticised, but it contrasts his performative and insular classical intellectualism with the more dialogic context of his education in Marxism and its orientation towards praxis. However, most importantly, James’s inability to feel fully at home within either of these contexts demonstrates that he was unable to privilege the materiality of political praxis over the ideality of cultural and intellectual life.

Pleasures of Exile 95 Just as James’s new Labour Party friends “made merry” with “The Case for West Indian Self-Government, “demonstrating their capacity to recognise the political associations between socialism and colonial self-determination, his engagement with Marxism yielded an especial synergy of its own. James later sees how his adoption of socialist and Marxist principles was inevitable, due to his already existing organic relationship to Marxism: It’s in the Labour Party milieu that I began to read about Marxism; I didn’t belong to anybody then. I was reading it as something new, in which there was an attitude to history and an attitude to people that I hadn’t met before. But I had all the knowledge of these facts that an ordinary person could have. Much more than the average person who joined the movement for . . . social and political reasons.35 This convergence of experiential and historical understanding is one of the most interesting aspects of his adoption of Marxism; it would later influence his theoretical model of revolutionary organisation and the process of proletarian coming-to-class-consciousness. James seems to suggest that his entry into Marxism was enhanced by his formal education as well as his formative experiences in Trinidad. For James, Marxism was politically and intellectually compelling because of its ability to build on his experience and empirical knowledge of the inequity of crown colony government and the baseless inferiority of colonial peoples on racial and sociocultural grounds. This recognition implies an intuitive understanding of the articulation and entanglement of race, class, and colonialism—even if as folk concepts instead of formal analytical tools—and Robert Hill argues that James’s personal experience of colonialism made his development of a novel and expansive Marxist historiography almost inevitable.36 However, James’s political adoption and methodological modification of Marxism is far broader than a historiographical intervention. The initial aim of the Beacon group—to develop an indigenous West Indian literary tradition—and the popular-led concerns of much of James’s fiction set in the barrack yards of Port of Spain, intersected with the broader political anticolonial and self-determination attitudes and creative cultural sentiments. If the reconciliation of a series of modern dualisms—such as individual and collective, material and symbolic, practical and poetic—is a hallmark of James’s intellectual contribution, its discernible emergence can be recognised within this critical moment. This is to say that, for James, the Caribbean was not simply geopolitically and culturally peripheral to the European metropole—it was home to dramatic subjects and artists. Caribbean peoples were not colonial proletarians whose radical self-activity lay dormant until the correct level of capitalist industrial development would stimulate revolutionary preconditions. But their position inside and outside of Western civilisation had placed Caribbean peoples within an acculturation process that contradicted their role as slave chattel and endowed them, as an approximation of an early industrial

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proletariat, with a proto–class-consciousness. As observed in Chapter One, in identifying the revolutionaries as black Jacobins, James recognises slave revolt as the result of alienating (racialized) relations of production within an internationalist frame, linking the Haitian and French Revolutions as a demonstration of a generalised democratic impulse. In addition to its foundational concerns with race, colonialism, and class, James’s organic leftism must be understood alongside his cultural and humanistic concerns that, in turn, established the frame for an expansive critical field of vision. In this vein, much of his work during the 1930s, in a variety of literary genres and interdisciplinary contexts, can be understood as a reflection of the relationship between race and class. Politically, The Black Jacobins wove discourses of race, class and caste together within an internationalist socialist framework that demonstrated the links between the black Jacobins of San Domingo and the Paris masses of the French Revolution, further articulated with the conjuncture between slavery, international capitalism and colonialism. But James also realised the value of conveying this event dramatically through a novelistic narrative or, in the case of the play, a theatrical performance. This “culturalism” is still regarded in some quarters as the dilution or suspension of James’s Marxism—for example, the sense in which Beyond a Boundary is read as a sports or cricket book, or even a memoir, instead of all of these and a remarkably nuanced and subtle humanist Marxist study in cultural politics. Similarly, his more “conventional” political works also suffered from the charge of adulterating the class struggle with “race” or the “Negro Question.” And given the orientation of Marxist culture towards material class struggle and practical social situations in Eastern and Central Europe, the insistent fusion of race, class, and colonialism that emerged from the vortex of James’s biographical and intellectual being-in-itself was not necessarily recognised and understood within his new milieu. The resultant clash surfaces within James’s recollection of the resistance of the leftist movement to his involvement in Pan-African agitation in England during the 1930s.37 He was less fixated on the “Russian question” and the struggle over the maintenance of international socialism, epitomised by the Spanish Civil War, within the European arena than other orthodox Trotskyists were. Significantly, James retained a critical conception of imperialism within his adherence to Marxism alongside race and class, eschewing the simplistic communist-fascist axis that preoccupyied Euro-Marxisms. As such, some have seen his denouncement of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and his preparedness to bear arms from within the left as his “groping to reconcile two political worlds: Pan-Africanism and socialism,” reiterating discussions of race and class as antagonistic and irreconcilable discourses in James’s thought.38 While simplistic, this dualism raises the image of James attempting to forge a coherent political space inclusive of these two—arbitrary, for him—poles, illustrating his exile as both physical and social and

Pleasures of Exile 97 conjuring the memory of the (mis)education that prepared him for an idealised, nonexistent world. After moving to the United States in 1938 to work with the SWP on the “Negro question,” James became exposed to what Grace Lee Boggs calls “discrimination much crueller and cruder than anything he had known either in the West Indies or Europe.”39 This discrimination was compounded by his experiences within the American Trotskyist movement, where his refusal “to yield to the fears of white radicals . . . made it difficult for them to respond unreservedly to the spontaneous black struggle.”40 Some white radicals’ resistance and fear may have emanated from the way in which James disturbed the tacit and accepted ethnocentrism of applied Marxist analysis and political practice, to turn the “race question” from being synonymous with the “Negro problem,” and to question the role of white activists and workers in the social reproduction of racism and racial stratification. As mentioned in the previous chapter, James’s 1939 discussions with Trotsky emphasised the reactionary sentiments of black Americans who supported self-determination as a demonstration of class antagonisms and linked the withholding of full American citizenship to the racism of white workers.41 These discussions facilitated the questioning and ultimate rejection of the vanguard party as the mode of (Trotskyist) Marxist organisation: James addressed its inherent paternalism towards the struggles of black people as well as its failure to build a mass-led revolutionary movement. What is perhaps most notable in these works is the way in which the conceptual dialectic (or zero-sum game) between race and class is strictly played out as an issue of organisation and praxis. But just as Schwarz reminds us that existential tensions, even if unarticulated, remain informative to James’s work, the contradictory pressures of quasi-metropolitanism and expansive analysis that James confronts in his attempt to synthesise discourses of race and class also exist. His customary reference to these tensions as conceptual and political issues, and the level of consciousness at which these pressures impact him, becomes transparent in Winston James’s astute comment that James “perhaps more than any other Caribbean migrant intellectual consistently down-played the effect of racism on his life.”42 Viewed through either a crudely deterministic class analysis paradigm or as a regrettable error of judgement, James customarily presented racism and the relationship between race and class as dispassionate issues. This is not to say that the insertion of the personal is necessary and missing within James’s analysis, but simply to note that the visceral power and intimate effects of racialization and racism are, rather than directly confronted as a specifically racialized and racist problematic, often subsumed within his references to the potentiality of and restraints on human capacities. Of course, this subsumption is part of the delicate problematic that James identifies so imaginatively: the tendency towards conceptual inflation and analytical determinism that obscures the dialectical synergy between phenomenological complexity and social structure. For James, it is precisely

98 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics the attempt to locate the descriptive and analytical primacy of race or class, in relation to each other, which leads to an unsatisfactory understanding of their articulation and the complexity of social injustice and oppression. However, his recognition of the communicative importance of dramatic narrative—as a means to disseminate political ideas and forge commitment—also draws careful attention to the existence of historical actors as conscious, sentient agents. Therefore, even if it is unfair, Naipaul’s statement that Lebrun “had sought to submerge his racial feelings in the universality of his political beliefs” characterises the sometimes fraught interaction between the particular racialized experience of his “ordinary life” and the development of generalised intellectual and political positions.43 A significant range of James’s experiences of and reactions to racism, related in Beyond a Boundary, are especially noteworthy when one considers the book as a quasi-autobiography that liberates James from the thirdperson narrative position of “the party” that he had occupied in much of his writing of the 1940s. Beyond a Boundary allows him to write in a more self-reflexive and revelatory mode. A significant instance emerges early in the book, when James recounts his attempt to join the army at the end of the first World War in order to “see the world.” In his attempt to join the Merchants’ Contingent, drawn from the young upper-middle class who joined English regiments, as opposed to the public contingent recruited from the broader mass, James endured what might have been an influential experience—or at least a rude awakening. While other applicants approached the recruiting clerk’s desk, submitted references, and arranged further interviews as necessary, James’s experience was signally different: “He took one look at me, saw my dark skin and, shaking his head vigorously, motioned me violently away.”44 Crucially for James—who again claimed a moral victory—the recruiting officer was the unexpected casualty of the occasion. Having been insulated from the crude worldliness of racism, now represented by the recruiting officer, QRC had allowed James to imagine and inhabit an idealised moral sphere detached from the sordid practicalities of profane reality.45 In fact, sure of his status as a QRC boy and a “coming cricketer,” James, by his own admission, had chosen to ignore the rumour (supported by the facts) that “the merchants selected only white or brown people,” and applied to (perhaps) the largest merchants in the city. This admission demonstrates that, as a young man, James had a strong sense of entitlement and self-assurance, derived from his education and the social mobility it putatively bestowed. But even while Beyond a Boundary reflects on these youthful events as idealistic errors made in good faith, if not naively, one cannot assume that his continual denial of racism as a significant experience in his life, and his avoidance of the issues of race and racism, emanate from such good faith. James maintains a reserved and detached observance of race and racism throughout Beyond a Boundary, and towards the end, after he initially finds a rather violent prose on crushing “racialism,”46 he becomes more animated.

Pleasures of Exile 99 His language becomes accentuated with a passionate insistence, contrasting his customary reserve. On page 241 of 261, when James discusses the campaign to install Frank Worrell as the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team, the polite veneer shatters; he declares that not only he is “angry,” but that he can maintain his anger because it is supported by an understanding of discrimination that he has held for decades.47 It is significant that James not only points to fifty years’ experience of racial discrimination, but also notes a “corresponding anger,” which has been latent and unexpressed. James’s avoidance of the painful encounters with racism, expressed instead through an assertion of his experience of an internal equilibrium, can be understood as the management of the vicissitudes of quasi-metropolitanism through bad faith. While this psychological complex of avoidance can be seen as a repression consigned to the cloudy reaches of the unconscious, there is no such contingency for Sartrean bad faith. Contesting Freud’s delineation of the unconscious that rejects “the conscious unity of the psyche,”48 Sartre instead asserts that experiential phenomena cannot be repressed—even if there were an unconscious—without conscious complicity.49 For Sartre, this reveals the importance and significance of the level of the “censor”: The [phenomenological] complex as such is rather the collaborator of the psychoanalyst since it aims at expressing itself in clear consciousness, since it plays tricks on the censor and seeks to elude it. The only level on which we can locate the refusal of the subject is that of the censor. It alone can comprehend the questions of the revelations of the psychoanalyst as approaching more or less near to the real drives which it strives to repress—it alone because it knows what it is repressing.50 Whether or not Sartre’s dismissal of the unconscious is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of Freud (as is often suggested), this privileging of consciousness over a questionable unconscious realm is congruent with James’s thought. A case in point is his critique of Richard Wright’s characterisation of Bigger Thomas in the novel Native Son, who acts unconsciously with “accidental” consequences, which indicates Wright’s hesitancy and negates Bigger’s revolutionary agency.51 Another is his denigration of Carl Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious” as increasingly unconvincing.52 Taken together, these statements support the view that the insistence on the radical and creative potential of conscious mass agency is one of the strongest threads within James’s work.53 As James began to read in the Marxist tradition and discuss its ideas within various political groups, he acquired a formal knowledge that supplemented his heuristic analysis of colonial society. However, this political involvement would prove a more enveloping exile, as the personal dislocation of his quasi-metropolitanism was intensified by the political marginality of his concern with race and colonialism alongside class struggle. Unconvinced by the political direction of the Trotskyist groups, with

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whom he associated in terms of their commitment to anticolonialism and racial justice, the bad faith in which he cloaked himself began to extend outward to form cleavages in his critical synthesis of race and class.

WHEN GODS FAIL It is crucial to note that, for James, the analytical tensions emerging from the conceptual and organisational incongruity between race and class are also manifested personally and intellectually. In America, he was caught between an attraction to the country’s tremendous democratic potential, an investment in the Trotskyist movement, and a different experience of his quasi-metropolitan condition. Unlike the dour pessimism of the Frankfurt School, for example, James remained optimistic.54 Instead of subscribing to Adorno’s bleak account of the manipulative force of standardised cultural products within the culture industry, he was convinced of the expressive and progressive possibilities of popular culture.55 Yet for much of this period, he also retained a commitment to formal modes of political theorisation and organisation, but had no idea how to assess the liberatory significance of popular culture—let alone incorporate it within the class struggle. James’s peripheral position was also apparent beyond the analytical and political spheres. In America, he remained a quasi-metropolitan of, in a sense, an even stranger variety than he was in London. As a non-American New World black man, James was a curious classical British intellectual polymath, distanced from black America and neither authentically British nor classical. In his incomplete and unpublished autobiography, James recalls Richard Wright’s recognition of this liminality and the restrictions it placed on him. In Wright’s estimation, James’s West Indian background made it impossible for him to understand the historical force of racism experienced by black Americans and its debilitating personal effects.56 This putative inability to understand the effects of racism on the black American psyche is not simply an evaluative disparity resulting from different experiences of early settlement throughout the Americas and concomitant social and racial histories. It also demonstrates James’s existential and intellectual distance from the specificity of an American social and racial order, exemplified by his recollection of socialising with his second wife, Constance Webb—a white American woman—and Richard and Ellen Wright, when Webb and the Wrights would discuss how they had been observed and received as an interracial foursome. He remembers being on the fringes of these conversations because he had not been alert to the events unfolding around them, and concedes that although some West Indians might have been attentive to subtle examples of racial antipathy, he had not been raised to pay heed to such things.57 Offering an insight into this delicate negotiation of personal and intellectual understanding as a rather mundane ontological occurrence, Sartre

Pleasures of Exile 101 argues that we are aware of the social representations of ourselves and that there is a degree of compliance to these representations in the mode of “being-in-itself.” For Sartre, the reality of “not being as one is” illustrates the impossibility of “being what one is,” a tension that is not realised on an unconscious level, but rather it is the very stuff of consciousness; it is the embarrassing constraint which we constantly experience; it is our very incapacity to recognize ourselves, to constitute ourselves as being what we are. It is this necessity which means that, as soon as we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legitimate judgement, based on inner experience or correctly deduced from a priori or empirical premises, then by that very positing we surpass this being—and that not towards another being but toward emptiness, towards nothing.58 Sartre’s point is insightful in that exile, as the terrain of this nothingness, becomes habitable through a bad faith that is fortified by the separation from an uncomfortable home. This being at home in the world or being oneself with others are thus accentuated as unattainable ideals, replaced by the contingent reality of reconciling oneself to varied approximations of compatibility. Therefore, when Cripps refers to the congenial relations James experienced in England but that he was unable to rediscover in the United States, she does not appreciate the pragmatic character of those former amiable relations. As he had realised in Beyond a Boundary, the enduring links are those with the family, the class, and the caste, and as a Trinidadian Marxist, exiled in Europe, struggling to combine analyses of imperialism and colonialism alongside the orthodoxy of class struggle, there were no enduring links to hold on to—except perhaps that of his friendship with George Padmore.59 Sociologically speaking, this liminal social personality looms large in the formation of urban modernity, perhaps most notably in Simmel’s characterisation of “the Stranger” whose ontological condition is determined through their relationship to the host group as the “unity of nearness and remoteness.”60 As one who is in but not of the group, the stranger belies a “positive relation” inasmuch as they are able to achieve a dispassionate distance from the group and, unlike the fully incorporated member, approach its structures and relations through general and objective ideals. Therefore, the stranger’s lack of commonalty with the group has a de-personalising effect and reconstitutes them as a particular type. Substituting the postcolonial figure for the Stranger is significant in terms of understanding the former as familiar and yet alien, which demonstrates the multidirectional flows of influence between the colony and metropole. In other words, the margin forms and informs the centre as much as the converse orthodox understanding.61 However, this tidy conceptual symmetry is profoundly disturbed by Fanon’s notion of the asymptotic relationship of the West Indian as

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quasi-metropolitan to the metropole. The unity of difference and sameness within the figure of the Stranger, who becomes an exemplar of the diversity and novelty of the group, is a rather inappropriate conceptual framework for understanding James’s mode of being-in-the-world. His negotiation of this putative unity produces a fraught existential effect, as well as intellectual and political costs. It is perhaps difficult to discern this tension because of the enduring quality of James’s leftist involvement. This longevity was arguably facilitated by his encounter with the left, often understood as a less tense encounter than many other black radicals of his milieu—such as Wright, Césaire, and Padmore—experienced (which was at least partially due to his Trotskyist affiliation). As “the only great Marxist literary intellectual in the Anglophone arena who was never deceived by Moscow,” James’s Marxism is notably independent and explains his continued importance and relevance.62 On the one hand, this understanding of James’s political involvement suggests that he remained an autonomous social thinker and political activist, borne out by the unexpected arrival, at James’s London flat in 1935, of an agitated Padmore, who had left his Comintern post in disillusionment with the Hitler-Stalin Pact. This would have us believe that, unlike Padmore, Wright, and Césaire, James was neither compromised by the Communist Party’s political opportunism towards the black struggle, nor by its ongoing doctrinal conflict between politics and poetics.63 However, it must be remembered that not only was James “always politically isolated and invariably ineffectual,” but that this portrayal of Stalinism—as a repressive ogre countered by Trotskyism as the true bearer of socialism—supported by James’s recollection of Wright and Padmore’s misguided Communist Party involvement, is easily questioned.64 James’s independence came at a personal and political price that is brought into focus when one considers his own relationship to the Fourth International and the nomadic, factionalised JFT. James’s changeable and unstable intellectual and political positions within the Fourth International might be understood as parts of the general process of personal and intellectual development that Sartre outlines in his “progressive-regressive method.”65 Sartre’s recognition—that the contradictions and alienation we experience are reflected in the project of selfrealisation that would surpass them—is not lost on James, given his struggle (often in bad faith) to forge incongruent elective affinities and to synthesise race and class. The embattled and shifting political terrain that hosts Trotskyist as well as Stalinist organisations and standpoints places the formation of analytical approaches within a strategic and pragmatic practicality that is not easily reconciled with principled evaluation and prescription. Just as the progressive-regressive method notes traces of initial gestures of revolt and traumatic distortions within intellectual formation, the development and maintenance of consistent and principled analytical and political positions is compromised by the machinations of real politik. This is to say that, for James, the internal coherence of his classical education, poetic commitment,

Pleasures of Exile 103 and anticolonialism was neither externally recognised nor valued, making his attempts to manage them within a humanist Marxist politics subject to pragmatic evasions and concessions. However, while Wright and Padmore find such compromises categorically unacceptable as transparent party political racial opportunism, James is left in a more ambivalent position; he is neither wholly alienated nor satisfied. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to realise this state of utter certainty—the Sartrean being-for-itself—it is important to note that this ambivalence, vaunted within Simmel’s characterisation of the Stranger and many debates on postcolonial intellectualism, is less positive in practice than conceptual valorisation might initially suggest. It is not just that, politically speaking, the intellect is caught between the real (politik) and the (principled) ideal, but that this discrepancy issues an irreconcilable fault line primed for bad faith. This proclivity, intimated in Sartre’s recognition of being-in-itself, the approximation of the self within a chosen social milieu, creates a dislocated consciousness that is negotiated through bad faith which, in turn, has a profound effect upon belief: In this sense consciousness is perpetually escaping itself, belief becomes non-belief, the immediate becomes mediation, the absolute becomes relative, and the relative becomes absolute. The ideal of good faith (to believe what one believes) is, like that of sincerity (to be what one is), an ideal of being-in-itself. Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes. Consequently the primitive project of bad faith is only the utilization of this self-destruction of the fact of consciousness.66 Viewed in this sense, belief is situational to group membership instead of a constant or wholly autonomous reflection that, in turn, suggests the fragility of imagining an inclusive community where political strategies might be practiced. The progressive-regressive method raises a potentially deleterious outcome of this discrepancy between belief forged in sincerity (what one believes) and in bad faith as demanded by group assimilation (what one ought to believe). Sartre points out that the habituation to a group impresses its collective horizon on the intellectual who then “grasps his thought as being at once his [sic] and other. He thinks in the idea rather than the idea being in his thought.”67 Of course, by the time of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre was attempting to reconcile the free voluntarism of the individual with the collective and political demands of sociality, and the mode of thought that is both individual and collective is part of this project. And James’s notion, discussed in the next chapter, of a spontaneous and organic process of mass coming-to-political-consciousness that renders the directive and corrective mission of the vanguard obsolete is guided by a similar sentiment. However, a delicate balance needs to be maintained here in the development of a political affinity across the personal and collective intellect

104 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics through negotiation and the incorporation of different viewpoints, and a doctrinaire didacticism that invites customary evasions and distortions that are systematically managed through bad faith. The tensions and dilemmas involved in the inhabitance of an uncongenial space also reveal the perilous negotiations between party political organising and the intellectual as social personality. In many of James’s political essays of the 1940s, bad faith, within the incongruous oscillation of consciousness and belief, is manifest in the narrative discrepancy between his voice and the demands of his Trotskyism. For example, in his third-person (“the party”) 1943 essay, “The Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society,” James combines the “instinctive tendency to independent organization and militant struggle of the Negro masses” with the prerogative of the party to analyse and criticise such forms of group organisation because of “its special guiding and correcting influence.”68 James’s critique of vanguardism was obviously immature at this moment. Anthony Bogues argues that James’s later 1948 essay, “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States,” demonstrates a breakthrough in seeing the black struggle’s relative autonomy from the party. However, the tension between race and class as conceptual categories, and the organisational role of the party and social group, remain. In “The Revolutionary Answer,” James conceptualises the black struggle through an economic reductionism that privileges the industrial proletariat in an overdetermined formal political realm. The “Negro” struggles in the American South are, for James, intrinsically important, but ultimately must be reorganised within broader social terms along socialist principles. This attempt to situate the black struggle in relation to the party revisits the conceptual dialectic of race and class; it firmly situates racial relations and racism, as the products of capitalist industrial and social relations, within a classical Marxist analytical frame. Yet while James admirably maintains his avoidance of conceptualising racism as an epiphenomenon, he nevertheless retreats from his earlier decentralisation of race and class and the false proposition to establish the analytical primacy of one over the other. This contradiction also means that the social and cultural determinants of racism that lie outside—yet are informed and reinforced by—dominant capitalist structures remain unexamined, and as such, racial struggles are locally symptomatic of a broader capitalist crisis that can only find resolution within the proletarian movement. Therefore, it might be said that in James’s involvement with the JFT and their changing affiliations to different parties, he increasingly thought and wrote through their ideas, particularly the primacy of class over race, at the expense of his own earlier conceptual and political fusion of the two. The attempt to trace the growing congruence between racial and labour struggles and political organisation—James here notes the increased incorporation of blacks into capitalist industry, which in turn, led to their greater acceptance within the organised labour movement—is based on

Pleasures of Exile 105 the tendentious assumption of the organic convergence of concerns, interests, and objectives across these lines. However, this political idealisation is countered by the intra-proletarian antagonisms along racial lines and it fails to account for the deep-seated resistance and chauvinism of white labour, disinclined to adopt the struggles of black labour as their own.69 Therefore, despite Sartre’s observation, when commenting on the left’s tendency towards factional infighting and implosion, that it is sometimes more important to share enemies than friends, the perception of racial and proletarian concerns, interests, and objectives as distinctive and separate motivations is deeply significant.70 In addition, and perhaps more importantly as far as assessing James’s intellectual position is concerned, the capacity to consider racial questions within a hegemonic proletarian framework means being able to endure an isolated, extremely difficult, embattled existence—let alone being able to emerge from it with coherent and worthy political formulations intact. Indeed, noting that “the essential problem of bad faith is a problem of belief,” Sartre recognises the difficulty of the situation and problematises the construction of belief by concentrating on negating the unease which distracts consciousness from developing positive prescriptions:71 How can we believe by bad faith in the concepts which we forge expressly to persuade ourselves? We must note in fact that the project of bad faith must itself be in bad faith. . . . The decision to be in bad faith does not dare speak its name; it believes itself and does not believe itself in bad faith; it believes itself and does not believe itself in good faith.72 In order to become believable, bad faith is sustained by “non-persuasive evidence,” or evidence that it has already decided to dismiss. For James, the schism between Trotskyism and the Communist Party provides the necessary “non-persuasive evidence” with which to fortify his acceptance, in bad faith, of his compromised position within the Fourth International. James disagrees with Wright on the subject of racism within the organisation, distancing himself from Wright’s insistence on disengaging from political relationships charged with implicit or explicit racism. Countering Wright’s experiences of racism within the Communist Party, James remarks that he had not faced racism within the Fourth International, and that even if he had, it would not bother him because he shared a basic social analysis with its members.73 However, Scott Mc Lemee contests this sentiment—expressing a capacity to subordinate the personal interest and will to that of the organisation—in reference to the recollections of a former white Trotskyist comrade of James’s.74 This comrade, B. J. Widick, suggests that James was somewhat traumatised after experiencing the reality of Jim Crow on a trip to the South, and that on returning to New York did not speak to any of his white party comrades for days. Obviously, since the story is unsubstantiated by James, its the veracity cannot be tested. But taken alongside his admission of anger at discrimination

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in Beyond a Boundary, it suggests his awareness of and visceral reaction to racism. Importantly, this suggestion raises the question of how he managed to maintain a disavowal of racism given its deleterious psychological impact. This question presents a problem of logical consistency, but given that we all live with such inconsistencies its salience is perhaps limited. Nevertheless, it is worthy of consideration in that it suggests that James, while he has personally experienced and been moved by racism, he is not intellectually and politically motivated by it; in other words, internal racial concerns are subsumed by the demands of class analysis. But a line cannot be drawn under the matter here. James, at specific points, offers competing explanations. One example is his concern with writing The Black Jacobins to challenge the historical denial of Africans’ radical self-activity, and to establish the multi-directional formative routes of modernity that acknowledge the influence of the Atlantic slave trade and the New World. Thus, we are left to consider and assess why—given his inclination towards totalising modes of description and explanation—he resorts to the reductionism of a basic social analysis, and how he manages the evasions and denials, not to mention the costs, required to sustain such a notion. Are we really to believe that James personally and intellectually maintains a consistent and compelling separation of race and racism from a basic analysis of society? To consider this question, one must question the idealisation of conflict as a productive enterprise, separate out the abstract functions of dialectical progression from the lived experience of dislocation and approximations of the self, and then reintegrate them within an analysis capable of evaluating the synergy between the two. This problematic is not distinctively Jamesian; rather, it lies at the core of the radical intellectual enterprise. The engaged intellectual is simultaneously charged with pursuing social transformation through interventionist activism and inventive intellectual work that necessarily issues a “guilty conscience,” where the former, as concrete social self-activity, is in conflict with the conservatism of the latter, as technical knowledge.75 For James it is less a question of how this guilt is manifest as a “class bind,” but rather how the struggle to concretely realise his discordant elective affinities of race, politics, and poetics are managed within an inhospitable and sometimes hostile environment.

THE PERILS OF EXILE When considering James’s attempt to reconcile his elective affinities of race, politics, and poetics within an unappreciative environment, there are two main points to explore. First, the perils of exile and bad faith underwrote some crucial inconsistencies, which emerge as political contradictions and errors that in James’s thought, are especially evident on his return to Trinidad. And second, given that I am not addressing this tendency as an

Pleasures of Exile 107 individual character deficiency, I must question the extent to which diasporic movement and exile is romanticised as an ontological-intellectual state through its anti-essentialist resonance. The putative separation of the existential pressures of the exilic life from intellectual work is not simply untenable, but also important in that it issues an antagonism between the personal and the intellectual which, in turn, places increased demands and responsibilities on organising an oppositional leftist politics. It is crucial, therefore, to consider the extent to which James’s experience and condition of exile, and his ambivalent relationship to the left, were negotiated and endured through bad faith that, in turn, created a series of protracted fault lines in his theory and praxis. For example, the tepid reception he received on his homecoming to Trinidad in the late 1950s, and his subsequent resort to crude nationalist pronouncements in a futile attempt to clear a political space for himself, demonstrates the manifestation of exile amplified by the absence of a strategically grounded community. Ultimately, the pragmatic disposition towards bad faith, exemplified within James’s exile exposed him to a political inertia: the penetrating vision to recognise the political combined with the inability to build an effective oppositional politics. If James’s experience with the JFT and Fourth International was compromised by a series of pragmatic concessions demanded by sectarian orthodoxies, his 1952 internment on Ellis Island as an undesirable alien, and subsequent expulsion, thrust him into an altogether different liminality. Following his 1953 deportation from the United States, James eventually returned to Trinidad in 1958 as editor of the Nation, the publication of the People’s National Movement (PNM). He also became secretary of the West Indian Federal Labour Party (WIFLP). However, James did not return to Trinidad after a twenty-six year absence as a prodigal son. Although he was known to local metropolitan Marxist intelligentsias, James was an obscure figure in Trinidad, largely viewed with suspicion by the bourgeois-liberal national movement.76 Despite being able to use his editorial position to campaign on a range of nationalist issues, James became increasingly frustrated with what he would later deride as simply bourgeois nationalist politics.77 Politically isolated after his split from Eric Williams and the PNM, James attempted, with disastrous results, to transpose the organisational skills he learned on the fringes of the Euro-American arena to a significant Trinidadian stage. Removed from an America conducive to subterranean leftist activity, James and several associates launched the Workers’ and Farmers’ Party (WFP) in 1965. As its editor, James used the WFP newspaper, We The People, “to criticize the government and build support for their populist venture.”78 The WFP stood in the 1966 Trinidadian national elections on a platform of various nationalist and social democratic reforms, and was summarily routed by the PNM. The reasons for this electoral humiliation are manifold, and arguably James’s experience of factional infighting among the American

108 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics Trotskyist left led him blindly towards an impolitic battle with Williams that may have been de rigueur within the small cells of the Fourth International, but given his capacity for pragmatism in bad faith, was a grave strategic error of judgement on a vital political stage. Indeed, James recognised the limitations of his commitment to the West Indies and the transitory character of his homecoming, which played a major part in his 1960 decision to resign as secretary of the WIFLP. In a letter to Norman Manley that same year, James states that he had always been forthright on the “temporary” nature of his return to the West Indies.79 With negotiations regarding independence and regional federation well underway, he recognised that it was a propitious moment to return to his former work. This poignant withdrawal questions the redemptive possibilities of exile and emphasises James’s inability to make a cathartic return, after the erosion of his influence and qualifications to speak with authority and accuracy on nationalist politics within the region.80 Suggesting that Beyond a Boundary is a testament to James’s return to the Caribbean, Grant Farred recognises its narrative as an “articulation of a diasporic intellectual’s efforts to overcome a history of constant relocation, remove and alienation from his original community.”81 Although Farred charts James’s ability to return to Trinidad, reenter its politics and attempt to convert it into “a space that he can constantly rediscover and recreate,” the complex intersection between politics and identity, and the intricate deviations and distortions of the progressive-regressive method, are marginalised in an assessment of James’s itinerant life and enabling of a neat reconciliation.82 If we read Beyond a Boundary with close attention to the ambivalence of James’s return to Trinidad, the book yields discontinuities in his conceptualisation of racial and cultural politics and his broader political theory and praxis. The practical discontinuities of ambivalence are evident in his catastrophic involvement within the unwieldy hierarchy of the WIFLP; his support for federalism as a liberal, parliamentary body; and creation of the WFP as a populist venture that had no organic links to its constituency. If we accept that movement can metaphorically and practically provide a hybrid alternative to the nationalist and racial absolutist stasis of blood and soil, Beyond a Boundary, and James’s cricket writing of the same period, conversely reveal a series of crude nationalist and biological signifiers, arguably intended to authenticate his Trinidadian credentials.83 In Beyond a Boundary, noting the genetic transference of genius from fast bowler George John to his playwright son Errol, James replaces the materialist dialectic of The Black Jacobins, firmly drawn from social and historical determinants, with blood as a transhistorical transmitter of resistance and creativity.84 Furthermore, in a 1969 article, James contradicts his consistent conceptualisation of a creolised Caribbean particularity, and recasts the strict egalitarian basis of his campaign for Frank Worrell as the first black West Indian cricket captain.85 His understanding of Garfield Sobers’s promotion to the same captaincy is replete with signifiers of authenticity that are firmly indicative

Pleasures of Exile 109 of rooted national belonging: “When Sobers was appointed captain of the West Indies he was the first genuine native son to hold that position, born in the West Indies, educated in the West Indies, learning the foundations of his cricket there without the benefit of secondary school, or British university.”86 Worrell’s metropolitan sojourn and his Manchester University education proscribe his authentic West Indian-ness, while Sobers’s uncomplicated and continuous affiliation to the nation’s soil renders him a “genuine native son.” This exceptionalism is also evident, in an even more alarmingly ethnocentric manner, in his characterisation of West Indian players as sine qua non among overseas players in English country cricket: With all due respect to Ahmeds, Mohammads, Saeds, etc., and other oriental nomenclature, to talk about overseas players in English cricket is to bring to mind at once the West Indians. The West Indian player is a special type, sui generis, a type which is fundamentally the same as it has been for over seventy years.87 Some startling sentiments and contradictions here require unpacking. In sharp contrast to the World Historical West Indian cricketers, who embody and practice the radical potentiality of epochal change in every batting stroke and ball bowled, these other fellow (post)colonials are reduced to their “oriental nomenclature.” To the discerning English eye, the West Indian player is distinctive and yet familiar, novel yet knowable. Superficially, the West Indian assumes the guise of Simmel’s Stranger, and transforms the host space and group through their capacity to combine distance and intimacy. This is arguably part of James’s objective in his 1960s cricket writing: to demonstrate the distinctive political maturation of West Indians who are inevitably on course for self-determination and who simultaneously reassure their soon-to-be former colonial masters that—unlike the independent Haiti of Dessalines—they are neither alien nor threat. But this World Historical character, indicative of unresolved tensions and nascent social change, is countered by the stasis of a figure unchanged “for over seventy years.” Thus Clive Lloyd in 1969 is the mirror image of Learie Constantine in the interwar years, as an exemplar of the West Indian social personality. For James the dialectician, this ought to be an untenable proposition. This conservatism, and the quest to reassure England of its preeminence as the arbiter of cultural and civilisational standards internalised within cricket, has important implications. It recasts James’s figure of the West Indian cricketer more as the favoured Other of Fanon’s quasi-metropolitan than Simmel’s incorporating Stranger.88 Of course, this not to frame James as a colonial apologist or sympathiser; the consistency of his statements and activities are proof to the contrary. However, even as Aijaz Ahmad rightly questions the portrayal of James as a colonial intellectual based broadly on his historical moment and points to his ambivalent position in relation to the Western cultural tradition, this very ambiguity negates an utter rejection

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of the West.89 Thus, Beyond a Boundary brings into focus the specific quality of this ambiguity that James recognises within himself: particular Anglicised values, for example, alongside the continuing experience as an exile in his own country among his own people, from childhood into mature adulthood. James not only severely misunderstood the specificity of Trinidad’s political terrain, but also recanted the creolised poetics he refined in exile in order to buy acceptance and an attempted return. James’s strategic adoption of crude nationalist and genetic signifiers demonstrates the difficulties in excavating his statements and intellectual legacies en masse, let alone in appropriating them for anti-essentialist academic and progressive political projects. At this point, the cleavage within a romanticised and celebratory understanding of exile is ever more exposed by the exhausting stresses of dislocation. Ironically, James realises the perilous aspects of exile and the difficulty in finding a social space where one can pursue the unattainable ideal of being-as-one-is, as in the experience of his friend Richard Wright. Referring to Wright’s Parisian exile, James challenges the evocative images, summoned through jazz and literature, of black American expatriates within a cosmopolitan France. James found it regrettable that Wright left the United States after leaving the Communist Party, noting that Wright was unable to feel himself or live away from America.90 For James, Wright’s inability to be himself in Europe, despite being completely accepted, was vexing. Even though the notion of the dissolution of Wright’s creative powers when removed from his black American habitus has been rightly critiqued, and the actuality of being oneself is debatable, James has a pertinent point regarding exile as characterised by agitation and discomfort.91 This recognition of the human life of the exile and itinerant intellectual is crucial not simply as biographical record, but also in terms of situating the intellectual as a sentient being instead of a disembodied consciousness. And given the recognised disjuncture between the migrant life and the theoretical promotion of anti-essentialism within certain strands of contemporary intellectual history and postcolonial criticism, James’s migration proved both a productive and sterile experience.92 Continual relocation among hostile environs exposed him to a pragmatic disposition towards bad faith, ultimately rendering the vernacular rhythms of specific societies inaccessible. Bearing an increasing ambiguity reflective of bad faith, the resonance of his work and its meanings are clouded. This pessimistic scenario is not totalising: histories, people, and situations change, but a cultural undercurrent, upon which a grounded sense of belonging and identity might be forged, remains.93 This is not to propose the centrality of a fixed location as paramount to intellectual production, but in the interests of forging political alliances, it points to the imperative of uncovering a social space wherein a political community can be formed and sustained. James’s exile at home, both in childhood and as an adult, allied with the defensiveness and resistance with which he met in metropolitan Marxist intelligentsias, make it difficult to nominate a space, premised on its physical properties, that would have been easy for him to negotiate and

Pleasures of Exile 111 inhabit. In addition, after his expulsion from the United States and inauspicious homecoming, James was arguably unable to rediscover a similar community of committed leftist activists and intellectuals.94 However, James himself acknowledges the need for supportive communities to release the creative capacities of humanity from their capitalist degradation, inasmuch as the alternative existence—without a collective mooring for the individual—is harsh and problematic: A human spirit which finds itself cramped in a situation where it can find no outlet for its energies and yet is unable to find any objective reason for a dissatisfaction of which it is not often conscious, builds up in itself an image which is the direct opposite of what it hates.95 Nevertheless, the attempt to overcome this alienation is an immense problematic, given that bad faith is an impossible attempt to flee oneself. Sartre recognises it as the tortuous struggle for self-determination and selfrepresentation, amplified by the condition of exile.96 The task of assessing James’s intellectual production and legacies necessitates a sympathetic and critical engagement with the travails of his peripatetic life; we would do well to remember that the price of bad faith incurred by James’s exilic beingin-the-world did not prevent his well-documented commitment to activism across a range of interventionist modes.97 It is therefore important to note that his bad faith is not informed by an individual character deficiency, but by the creative tensions of the continual dislocations of exile and its perilous pleasures.

THE QUOTIDIAN PLACE OF IDEAS Assessments of the correspondence between biography and intellectualism often falter when tightly circumscribed by prior analytical and political imperatives. Competing accounts, outlined below, offer alternative intellectual evaluations of James’s singular itinerant life—which enabled profound critical insights and a deracinated experience that disabled his effective political analysis and engagement. Given that both projects broadly identify with particular analytical and political positions, it is worth noting that attempts to map certain interests “backwards” onto intellectuals through abstracted hermeneutic methodologies risk ignoring or trivialising the psychic and sentient specificities of a conscious human existence. This shortcoming is neither accidental nor malicious, but it partly demonstrates what Bruce Robbins calls the “over-appreciation” of rootlessness and the veneration of novel radical political sites, writers, and texts as an outcome of the professional institutionalisation and self-legitimation of the humanities within the academy.98 But this is not to suggest the emergence of meaning as a complete and direct reflection of its object or subject without being mediated through an

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interpretive process, or to deny the existence of personal values and role of individual judgment within the endeavour of understanding. The ethnomethodological attempt to grasp the knowledge residing within subjective experience, through the principle of recognising the specificity of the subject, faces the problem of incorporating the broader structural basis informing the self-understanding that enables the subject to “speak for themselves.” However, what is largely disputed here is the critical currency of analyses, where the centrality of elaborate theoretical “reading” and the preeminence of conceptual imperatives in an assessment of intellectual production assume greater significance than the mundane, everyday existence of the individual in question.99 So where does this familiar conundrum leave us? Given the hermeneutic task of adducing personal experience in relation to intellectual development, undertaken here in reference to James, it is imperative to avoid privileging either the material or symbolic as primary referents. It is especially important to avoid the gross simplifications that result from resorting to a singular approach; the compounding error of such methodological primacy is its inability to fully comprehend that which it purports to understand.100 Pierre Bourdieu provides a useful approach to this problematic, in his effort to dismantle the “ruinous” and “artificial” divide between objectivism and subjectivism within the social sciences by developing a theory of practice able to conceptualise the interface and interplay between structure and action.101 Bourdieu’s rejection of the distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge in favour of developing an understanding of the “knowing subject” (elaborated in his concept of “habitus”) identifies everyday “systems of transposable dispositions” that (re)produce social environment and individual practice in a perpetuating logic.102 What is perhaps most noteworthy here is that a habitus produces individuals who, in turn, also produce the habitus. Bourdieu’s theory clearly marks the attempt to move beyond the structure/action problematic. For the discussion at hand, habitus helps avoid simplifying exile as either a symbolically enabling action or a material disabling structure. However, although Bourdieu provides a means to begin to consider the entirety of James’s personal, intellectual, and political life, the necessary familiarity of dispositions within habitus carries bounded associations that leave work to be done in terms of assessing diasporic space. Part of the complexity of migrancy is the precise problem of incommensurability—although some constancy might occur in the habitual states, predispositions, and propensities common to habitus, it cannot be expected, and the subsequent negotiations form a major aspect of the migrants’ predicament. Nevertheless, this incommensurability is instructive. It reminds us that an efficacious structure/action conceptualisation must be more than an analytical, textual, or political exercise, and, for an understanding of James as a “knowing subject,” it suggests the necessity of reflecting on the appropriation

Pleasures of Exile 113 of intellectual biography for analytical and political purposes in a more nuanced manner. The intermittent bad faith attributed to James throughout this chapter is not meant to suggest that he systematically undertakes a complete evasion of all unpalatable existential realities. The process of writing Beyond a Boundary led James to recognise that many of his memories held a compelling, formative pain, reminiscent of Glissant’s function of the “productive neurosis” experienced by those torn from Africa. For James, colonial Trinidad’s racial stratification and racism, that proscribed the life chances and creative possibilities of so many, is not a memory to be erased or accentuated. Instead, his reflection on this past carries a set of delicate demands: on one hand, he warns against those profiteers of “racialism” who, realising the immanent dusk of colonialism, now profess a total abhorrence of it; yet on the other hand, he is wary of adopting a cathartic approach to personal history that seeks to eradicate unpleasant aspects of the past.103 As a corrective, he then states that freedom from his own painful memories would constitute a terrible loss, noting that he neither wishes to be separated from his past nor its future.104 This response to the past encapsulates the Sartrean progressive-regressive method as the “project”—“a certain object, still to come”—that behaviour, conditioned by “real and present factors,” tries to realise.105 Two crucial points relate to James here: first, the real and present factors of past colonial domination and racism must be engaged in their specificity if the independent, postcolonial project is to be realised; and second, given that James is personally reflecting on a past with a broader political context, the behaviour and project to which he alludes notably have an individual (to James) and social (Trinidadian) resonance. But importantly, the progressive-regressive method is not a model for identifying wider historical and social forces; it is an analytical tool for describing and understanding individual biographical development. Therefore, even though a broader social and political significance can be attributed to the progressive-regressive process of James’s reflection, the process itself is personal; the real, lived struggle to realise one’s “project” cannot be dissolved into the conceptual and structural ether of “the social” but remains concretely manifest at an individual psychic level. If anything, the “spiral” of an individual life into futurity, detailed in the progressiveregressive method, explicates the incipient ambivalences, conflicts, tensions, and struggles within the beliefs, behaviour, and actions of the individual. This explication invites a question of our understanding of James’s life and work: what effect does this groundswell of emotional energy have personally, intellectually, and professionally? Indeed, we might well remember that James also admitted that there were some memories (without specifying what they might be), West Indian memories among them, from which he might want to be freed.106 If we return to Glissant—and the general issue of managing textual extrapolations of psychoanalytical assessments of individual experience within

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broader theoretical, conceptual, and political concerns—we must carefully think through the analytical implications of reading the neurotic disposition and its significance as a basis for textual critique. Indeed, many of the metaphorical markers of the postcolonial—and the characteristics of its intellectual production and producers—display a conceptual indeterminacy through evocative subjective categories: liminal, dislocation, interstitial, alienation, and so on—the list is almost endless. The neurotic disposition Glissant confers on the creole Caribbean subject as a conceptual device may issue a potential rhetorical productivity, through reinforcing the creolist impulse in the face of the insular absolutisms of Culture and History—but this is not assured. And most importantly, it must be remembered that this complex is a neurosis nonetheless. A neurosis, by definition, entails the experience of feelings of depression and anxiety as well as a disposition towards obsessive behaviours, so we might easily accept that whatever intellectual insights this metaphorical resource might offer, it is nonetheless an undesirable existential state. Indeed, while Freud recognises that neurotic symptoms serve a purpose and possibly represent a valuable response to a problem (which implies that, strictly speaking, neuroses themselves ought not necessarily be “cured”107), he does not justify their casual acceptance as beneficial complexes. His acceptance of the protective purpose of neuroses in relation to war traumas is an extreme case, but it is the very extremity of this example that justifies an understanding of the precise functional value of neuroses. Ultimately, as he notes in Civilization and Its Discontents, neuroses “threaten to undermine the modicum of happiness open to civilized man [sic].”108 The reference to neuroses, in metaphorical literary assessments of an intellectual life devoid of mortal extremity and medical, therapeutic, or psychoanalytical settings, is not an analytically commensurate enterprise. But leaving the category of neurosis aside, we might nevertheless ask why the enervating characteristics of dissonance, displacement, liminality, alienation and so forth are so slavishly read into the postcolonial migrant intellectual as conceptual markers of moral and political advantage. Put differently, what does it mean to appropriate symptoms of immense personal anguish as valid and valued conceptual and political symbols? With Weber in mind, one might look at a secular mutation of the Protestant ethic: the pained endurance of existential trials serves as an indication of the “piety” of “subaltern” and “marginal” peoples (and their intellectual advocates) to be confirmed within the post-revolutionary paradise of political heaven on earth. Of course, this scenario is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but its putative accuracy (for me) is reinforced by the missionary zeal with which it is enforced. In this vein, objections to the productive utility of neurotic states might raise the spectre of an attempt at the completed self, and the fixed and settled identities that it implies, as a precondition of meaningful political engagement. However, it is far from obvious that existential angst yields a productive metaphorical value that can be smoothly separated from its subjective state as an inhospitable psychic condition.109 Besides, the focal point here

Pleasures of Exile 115 is not the objective state of the split self, but the mobilisation of distressing psychic ambiguities that are dissociated from fruitful self-understanding. Put differently, the split self that is constantly paraded within sophisticated theoretical exposition and able to function in the social and domestic spheres, and the individual, whose public and private life is debilitated by the effects of their alienation, are not equivalent. In this sense, one might again assert the necessary analytic and therapeutic responses to neurotic conditions: the event of a loss and substitution of “reality,” deemed central to neurosis, seems somewhat incommodious with the quest for coherent intellectual labour oriented towards social understanding and political engagement. There is something profoundly disquieting about the gratuitous trafficking of psychoanalytical concepts—and the currency of transience, dislocation, and other metaphors of instability—within the proliferating studies that mine textual and conceptual fruits from the ordinary travails of the intellectual. Ironically, such trafficking produces an impassive hypertextual and analytical façade, where the vital signs and struggles of an intellectual life are eviscerated and reduced to a representational skeleton from which predetermined conceptual and political insights are exhumed. An unavoidable tension, therefore, emerges when the laudable ideal of diversity—as conceptualised within creolisation and hybridity—is read through an ontological reality that is then distilled to a conceptual necessity mediated through disembodied ideas. Given the tortuous dread incorporated within the alienated, dislocated, interstitial dispositions inter alia, the valorisation of these existential states in the maintenance of professional academic projects and collective political struggles appears simply as a misplaced and bizarre affection. The significance of James’s peripatetic exile within his work is subject to two broad responses. Within strict materialist paradigms, the “dialectic of place and displacement” is reformulated with an enervating effect: within the colonial context, the denigration of indigenous personality and culture is taken to produce the “alienation of vision” and “crisis in self-image” that stubbornly remain corrosive forces encountered by the conscious decolonising and postcolonial project of self-understanding and national representation.110 As I will discuss at length in Chapter Five, some critics recognise James’s cricket writing and his commitment to its aesthetic culture as an example of this colonial “alienation of vision” and “crisis in self-image.” For example, Helen Tiffin argues that James’s intellectual career is characterised by a steadily declining interest in the specificity of the West Indies.111 She traces her argument through the deteriorating native focus of his work from the grounded concern with the barrack yard folk in Minty Alley, weakened by the internationalism linking Haiti and Paris in The Black Jacobins, and reaching its apogee in the deracinated reverence for bourgeois aesthetic culture and British Victorianism in Beyond a Boundary. There is much to take issue with here, but accepting this as a plausible hypothesis for a moment, a separate and more fruitful question must be engaged: what explains such a shift in James’s work? If it is the case that

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James is lured by the cosmopolitan sophistication of metropolitan urbanity, seduced by the master colonial culture, and duped by a monolithic Marxist class analysis into undervaluing locally specific political and racial concerns, then a simple set of contradictions have to be accounted for: How might we understand James’s reflections on the social and personal atomisation characteristic of the urban metropolis as a deeply troubling phenomenon that militates against individual fulfilment or political consciousness?112 Why does Beyond a Boundary formulate a critique of the meritocratic myth of the cricketing ethic as an operation in the interests of colonial domination and racial and class stratification? And why does James become suspicious of a revolutionary vanguard that does not trust the radical instincts and political potential of oppressed peoples’ self-activity?113 These are not simple questions, and if they are not to be dismissed as exceptions that prove the rule then they demand serious contemplation and explanation. It is insufficient to compile an inventory of James’s different positions without taking personal circumstance, the demands of different contexts, and processes of intellectual clarification and growth into consideration. As such, it is uncharitably simplistic to expect that lived psychic dramas can be erased by intellectual activity and political commitment, or that the rejection of “Western” ideas and values tout court is a pre-requisite of cogent anticolonial critique. The second broad response to James’s progressive-regressive process reveals an altogether different set of conceptual and political predicates, involving interpretations of the migrant intellectual indebted to the diasporic, the postcolonial, the exilic, and other exalted existential forms characteristic of the modish commitment to liminality, fluidity, hybridity, and so on. For example, Rob Nixon’s assessment of the “triregional affiliations,” and subsequent diasporic cultural attachments that assuages the “double sense of displacement” alluded to by many West Indian writers leaving the region, evokes the productive metaphors of movement familiar to textual and symbolic analyses of the postcolonial intellectual.114 While this “displacement” refers to the contemporary and historical removal of the writer and their descendants from their respective native lands, the writers’ resultant triple affiliation—to the lands of an ancestral past, a personal past, and a new migratory destination—provides them with a rich experience to be worked through, in both psychic terms and literary forms. This indication of multiple influences and their varied intellectual effects is undeniable; however, this dialectic of displacement and affiliation is sometimes taken as evidence of the relatively straightforward conceptual reconciliation of the conditions of migrant life and the positive intellectual potential of an exilic mode of being-in-the-world. In What’s My Name?, Grant Farred develops such an extended reading of James’s dislocation and marginality.115 Farred characterises James as a “marginal intellectual,” a status that is, ironically, not lost on James as he attempts to overcome this situation within his work. For Farred, this undertaking is

Pleasures of Exile 117 manifest in a series of ways in the James corpus: James uses the motif of his own marginality to develop Minty Alley and the social distance between the middle-class protagonist Haynes and the barrack yard indigenes. Then in books such as The Black Jacobins and Modern Politics, this fictional alienation is replaced by political commitment.116 However, marginality remains central to Farred’s understanding of James as a person who is situated in an anomalous and fringe position: neither a British one, nor Caribbean, nor a hybridised “third space.” Nonetheless, although James’s “political commitment and his physical and psychic remove remained in conflict throughout his life, sometimes ameliorating but more often complicating his marginality,” Farred then completes a not unexpected move, recognising that James’s “interstitial subjectivity” is characteristic of the “marginal intellectual,” which, in turn—like the critical insight of James’s own black Jacobins—leads to a “salient bidiscursivity.”117 The “facility to operate between, outside, as well as within and on the margins of two communities” that marks the salient capacity of this “bidiscursivity” is, however, an advantage beset by burdens: the onerous task of negotiating between the entrenched ideology of the existent and the imaginative possibilities opened up by the bidiscursive field of vision, for example, as well as managing the ambivalence of multiple belonging and affiliation.118 This perspective offers an obvious contrast to the paradigmatic concerns with alienated vision and crises in self-image, and it importantly notes the complexities of James’s position. Farred crucially enumerates many of the tensions James faced as he worked across different locales, managing different intellectual and political demands while noting the “debilitating” effects of marginality that James would attempt to reconcile through his work. However, when Farred rightly notes the “critical self-blindness” of The Black Jacobins—to think beyond the anticolonial immediacy of revolutionary struggle in San Domingo and consider the post-colonial demands of building an independent civil society freed from the repressive state apparatuses characteristic of plantation slavery and colonial governance—his argument remains at a textual and conceptual level. This is to say that Farred is indeed correct in his methodological approach; given James’s prescient “reservations” and “anticipations” over Dessalines’s style of postcolonial rule, his own failure to analytically and textually explicate the full demands of re-creating society on a truly revolutionary and transformative basis is indeed noteworthy. However, if this mistake is an analytical and textual shortcoming, then again the question of why James was unable to “think history more than one step beyond its moment” is crucial because it is not answerable on singularly analytical or textual grounds. The personal development and transformation James underwent while he researched and wrote The Black Jacobins cannot be ignored: the dislocating and enthralling aspects of his recent move to England and subsequent relocation from London to Nelson; his personal and intellectual delight in the discovery of Marxism; his psychic struggles with his quasi-metropolitan

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status; and his explicit desire to chronicle the African slaves’ gesture of radical self-activity towards significant enabling and dissonant subjective states. Without recourse to a compartmentalist thesis in which James maintains a strict personal/intellectual separation, we are left to consider the possibile extent to which various subjective events filtered into his analytical and textual interventions. Indeed, if one accepts James’s choice of vocation—letters and criticism—as a decision informed at least partially by a personal impulse, then it might easily be argued that his existential experience and conditions provide a significant drive for his analytical work that equal, if not exceed, his conceptual preoccupations. Thus, while the development of symbolic, hermeneutic accounts and political critiques of intellectual work are undoubtedly important, they are most efficacious when the various factors combining to produce ideas—personal, analytical, and political—are accounted for. Without an appreciation of the vital existence of a living, sentient figure that formulates ideas and brings pen to page, critical insights remain onedimensional: overreliant on the textual and the conceptual, over-determined by strict assessments of materiality, and ruthlessly unsympathetic towards the personal impact of psychic struggles. Ironically, the migrant postcolonial intellectual—in this case James—is reduced to a cipher of what he represents instead of what he is and struggles to become. And the deep significance of his personal struggle is as politically important as it is biographical. A more balanced and nuanced understanding has the capacity to inform an expansive notion of intellectual work and political commitment, which would be able to countenance significant internal variation without recourse to doctrinaire ideals of what properly constitutes a “black intellectual” or a “postcolonial intervention.” The main point here is simple, but not simplistic: as much as James lived in different societies and moments, surrounded by rich ideas and influences, he also lived in his body and circumstances. The proof is in my own unsuccessful attempt to decipher James’s illegible script in many of his letters housed in various archives, perhaps explained by Caryl Phillips’s observation that “this writer who produced thousands of pages of books and letters suffered great physical pain when he wrote,” and “was dogged with fragile health and lived continually on the edge of penury.”119 An intellectual representation of James, as an iconic figure reduced to his ideas, ignores the stark privations posed by the exilic life. We may choose to read exile, dislocation, and itinerancy in a rhetorical and metaphorical manner, that is tightly linked to given theoretical, political, social, and cultural ideals, but we do so from an immense distance, insulated from its human costs and perils. Indeed, as Edward Said has remarked, “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,” and despite the many insights and opportunities that it presents, such as a breadth and originality of vision, it nevertheless yields a “crippling sorrow of estrangement.”120 While Lee Boggs rather crudely argues that James exacerbated his exile by straying too far from his roots, she also recounts an episode when James

Pleasures of Exile 119 collapsed in a Ghana hotel lobby in the 1970s, and no one knew who to contact. The anecdote provides a chastening reminder of the human cracks in the everyday life of the intellectual.121 Therefore, the task of inserting James into various political projects, and the recovery and reconsideration of his intellectual legacies, is fraught with the complexities of exile. If, as I have suggested, James moves between different positions—which, at times, entails compromising his creolist poetics, partially due to the existential and social stresses to which he was subject—then an attempt to understand such discrepancies requires more than a rehearsal of familiar, polarised hermeneutic moves. A balanced account of the intellectual products and political potential of James’s migrant life must remain aware of its sheer ontological arduousness and refrain from trivialising, romanticising, or dismissing the significance of his mundane travals.

4

Mapping Spontaneity The Organic Unity of Self-Activity and Radical Struggles

On one occasion I was asked to show a book that I carried under my arm. The comrade looked at it and shook his head. “What’re you reading this for?” he asked. “It’s interesting,” I said. “Reading bourgeois books can only confuse you, comrade,” he said, returning the book. “You seem convinced that I’m easily confused,” I said. . . . “Didn’t Lenin read bourgeois books?” I asked. “But you’re not Lenin,” he shot at me. “Are there some books reserved for some people to read, while others cannot read them?” I asked. “Comrade, you do not understand,” he said. Richard Wright, American Hunger The task is to abolish organization. The task today is to call for, to teach, to illustrate, to develop spontaneity—the free creative activity of the proletariat. C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics The psychic, physical, and political tensions of exile that shaped James’s personal and intellectual development are evident in the content, as well as the formulation, of his social theory and political praxis. His struggles to articulate race, class, and colonialism from within the left led to the strategic adoption of conflicting positions, where he was compelled to decentre race and class at one turn and reestablish the primacy of either at others. This pragmatic oscillation, between class reductionism and the articulation

122 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics of race and class, clouds the attempt to survey his entire corpus and note discrete strands of his social thought that are neatly formed within specific moments and/or are diachronically consistent. In broad terms, the thematic development of James’s political engagement can be discerned within three overlapping concerns: his initial Trotskyism that stresses the internationalism and centrality of class struggles; his theorisation and critique of “state capitalism” and the pervasive barbarism of modern society; and his adoption of an anti-vanguardist position that notes the tendency of the party organ to undermine “mass” and sectional struggles. While individually discernible, these concerns are not distinctly separated on a linear historical continuum. Rather, the progression of James’s political thought reflects his precarious position as an individual who is simultaneously included in and excluded from Western metropolitan and Marxist arenas. Given the intermittent hostility to his creolised theorisation of race, colonialism, and imperialism—that sometimes assumes analytical equivalence with class—his anti-vanguardism and critique of organisation emerge at least partially in response to the difficulties he faces in attempting to maintain this expansive mode of analysis. This complexity is further enhanced by James’s collaboration with his JFT colleagues and the later Correspondence group. It is a problematic enterprise to accurately attribute ideas to an individual when they (may) have emerged from a collective setting, exemplified by the disputed authorship of State Capitalism and World Revolution. The bibliography of The C. L. R. James Reader lists the 1950 first edition as a collaborative JFT publication, but the authorship of the 1956 second edition is attributed to James and the five other signatories of the preface—including Cornelius Castoriadis under his pseudonym, Pierre Chaulieu1. This discrepancy is further complicated by Martin Glaberman’s statement in the preface to the 1969 publication of the “second edition”—listed as the third edition in The C. L. R. James Reader2—with James as the sole author: The origin of this work as the collective viewpoint of the JohnsonForest Tendency also dictated that its authorship be anonymous. It is gratifying to be able to record that, with the kinds of assistance from other members of his grouping that are usual for political documents, the author was C. L. R. James.3 Glaberman explains how the broader significance of sole authorship helped “to place James, who wrote for a number of years under the pseudonym J. R. Johnson, in a truer light as a major inheritor and continuator [sic] of the Marxist tradition.”4 Raya Dunayevskaya argues, however, that the document was written en masse by a JFT working group and that James later claimed sole authorship without consent.5 The fact that members of the JFT became known in certain circles as “Johnsonites” suggests James’s tacit leadership, acceptable to some and not to others, and supports Cripps’s

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observation of his tendency to assume the leadership of groups in which he was involved.6 The collaborative tension within the JFT highlights the problems of social and political organisation relevant to political party mobilisation, as well as the activist engagement of cells and reading groups. Simply put, the working relationship between James and the JFT, apart from being a specific personal and collective situation, mirrors the broader question of the individuals’ association with the group and the command structures developed to order this relationship. This question is ostensibly political, and in addressing it, James’s political thought—his Trotskyism, state capitalism critique, and anti-vanguardism—reflects the continuation and development of his existing concern with human creativity and fulfilment. As is the case with his yard fiction and The Black Jacobins, he is interested in the struggles of “ordinary” people and their attempts to imagine and claim self-fulfilment. However, given that the individual is not—or ought not to be—an atomised and self-referential subject, James seeks to situate them socially. This presents him with a problematic, easily resolved within literary narrative or historical reconstruction, yet incommodious in political life: how might one retain a sense of individuality alongside a responsibility towards the collective and the desire to achieve radical social transformation? In other words, as social contractarian philosophers from Rousseau to Rawls and beyond have asked: how can one reconcile individual freedom with social obligation, and by what process? The significance of James’s insight, on the social contract through the prism of Marxism, is often recognised alongside his theorisation of the revolutionary capacity of the “masses,” which some believe he developed in America during his work with the JFT.7 Within more mainstream debates, James’s role in the development of the theory of state capitalism is often regarded as his largest contribution to the JFT.8 However, if James’s Trotskyism, state capitalism critique, and anti-vanguardism exemplify his substantive interventions as a political theorist and activist, then the innovative modalities within which these concerns emerge and are engaged are just as, if not more, important. While it is often expedient to dismantle the polymath range of his corpus and various interventions and re-assemble them separately within disciplinary academic boundaries, such an undertaking misses the significance of James’s compulsion towards understanding the social as a historical and analytical totality. Even though some regard James’s “culturalism” as the suspension of his Marxism or as a project separable from his political theory, and see his literary work as a project distinct from his engagement with the principles and responsibilities of Leninist organisation, that is simply not the case. The ostensibly political content and engagement of his “American years” is actually informed by his prior, and one might say foundational, poetic affinities. It is in this sense, as we shall see, that the contradictions and enduring quality of James’s independent Marxism come into full view.

124 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics The importance of the elective affinity between race, politics, and poetics, and their socio-analytical articulation to the formation of James’s political thought, cannot be overstated. He recognised the possible replacement of the tyranny of capital by the dictatorship of the party, and seeing it as a barrier to the activation of proletarian radical energy, he simply sought to liberate the progressive potentiality of human species-being. James’s appreciation of Frank Worrell’s captaincy of the West Indies cricket team is instructive here. He pointedly recalls that Worrell did not lecture the players on what they should do or dictate to them, but instead led by the simple principle of informing his team of the correct course of remedial action and leaving them to respond as they saw fit.9 For James this Socratic style of leadership exemplifies the “ultimate expression of a most finished personality,” in that Worrell displayed a trust and confidence in his players’ capacity to follow the correct course of action by themselves.10 Instead of carrying out the captain’s orders like conscripts, the institution of a more egalitarian and dialogic command structure enabled the players to discover and fulfil their own potential as well as the team’s. There is something at once heavily romanticised and yet compelling about this story. James points to a collective working towards a common purpose on the basis of individual voluntarism; individuals by themselves are convinced of and committed to the collective interest, which is, at the same time, indistinguishable from their own. It is this fusion of the individual and the collective, attained through Worrell’s unautocratic leadership that James attempts to replicate politically. He probes the barriers of class primacy, hierarchical party organisation, and intellectual vanguardism to advance a corrective humanism that strips class of its epistemic and analytical privilege. Ultimately, James attempts to imagine a social compact through an organic-coming-to-political-consciousness, where individual self-activity is spontaneously oriented towards a collective good synonymous with its own interest without vanguardist organisation or egotistical desire. However, while this insubstantial idealisation is unable to fully withstand the rigours of analytical understanding and the complexity of social life, it nonetheless remains compelling in its sincere faith in creative human self-activity.

“MARXISM IS A HUMANISM” As early as the late 1930s James recognised the inability of orthodox Trotskyism to confront an escalating social barbarism. His 1937 history of the Third Communist International, World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, questioned the inviolable authority and revolutionary wisdom of the vanguard party, and warned Trotsky of the irrelevance and inaccessibility of hierarchical political organisations to popular concerns.11 In the Coyoacán discussions with Trotsky, this issue emerged when James argued that the historical development of

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black Americans necessitated agitation for black social justice before the demands of socialist organisation, signalling the irreducibility of racial struggles to proletarian political organs as well as the socialist movement’s tendency towards paternalism in engaging those struggles. Taken together, the implications of World Revolution and the meetings with Trotsky are clear: it was up to the organised left—and its white ruling cadre—to develop a movement inclusive of racially specific articulations of the class struggle. James asserted that blacks would only join a movement that they intuitively felt—guided by their historical experience—was relevant to them, and was committed to their class-related struggle for social justice. This discussion of paternalism and vanguardism was part of a series of broader internal leftist debates that took place during the inter-war years in the midst of an advancing Stalinist totalitarianism. The larger Trotskyist concern—with the character and precise formation of capitalism and the “correct” mode of praxis—led James and the JFT to recognise the degeneration of Stalinism and the Communist Party as part of a tendency towards a more global phenomenon of totalitarian bureaucracy, or “state capitalism.” Their critique of the emergence and character of state capitalism, advanced through a series of internal documents and publications, reached maturity in three separate works: The Invading Socialist Society (1947); State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950); and ‘The Balance Sheet Completed’ (1951).12 These documents can initially be understood as a series of polemical accounts of class analysis and political organisation; their critique of the orthodox Trotskyist acceptance of state capitalism as a historically necessary stage in the socialist struggle offered a distinctive corrective. Harry Cleaver identifies the argument of State Capitalism and World Revolution: the rise of Taylorism and Fordism indicated a unique moment within the class struggle, giving rise to an overarching social and industrial system with an ever-increasing division of labour and decreasing skills.13 For James, the orthodox Trotskyist acceptance of capitalist production as a necessary stage through which the socialist struggle had to pass misread this phenomenon, erroneously ascribing the notion of the inevitability of capitalism’s demise and socialism’s triumph to Marx.14 Instead, James argues that Marx—and later Lenin—had stated that society faced a simple choice: socialism or barbarism, and the resolution had to be claimed through political activity, not seen as a latent, dialectically inevitable, yet-to-be-realised historical force. But given the limitations that vanguardism placed on the formation of a broad proletarian coalition, inclusive of groups whose economic oppression was crosscut by additional forms of subjugation, the precise character of oppositional political organisation and practice required rethinking. Here the importance of the JFT’s intervention emerges: their proactive, dialectical reading of workers’ (potential) radical self-activity provided a significant counter to the hegemonic power of state, capital, and bureaucracy, and thus returned revolutionary responsibility to the “masses.”15

126 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics The “recovery” of the “young Marx,” completed after the Second World War by a new generation of intellectuals, notably contributed towards the paradigm of Marxist humanism, largely represented by two broad schools. An escalating unease with Stalinism and the Communist ideological orthodoxy it demanded, inspired a reconsideration of Marxist theory and praxis in the Eastern European satellite states of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. This “revisionist” project, identified as Marxist humanism, reflects both the rejection of the Stalinist system and the search for a more satisfying understanding of the creative capacity of human social actors— instead of the habitual resignation to the dominant role of external productive forces. Although they surfaced in different contexts and with specific misgivings about membership in the Soviet bloc, James H. Satterwhite argues that the Hungarian “Budapest School” and Yugoslavian “Praxis” group along with Polish and Czechoslovakian variants, emerged around the same time in the post-war period, and although they gathered significant momentum after the death of Stalin in 1953, they cannot be understood simply as critics of Stalinism. Drawing substantially on the “young Marx,” especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, their characteristic interdisciplinarity, centred on philosophy, sociology, and an application of allied approaches including phenomenology and existentialism, enabled a significant contribution to the development of Marxist theory.16 In addition to this Eastern European constituent, a second “tradition” of Marxist humanism is identified within a cadre of Western Marxists, exemplified by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Sartre and others, including Ernst Bloch. This variety of Marxist humanism was largely formulated not on a foundational critique of Stalinism, but as a response to the crisis of modernity. Although many Western Marxists’ involvement with the Communist Party procured their (sometimes ambivalent) support for Soviet Communism, that in some cases would only be breached after the cataclysmic invasion of Hungary, their focus on three central concerns—alienation or reification, the end of history, and the recovery of “man” [sic]17—demonstrated that they shared theoretical concerns with the Eastern European schools. Reiterating and extending this inventory of the second, and intellectually dominant strand of Marxist humanism, Timothy Brennan notes the inclination of radical intellectuals towards more psychological and ontological issues during this period: Bloch’s work on hope, Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of trust, and James’s concern with happiness in American Civilization are parts of this trend.18 James and the JFT’s position within this humanist turn is crucial, if customarily ignored: the group was the first to translate any of the recently “discovered” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts into English in the 1940s, and its subsequent influence is transparent in their work during this period.19 But perhaps it is precisely their reading of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that contributed towards the marginality of James and the JFT in this period of Marxist development.

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The later ascendancy of anti-humanism (perhaps still obliquely influential through contemporary critiques of the unitary subject and Eurocentric anthropocentrism, familiar throughout the human sciences); the dismissal of paradigmatic humanist Marxist thought as a politically inert and moribund introspective critique; and a deep ambivalence over the status of Marx’s Manuscripts all contributed towards a solid denunciation of the post-war humanist turn within Marxism. As Perry Anderson has noted, Trotskyists tend to be routinely excluded from the pantheon of Western Marxists.20 In James’s case, Michael Denning argues, this routine exclusion secures his absence from mainstream debates on this period.21 Nevertheless, there is ample reason for reconsidering James and the JFT’s work as a noteworthy contribution. In resisting the dialectical fatalism of Trotskyist orthodoxy, they visited the young Marx with an altogether different orientation than that of the Marxist humanism canonised within the Western Marxist tradition, and they did not share the overarching note of despair with latter Marxists—evident within, for example, the disputable accounts of Sartre’s nihilistic individualism and Adorno’s pessimistic account of an irresistible totalitarian dominance.22 In his introduction to the translated excerpts published in 1947, James expresses the specific impact that the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts had on him and the JFT. Identifying Marx’s starting point—the realisation that labour was not external to humans as an abstract economic process, but was a concrete human activity—James argues that Marx thus developed a philosophy of human activity within the labour process. But expanding beyond the realm of industrial production and capital accumulation, James reads Marx’s identification of a tremendous irony: the productive process and fruits of scientific discovery that stimulate humans’ sentient and emotional capacity yet simultaneously diminishes it. As such, modern workers have become “the most highly civilised social force humanity has ever known,” and the exponential increase in demand for individual selfexpression is instead corralled by the machine of capital that divides mental and physical labour: thus capitalism deprives the worker of “intellectual potentialities” and separates the intellectual sphere from the world of physical labour.23 Given that this effect is not incidental, but rather the result of the conscientious work of capital to suppress the very human and social forces it has stimulated, James presents Marxism’s enduring value as the movement beyond a descriptive account of this malaise to mount a challenge to alienation, without which the future of human life was “hopeless.” The “practical politics” that James and the JFT took from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is reflected in their objective to draw on the actuality of contemporary society. In doing so, they would illustrate Marx’s philosophical and economic truths, as well as support the radical activities necessary to transform human and social production and relations that were to be found within workers’ struggles. In his 1947 introduction to the Economic and

128 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics Philosophical Manuscripts, James notes of the JFT: “For us, as dialecticians, the social requirements of the age exist in the needs and aspirations of the masses.”24 James and the JFT’s appropriation of the young Marx and subsequent humanism emerges within their outline of state capitalism, drawing attention to the overwhelming barbarism of the new epoch that deeply altered the fundamental basis of society. Key to this critique was their recognition of the erroneous concentration on the “relations between men and things,” characteristic of orthodox Trotskyism, that was incapable of identifying the inequities of productive processes—for example the daily persecution of workers in the Soviet Union.25 This perspective’s affinity with, for example, Adorno’s concern with the dehumanising impulse of massification that attempts to transform active people into passive things, ends at the descriptive level: the JFT’s prescriptive point is that the Communist International of world revolution ought to develop a sociological analysis founded on productive and human relations. Importantly, this positive political statement moves beyond the dominant frame posed by Marxist humanism where, in the work of Sartre, Adorno, and, to an extent, Lukács, for example, the modern human is characterised as an atomised being in two senses. In this vein, human beings are desensitised to social reality as individuals, and the instruments of their domination—including the commodity relations of entertainment and recreation—appear as benign forms that disguise their iniquitous social function. Alternately, James and the JFT situate the individual within a human collective oppressed by direct coercion and through indirect repressive apparatuses. The Invading Socialist Society points out that the productive relations of capital are purposefully ordered to coerce and terrorise workers and organised labour movements. Given the progression of workers towards a high state of organic class and revolutionary consciousness, capital has developed powerful modes of discipline that necessarily encompass the totality of society. Therefore, just as plantation slavery was in its epoch, the inter- and post-war barbarism of totalitarianism is, in fact, the most advanced expression of social control in accordance with the advanced historical stage of capital. There are, of course, significant problems with this workerist paradigm. The state capitalist critique, however, valuably combines organisational analysis with the imperatives of class struggle, applicable to capital and leftist opposition. The omnipresence of state capitalism across the political left and right is especially evident in the proliferation of hierarchical bureaucratic structures throughout the productive sphere, ranging from industrial management to trades unions. Each form demonstrates centralised control that systematically suppresses egalitarian and active proletarian participation. For James, an awareness of this control is pivotal in maintaining the emphasis on class relations and struggle. It reiterates Engels’s analysis of bureaucrats as those who replace the social functions of the bourgeoisie

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instead of benevolent “state functionaries.”26 Furthermore, drawing on Lenin’s observation of the Soviet, as a new form of mass-created social organisation in opposition to the dictatorship of the proletariat, James depicts bureaucracy as a historically advanced expression of class domination. And crucially, he asserts that revolution amounts to more than the substitution of one form of power for another, whereby without workers’ power, nationalisation and confiscation are meaningless. For James and the JFT, this meant that the Fourth Internationalist’s orthodox concentration on capitalist domination within the sphere of consumption lost sight of the terror of capital within productive processes and relations, and their dehumanising aspect that hindered the transformation of “human sensibilities” into “social agencies.” James’s attachment to an essential humanistic creativity—carried through and inseparable from his culturalist concerns and works—is thus recast within the ideal of workers’ power. This (potential) popular radicalism is an embodiment of historical materialism, where organic proletarian revolutionary struggle surfaces as the dialectical negation of bureaucratic hierarchies and organised state capitalism. And although this conceptualisation supposedly opposes the dialectical fatalism of socialist inevitability, it is problematic in that it assumes a radical, socialist “end of history.” However, this limitation notwithstanding, the significance and enduring quality of this analysis lie in its assertion of radicalized proletarian self-activity, not simply as a mystical abstraction but as an actually existing, if immature reality. As is evident in the formulation of his culture critique, James attempts two key interventions: the identification of social actors’ appreciation of the social disciplinary mechanisms surrounding them, and their capacity and preparedness for radical and emancipatory self-activity. Leaving its shortcomings—of which there are many—aside for a moment, these interventions represent a notable extension of Marxist humanist approaches. Erich Fromm, for example, concurs with James and the JFT’s reading of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, drawing attention to the symbiotic relationship between human self-activity and social and historical development, as well as the malnourishment of human sensuous needs under capitalism.27 Similarly, Leszek Kolakowski presents politics not as a means-ends calculation of economic structure and labour relations, but as an imaginative enterprise entailing moral engagement and ethical judgment.28 For Kolakowski, therefore, social and individual development is established through an ongoing negotiation between existence and duty as an individual and collective moral proposition, not determined by present exigency or historical precedents. However, Kolakowski’s noble idea of the political necessity of “excessive hope,” an expansion of the restricted horizon of the possible, clearly focuses on the negations preventing radical political imagination, let alone activity. This is just as unacceptable to James and the JFT as their commitment to historical materialism informing contemporary political understanding is to Kolakowski. The abiding sense

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Marxist humanism proffers here is one of the forces of capital and inhibited human self-activity, while the JFT’s remit of a practical politics uses this imaginative point of departure to discern agency and radical action, albeit politically immature. Notably, James has much in common here with what we may call a utopian tendency of Marxist humanism—reflected by Kolakowski—and its attention to the social function of radical thought: imagining progressive or non-progressive possibilities of social transformation instead of focusing on the specificities of its (putative) concrete social form.29 However, at the same time, James’s focus on individual and collective potentiality and activity is too anthropocentric a proposition for utopian outlooks, which are often oriented towards critiques of environmental lifeworlds or human spiritual and productive concerns. And in resisting the inviolate realm of the imagination within utopian thought, James appears to have much in common with Engels’s focus on the necessary historical and material grounding of truly revolutionary activity, which he regarded as negligible in latter utopianism.30 Therefore, James’s resolution—to avoid the abstract pedantry for which the Western Marxists and Marxist humanists inter alia are castigated, while remaining sympathetic to “the human” as an exhausted modern personality—leads him towards a different problem: the fetishization of human action within the social concrete. American Civilization’s contestation of popular culture, as an all-encompassing instrument of discipline and repression, has been roundly critiqued as a naïve misreading of the specificity of the post-war American cultural terrain, fatally restricted by James’s meta-political insistence on radical dissent dwelling within capitalist domination.31 While these substantial objections are not without merit, they reflect upon James’s attempt to move against the current of modern sociological and Marxist-humanist thought. James and the JFT sought to combine the conceptualisation of human immiseration as the paradox of modern progress and its human costs. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts initiated it, and Durkheim and Weber engaged it in their respective descriptions of anomic modernity and its iron cage with an assertive political commitment. James and the JFT’s advancement of prescriptive political treatises on achieving a more equitable social order is in stark contrast to the founding sociological fathers’ analytical focus on explanations of the emergence and formation of modernity. This is not to denigrate Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Their orientations are no oversights on their parts and, of course, Weber famously described politics as a vocation characterised by a concentration on building definitive positions as a basis for action, antithetical to the detailed analytical laboriousness intrinsic to scientific and intellectual endeavours.32 What is important here, however, is the tension between these approaches to social understanding and critique, that are on the one hand, oriented towards the production of intellectual and analytical insights, and on the other, directed towards the achievement of social transformation.

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If the academic protocols underpinning modern sociology preclude direct partisan political engagement, the revolutionary spirit of Marxism does not afford James and the JFT such immunity. As such, the transposition of the sociological descriptive and explanatory analytical exercise onto Marxist humanism becomes problematic, precisely because many intellectuals associated with this tradition do not subscribe to the Weberian distinction between intellectual and political activities. The formal political involvement of figures such as Gramsci, Lukács, and Sartre is widely accepted as integral to their intellectualism, and often distinguishes them as “engaged intellectuals.” However, this articulation is not necessarily tidy. Bill Martin, for one, identifies a profound contradiction at the core of this intellectual enterprise, in that engaged intellectualism simultaneously requires political commitment alongside the masses and an undertaking of the intellectual work that can inform radical social transformation.33 If there is to be any useful correspondence between intellectual work and political activism that does not privilege either domain, it is in the extent to which sociological modes of analysis might inform committed political concerns, and vice versa. James’s Notes on Dialectics, a reading of Hegel’s (lesser) Science of Logic alongside the imperatives of proletarian class struggle, is instructive here. It not only provides an apposite example of the attempt to marry intellectual work with political engagement—the book was initially produced in mimeographed form specifically for radicalized industrial workers—but it is also unswervingly guided by the principle that analytical abstractions must be socially applicable. Therefore, James and the JFT’s application of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts drew on Marx’s elaboration of the systemic dehumanising impulses within modern industrial processes to describe and explain the organised disciplining and coercion of modern workers—but then it sought to extend this sociological analysis towards political prescription. Instead of viewing proletarian oppression as a naturalised social condition, and accepting the corresponding implication that only intellectuals and a political vanguard have the capacity to recognise the iniquity of objective reality, James again opted for the radical self-activity of the individual as a member of the collective. With this critical and political orientation in mind, James ought to be regarded as an independent Marxist humanist, distinguished from and yet symbiotically connected to the Eastern European and Western Marxist schools. Locating James within broader twentieth-century Marxist tradition and maintaining the distinctiveness of his independent social thought is of paramount importance. Befitting his consistent articulation of class with other forms of social categorisation and modes of oppression, James fails to recognise a distinction between the analytic demands of humanism and Marxism. This encapsulates his ultimate opposition to the objectification of human relations or their distillation to materialist concerns. It also indicates his commitment to retaining sight of the expression of agency within inhospitable circumstances, and a Hegelian orientation of the human

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spirit towards freedom, which in James’s estimation, also translates as happiness.

SPONTANEITY AND ORGANIC (DIS)ORGANISATION If the apparent banalities disseminated within popular culture, through forms such as gangster films and comic strips, were actually produced and consumed in response to mass antagonisms, then James’s ultimate challenge was to develop a bridge between organic proletarian dissent and class-conscious political expression and activity. Claiming historical progression as a contingent ground that precludes “unscientific” speculation, James attacks Marx’s detractors. He argues that the orientation of organic, mass class-consciousness cannot be assiduously mapped as an idealisation of post-revolutionary society—instead, it is dependent on Marx’s method for analysing social development and historical movement.34 As an example of this error, “The Balance Sheet Completed” points to the SWP’s mistaken “promise” to its followers of an immanent revolution in return for their painful sacrifices, which led to disillusionment when that did not happen. For James, workers in revolt would create the society that they wanted, a society specific to the particular needs of the masses at that distinct historical moment, such as he discerned in the Paris Commune of 1871. This faith in the creativity of the class-conscious proletariat in struggle, and its capacity to concretely establish a radical program, is later exemplified by the Hungarian Revolution where “there was no divorce between immediate objectives and ultimate aims, between instinctive action and conscious purpose. . . . Hungary . . . never for a moment forgot that it was incubating a new society, not only for Hungary but for all mankind.”35 In his critique of a centralised and institutionalised vanguard, James faces some monumental questions: How could these tremendous hopes for a truly human existence be uncovered and marshalled so that the masses would realise the imperative of class struggle for themselves? And how could one theorise a class-conscious mass proletarian movement that was not party-led or partyorganised? In order to resolve these questions, he followed the contributions of a variety of activist-intellectuals and moved to the well-worn Marxist path of spontaneity. The tension between party, organisation, and the creative, radical selfactivity of the workers is clear throughout James’s work during the 1940s and in the positions adopted by the JFT. They recognised workers’ power as the antidote to state capitalism and its escalating totalitarianism. Reiterating its humanism, the JFT argued that workers realised the totality of their struggle and sought to develop a “philosophy of life,” as well as an organisational structure that would enable the direct expression of their class struggle. They rejected the distillation of the socialist struggle to economic considerations, asserting that workers across the world did not only

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want higher pay and better working conditions, but also absolute social reorganisation and a transformed productive system.36 This radical imagination also faced significant organisational barriers. The pragmatic vacillations of the leadership and its constraining bureaucratic and hierarchical structures thwarted the grounded instinctive political sense of the workers as rank-and-file party members. For the JFT, the very reason for ordinary workers to join the party in the first place was left unfulfilled, as they discovered nothing about themselves and the potential of the working class.37 Lacking the theoretical and conceptual apparatus with which to critically engage the party (on the terms established by the party), the workers thus became alienated from revolutionary organisation; ultimately, for James and the JFT, the proletariat were locked in conflict with their representatives, unions, and leaders. Therefore, the main problem James and the JFT confronted was how to erase the paternalism and didacticism of the organised leftist movement that silenced organic proletarian contributions. Was it an issue of party organisation, theory, and/or praxis? Or was it an issue of organisation itself? For James, the issue appears to be all of the above, but with different emphases at different moments. In Notes on Dialectics, he sees the party organ as a tool for radical social transformation, debilitated by a Stalinist cancer, but with organic proletarian radicalism providing the corrective form: It is by now clear to all except those blinded by ideological spectacles that organisation is the obstacle, the opposite, the mountain, the error, which truth has to blast its way out of to find itself. If the communist parties are to endure, then the free activity of the proletariat must be destroyed. If the free activity of the proletariat is to emerge, it can emerge only by destroying the communist parties.38 Although there is a hint of sectarianism in James’s reference to the “communist parties” obstructing free proletarian activity, the proposition itself is clear: organisation is antithetical to organic proletarian radicalism.39 In response, James enigmatically continues: Only free activity, a disciplined spontaneity, can prevent bureaucracy. . . . The proletariat has reflected itself in organization after organization until now it will see organization for what it is. The impulse, spontaneity, with which it created new organizations, the means by which it created them, must now become the end. . . . Organization is concentrated spontaneity.40 This statement raises some difficult questions: how is spontaneity disciplined and concentrated or—drawing on the final epigraph of this chapter—taught, illustrated, and developed? On a literal level, this appears paradoxical, but

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for James, it becomes a relatively straightforward proposition of unifying dialectical opposites. As a 1951 statement of “resignation” from the Fourth International, “The Balance Sheet Completed” states that even though the party assumes a role as the vanguard of class struggle, it requires education itself: the SWP’s abstract policies and union fixation betray a profound ignorance of Marxism that prevents it from fulfilling a meaningful pedagogical role.41 For the JFT, as with Marx in 1864, while revolution aimed towards future social transformation, for the party in the 1940s it “must begin with social emancipation” since the radical reformation of society can only be achieved through the emancipated proletariat and their “latent socialism.”42 In more hospitable historical circumstances, spontaneity had come to correspond with an organic, popular-led socialist movement, grounded in the concrete class struggle as opposed to the abstractions of distant party ideologues immersed in the degenerative demands of real politik. If the Hungarian Workers’ Councils served as a present-day inspiration to some of James’s later work in this regard, much of his 1940s and early 1950s thinking bears the stamp of Marx’s analysis of the 1871 Paris Commune.43 Marx’s The Civil War in France, in terms of its emphases, was an important historical and analytical foundation for James’s conceptualisation of radical social reformation along collectivist lines: responsible, elected, and accountable public officials; the replacement of a ruling class with the “selfgovernment of the producers”; and the democratic exchange of information. For James, the profound significance of the Paris Municipal Council is threefold: the event of “ordinary suffrage”; the rejection of the separation of powers central to the bourgeois state and parliamentary democracy; and the combination of executive and legislative functions within the Council.44 Taken together, this demonstrates the revolutionary importance of the proletariat in struggle to dispense with the old state system and create a new, more relevant model of socially egalitarian and administratively efficient governance in its place. Alongside this structural development, James’s work draws an important association between the sociohistorical significance of the individual within the Commune and the description and explanation of the social and productive estrangement of the individual in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. As such, the ameliorative procedures undertaken within the Commune politically resolve the literal and figurative disenfranchisement of labour, which appeals to James’s concern with addressing and identifying the repressive apparatuses of state capitalism. In order to achieve this social transformation, the individual’s status and function within the communal form of organisation was radically restructured in a way that appealed greatly to James. Marx notes that in order to be truly revolutionary, the Commune could not simply appropriate “the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” but had to undertake a radical transformation of social structures and relations.45 This transformation is not solely evinced by popular-democratic organisational

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imperatives, but also in the freeing of the individual from the spiritual and structural forces that serve to repress them. Therefore, the free individual within the Commune is released from the fetters of industrial and moral discipline. Instead, faced with the possibilities of their free self-activity, they disavow the selfish and egotistical individualism exalted by capitalism and voluntaristically orient themselves as individuals towards the maintenance and good of the Commune. This appeals to James as an example of the reconciliation of the desires of the individual with the good of the collective, that could satisfy both without descending into a self-interested bourgeois individualism and a totalitarian state-centrism. James’s constant reference to “free individuality” as opposed to individualism—and the utilitarian and bourgeois connotations of the latter—therefore, alludes precisely to the Communal form of human association and self-activity. As a polemical evaluation and empirical example, the Paris Commune allowed James to imagine and conceptualise the necessary organicity that would allow spontaneous workers’ struggles to move towards radical social transformation. At first glance, the task of mapping spontaneity appears a paradoxical proposition. But the very idea that an impulsive and amorphous political event can be anticipated, let alone directed towards particular ends, was not lost on Marx, and his understanding of spontaneity within the historical development of capital and the progression of the Commune and socialism was, for James, instructive. Marx argues that the historical emergence of the Commune as a phase of class struggle is indicative of spontaneous, classconscious activity where the working classes know that the present “spontaneous action of the natural laws of capital and landed property”—can only be superseded by the “spontaneous action of the social economy of free and associated labour” by a long process of development of new conditions, as was the “spontaneous action of the economic laws of slavery” and the “spontaneous action of the economic laws of serfdom.” But they know at the same time that great strides may be [made] at once through the Communal form of political organization and that the time has come to begin that movement for themselves and mankind.46 Marx rejects spontaneity as an epiphenomenon, and recognises it instead as a responsive event and a recurrent feature of economic and social development. Because spontaneity is impulsive and yet cyclical, he notes that new social and economic conditions will not unfold in a random manner but through a “long process” that also involves the “Communal form of political organisation.” This is crucial for understanding James, because Marx makes it clear that the project of radical social transformation, in order to be effective, cannot afford to be totally disorganised. This implies that the realisation of Jamesian organic spontaneity ought not to dispense with the concept of organisation, but that it requires a different, non-hierarchical,

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non-paternalistic, and post-vanguardist form. In making this move, James undertakes a deft conjuring trick. When he points to the possible (re)education of the party in Marxism, he leaves open the space for a selfreflexive party or organisation that is conversant with proletarian political desires and that disavows a paternalistic attitude towards the latter’s informal understanding of class struggle. This move is crucial because the idealisation of a popular-led organisation (favourably) addresses the tacit question of what place non-proletarian Marxists, who are respectful of the legacy of Marx and Engels and proletarian organic intellectualism might possibly occupy in such a reconstituted political body. And, through a contradiction par excellence, the door is left open for the reformation of a decentred and more reflexive Leninist vanguard that renounces the didactic control that “existing organizations” exercise over the proletariat.47 In other words, while spontaneity represented the dialectical negation of organisation within the evolution of class struggles, James and the JFT claimed certain validating credentials that authenticated their position within an organic, spontaneous socialist alliance. They situated themselves outside of an over-determined historicism intractably attached to the scientific method of dialectical and historical materialism that could only comprehend and approach concrete reality as an abstraction: “We are not formalists. The logical deduction is for us only the guide to proof by practice.”48 This attempt to declare an organic link to workers is reiterated in “The Balance Sheet Completed,” where James and the JFT confirm their commitment to “grass roots” organising and stress their involvement in the social lives of workers away from the industrial plant. However, this emphasis on grass roots political engagement and organic popular spontaneity does not necessarily point to the institution of a progressive autodidactic proletarian socialism. It also raises the question of whether the replacement of capital’s dominance by the dictatorship of the party would necessarily be resolved by such a spontaneous, organic “organisation.” Given the struggles over collective representation and goals that have existed within a series of informally organised, “popular” movements, the “organic” basis of any movement cannot be accepted in itself as a proof of its ability to represent a broad constituency. Nonetheless, the seeds of an organic, non-vanguard movement had been sown, and they began to germinate within the JFT. In “The Balance Sheet Completed,” having illustrated the stifling effect of the party on the revolutionary creativity of the proletariat, James and the JFT began to consider how organic individual disquiet and dissent could become translated into a collective, class-conscious political movement. Understanding the Fourth International as a group consumed with a “maudlin” sense of revolutionary struggle entailing personal sacrifice, the JFT positioned themselves contrary to this “petty-bourgeois sentiment”: their comrades, while oriented towards collective mobilisation, accepted personal accountability for their actions and commitment and did not abdicate autonomy and responsibility to the wider movement.49 The JFT had been unable to find this atmosphere in

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their Fourth International involvement and more specific alliances with the SWP and the WP; their attempts at unity proved incompatible with the proliferation of party cliques, anti-JFT leaderships, and imprecise theoretical and policy formation.50 Therefore, the split with the Fourth International is deeply significant, signalling the primacy of a class-conscious individuality that would begin to provide a means to reconcile the requirements of the self with that of the collective. If such individuality was repressed within the totalising structures of state capitalism and leftist attempts at a collectivised response, then the task was to uncover a mass spontaneity that veered leftward under its own navigation. The answer for James, through Marx, began with the proposition that intellectuals as a class must abolish themselves and that philosophy must become proletarian, reflecting and relevant to the everyday lives of workers.51 In response, James theorises an organic coming-to-political-consciousness as a way for black Americans, marginalised within dominant and subterranean political organisations, to discover socialism for themselves. This organicity is not strictly accurate, given the residual vanguard category within James’s social thought. Nevertheless, in understanding the developing radicalized political consciousness of different oppressed groups, emerging within their immature expression of chauvinistic sentiments and statements, he significantly routes them in one direction: towards a radicalized political consciousness. And regarding the compatibility of a particular group’s political consciousness with that of other groups, creating the synergy necessary for the formation of a concrete and inclusive broad proletarian coalition, he presents the radicalization of the particular as conversant with the development of a generalised, oppositional political programme. It is this broad coalescence of individual, group, and class interest, capable of informing a spontaneously forged proletarian movement without assiduous organisation, that James uses to develop his ideal of a progressive and inclusive oppositional politics on an organic-coming-to-political-consciousness. An obvious criticism of this organic process, as Alex Callinicos comments in regard to the genealogy of black radicalism in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, is to problematise it as mysticism.52 While it is admirable in its attempt to eradicate the paternalism and opportunism of didactic party organisation and the dominance of the vanguard, the problem of exactly how this organic coming-to-political-consciousness will be realised—let alone enable socially dissimilar “groups” to recognise politically similar interests—is immense. And given its spontaneous emergence out of the negativity of social disenchantment and anger, how will it inevitably gravitate towards a progressive oppositional politics? How will it develop its intuitive affinities with Marxism? The first point to note within this process of emergence and articulation is that, drawing on James’s creolist predilections outlined in Chapter One, Marxism is to be inverted into inherent social and class conflicts. This is to say that Marxism will be theorised and constructed through its relationship with concrete social struggles—not, as was

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previously the case within vanguardism, the other way around. For James, the analytical technique of applying a Marxist framework to social conditions and struggles in order to achieve understanding distorts the concrete reality of those struggles, which, in turn, become alienated from the political prescriptions that would achieve their amelioration. The theorisation of this transitional process shifts as James’s thinking on spontaneity crystallises. Initially, as noted above, the reformation of the party along reflexive and anti-vanguardist lines is important, because it is the party that will provide an important educative function in developing Jamesian spontaneity from its embryonic manifestation: “The party, in stimulating the independent struggles of the Negro people, teaches Marxism to them in the only terms in which they will learn it, the terms of their own desires and experiences.”53 While James would later refine this 1947 statement, as his antagonisms to the paternalism and opportunism of the party become increasingly lucid, it expresses an already existing anti-vanguard concern. Even earlier, although rather subdued in his role as party spokesperson, James sketches an autodidactic process whereby the “masses” discover themselves in struggle as historicised class subjects. As a result, blacks engaged in struggle uncover what might be termed an organic, unspoken Marxist grand narrative, whereby they need not study Marxist historiography, theory, or praxis in order to understand—and perhaps more importantly, feel—the formation and relations of class struggle: by merely observing the Negro Question, the Negro people, rather, the struggles they have carried on, their ideas, we are [now] able to see the roots of this position in a way that was difficult to see ten or even fifteen years ago. The Negro people, we say, on the basis of their own experiences, approach the conclusions of Marxism.54 This intuitive Marxism, part of a political sensibility oriented towards human freedom and social justice, is borne out in James’s later statement that “all humanism finds itself in close harmony with the original conceptions and aims of marxism.”55 It is worth noting that James replaces the upper case ‘M’ in “Marxism” with the lower case “m,” despite his long preference for the former in the majority of his work. Although any explanation is inevitably speculative, one can suggest that in stressing the eternal humanism of marxism and its secular moral appeal, he is attempting to divest it of its formal preeminence. James therefore points to a marxism that is organic in its autodidacticism, unspoken in its intuitive appeal, and grand in its human reach. Thus, the unspoken marxist grand narrative addresses the reconciliation of the individual and the collective, and the human and social unity of oppressed peoples and oppositional political struggles. Within this imagined, organic unspoken marxist grand narrative, groups engage in struggle through forms appropriate to their historical formation and specific social position. This leads James to note that the black church in America is a significant organisational space in response to black

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social dislocation and limited access to the formal political sphere.56 Much later, reading Alice Walker’s novel Meridian, he would see a politicised consciousness in the reaction of a black church community to the murder of a young black man as a demonstration of an organic marxism and the autonomous organisational capacity within the black struggle: “these people hadn’t to be trained or taught Marxism; these black people in this Southern church had built up a sense of community, and of right and wrong, so strong that if the need came, they would join any revolutionary movement that meant to kill those who were oppressing them.”57 The organicity in this unspoken marxist narrative is evident in the way Jamesian spontaneity both acknowledges and transcends the specificity of sectional groups. James did not just concern himself with the development of the black struggle, but building on the themes raised in his discussions with Trotsky, his theory of spontaneity became applicable to differentiated responses to social oppression. Each group, locating itself historically, would recognise the specific class and productive relations of its oppression in articulation with its own specific identity—for example, race and gender. This organic and unspoken marxist narrative becomes “grand” in an interesting way, as James attempts a deft theoretical sleight of hand in order to retain the specificity of group struggle and the radicalized imperatives of a generalised historical materialism. “The Balance Sheet Completed” notes an enduring affinity between black and women’s struggles in America, underdeveloped by the paternalism of the party where each group fights to maintain its own integrity within the movement, preventing the recognition of their organic and shared proletarian interests.58 Maintaining control of their own mobilisation and struggle instead of submitting to didactic vanguard party directives, sectional groups would develop in struggle along their own specific historical dialectic, conversant with broader social and historical development. And in the idealised post-vanguard scenario of organic, spontaneous self-activity, each sectional group engaged in struggle would encourage other groups in their particular struggles. Groups would, therefore, learn from and support each other, and in doing so would come to realise—for and by themselves—the commonalties of their social relations of production and alienation, symbiotic within broader historicised class struggles. In other words, freed from the constraints imposed by a privileged vanguard, sectional groups would be voluntarily linked to and internally convinced by the cohesive egalitarianism and revolutionary salience of this unspoken marxist grand narrative.

THE “WOMAN QUESTION” AND THE LIMITS OF ORGANIC SPONTANEITY Obviously, one cannot (or ought not) assume progressive radicalism as the inevitable outcome of spontaneous self-activity. Although this teleological

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presupposition leads James towards grave theoretical and conceptual weaknesses, his conceptualisation of spontaneity is also practically problematic: Jamesian spontaneity itself perhaps demonstrates a residual vanguardism in its placement of black workers at the frontier of an evolving organic political consciousness. The didactic party authority that emanates from the revolutionary hierarchy is thus replaced with a racial vanguard that possesses the epistemic privilege to act as the organic guardian of the radical spirit. For example, the festering resentment of black Americans signifies the barely concealed anger largely evident across the whole of America; in terms of its progressive potential, politically immature black antipathy is an expression of “modern Americanism” and “a profoundly social passion.”59 Alternately, the failure of American women to comprehend their oppression as part of a collective social process negates their capacity for radical self-activity: “many women who are indifferent to ‘civil rights’ burn with rage and impotence at this antagonism between theoretical and practical life which touches them so nearly.”60 But help is at hand: within a classconscious organic spontaneity, the black struggle will inform broader proletarian struggles and ignite women’s struggles; in short, it will educate white workers and inspire women. This paternalism, where the black struggle assumes a gendered pedagogical function, has been traced from James’s formative political milieu where West Indian men were responsible for rescuing the nation and region from the grip of the British Empire. Hazel Carby asserts that, for James, colonial and anticolonial politics were constituted on an all-male battlefield where men, as individuals and social representatives, could struggle against each other.61 For Carby, James’s social and political landscape is gendered, as is the conceptual formation of his class analysis: while the Jamesian masses supplemental to “great men” are feminised, the middle class intellectual protagonist, such as the one featured in Minty Alley, is masculine. In addition to being problematical in all of the obvious ways, the gendered distinctions within James’s work present different dilemmas when placed alongside the putative dissolution of the vanguard, and its authoritative intellectual and political position, by an organically radical proletarian spontaneity. But instead of providing the practical basis for the forging of organic links between sectional struggles, whereby particularities of race, class, and gender might be articulated within a broad marxian social movement, James’s conceptualisation of spontaneity does not engage the assumption of revolution as a “homosocial act of reproduction: a social and political upheaval in which men confront each other to give birth to a new nation.”62 James therefore faces a crucial methodological and explanatory problematic: would the hypothetical event of the rapprochement of white and black workers’ sectional interests necessarily resolve all (major) incidences of intra-proletarian antagonism? This dilemma, extending beyond the race/class, leader/mass relation to incorporate issues of gender and patriarchy, is of crucial importance insofar

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as political agency is often configured as a masculine realm.63 Furthermore, not only are James’s World Historical figures, without exception, male, but the disparity between men and women as social actors is particularly striking. Throughout his work, men conspicuously occupy active social and political roles while women are generally confined to the domestic sphere.64 However, at the same time, James pointedly chronicles the ideal of freedom and equality promised to women alongside a recognition of their exclusion from full participation in public life and relegation to a mundane existence of domestic drudgery.65 James’s explicit understanding of post-war American society as a “man-dominated civilization,” advanced in American Civilization, basically suggests a form of patriarchal domination that combines a rhetorical egalitarianism with the conscientious reproduction of gender inequality and maintenance of male supremacy. However, the social characteristics and potentialities of women are not constituted through the social and historical predicates germane to the formation of the Jamesian male World Historical individual. Mirroring his delineation of the emergence of black diasporic social agents and their critical capacity, James alludes to the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of women within American society that provides them with an acute insight into its contradictions and flaws. However, while this same marginality led to a radicalised New World (male) black consciousness, women’s experience of the inherent contradictions of their social conditions produced an angst-ridden existence that lacked the capacity to create a meaningful oppositional critique and praxis: Equality they have in theory. They can and do embark on careers and win places for themselves in teaching, in the professions, in business. They are severely handicapped by the masculine prejudices, traditions etc., but they are pushing ahead. If economic crises hit them harder and quicker than they do men, yet crises seem to be in the nature of things. It is not that which disrupts them. The thing that tears them to pieces is that when they examine their equality, they find that it is a spurious thing.66 This discussion of ostensibly white, middle-class American women in American Civilization alludes to the unavoidable conflict between their increased access to education, employment opportunities, and disposable income for consumer durables, and the heteronormativity of motherhood and domesticity. And although their class position might be incongruous with proletarian radicalism, it is worth remembering that James stressed the need for the inclusion of a black petit bourgeois intelligentsia within the formation of an SWP-sponsored “Negro organisation.”67 Therefore, taken alongside his assertion that Marx recognised women as the most exploited social grouping,68 one might assume that the patriarchal domination of white middle-class women is a necessary inclusion in the general project of revolutionary social change. However, applying the production/

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consumption framework already dismissed as an inadequate basis for proletarian political critique, James’s model of the “modern woman,” based on American women—with more, albeit unequal, social opportunities than any other female population—demonstrates how their qualified liberation has not overturned normative patriarchal social structures and relations: instead, their freedom is exemplified by their greater access to the beauty products and facilities that reproduce the archetypes of Westernised conceptions of femininity.69 This “freedom” is ironically compounded by James’s recognition that American women’s access to electrical appliances makes domesticity easier without questioning or critiquing the division and relations of labour in the home.70 In James’s estimation, the tension between the real and the ideal manufactures women’s angst as they attempt to combine the demands of home and career. But it is notable that the submergence of women’s struggles and radical self-activity within the masculine social realm—and, one might add, the masculine revolutionary proletariat—is also exercised through a biological imperative. For James, the social meanings—and biological impulses—of human reproduction and childbirth that cultivate the opposition of home and career perpetuate gender inequality. Childbirth signifies an innate biological inequality against which women are unable to struggle; thus, their recognition of the disparity between the social opportunities open to them and the social reality of homemaking simply accentuates their feelings of angst. For James, women’s confrontation of workplace discrimination— childbirth in modern times equates to “three years or more out of a woman’s life”71—presents a conflict between domesticity, family, and career that “active men” do not face. And even though this might be understood as a social choice, James blurs the contributory factors of a patriarchal “mandominated civilization” and maternal biological impulses: “Whether basic biological urges impel women to need babies is excluded here. I cannot go into that. The fact remains that if the couple or the woman or the man, particularly want children, and biological urge or not, that is a natural and normal instinct, equality vanishes.”72 Although the evaporation of equality can be understood as a social effect of gender politics, this “natural and normal instinct” situates gender roles within a biological frame that implies the naturalised and historical disposition of women towards subservience. Although this could signify the need to rethink domestic and parental roles and responsibilities, that is not necessarily the case within James’s formulation. While rendered through specifically modern capitalist mechanisms, the gendered vicissitudes of a “man-dominated civilization” are not simply reflective of patriarchal domination, the contradictions of Western modernity, or a corollary of the escalating barbarism of industrial and state capitalism. This becomes evident in James’s belief that gender inequality was absent in “primitive communes,” because the layers of social organisation demanded a distinction between rulers and ruled as well as a structured social division of labour. As a result, childbirth meant that women

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were “automatically” secondary to men for extended periods; the necessary hunting and gathering therefore fell to the men while women remained at “home” to bear and rear children.73 This notion simplistically transposes, as an unquestioned inevitability, the gendered structure and role distribution in modern society and the nuclear family onto speculative early communal formations. For James, this heteronormativity and its correlate domestic arrangements are “automatic.”74 This transposition allows for the continued and uncontested existence of certain innate gendered characteristics that, while socially exacerbated and distorted, are nonetheless inalienable facts of homo sapiens’ being. Archaeological inaccuracies aside, this position yields obvious political problems. Given that James sees no need to critically consider the (re)ordering, (re)allocation, or (re)definition of gendered domestic and social roles reflected within essential evolutionary human traits, the question of whether a socialist revolution, or any form of radical social transformation, can eradicate gender inequality or whether it ought to be accepted as a fact of human nature, looms large. Indeed, it is well documented that the naturalisation of the gendered distribution of domestic and familial roles, such as “mothering,” is meticulously socially reproduced as a means of reasserting patriarchal social orders.75 And given that James long dismissed the justifications of racism and racial stratification based on biological theses of hereditary capacities, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he might have considered the social morphology of human reproduction and the necessity of reorganising gendered roles and domestic relations. These strategically naturalised female characteristics have a deleterious effect on James’s understanding of women’s social and political participation, and they leave him open to a series of standard charges: agreement with Marx’s assumption, for example, that the wage labourer is a man, and reiteration of the marked gender differentiation attributable to the androcentric ideal of conquering nature, central to Marxist theory and praxis.76 As such, James’s perspective arguably synonymises the proletariat with industrial production and misunderstands domestic work as class production for non-capitalist consumption, seen in discussions of “wages for housework.”77 Unsurprisingly, such objections have been contested. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, for example, argues that James does not understand gender equality as secondary to the demands of a “larger” proletarian revolutionary struggle and anticipates the emergence of autonomous women’s movements as an “exciting” form of radical self-activity that would contribute to the broader quest for social transformation.78 However, given his problematical delineation of women’s self-activity, James’s commitment to developing the theoretical and practical articulation of gender with racial and class struggles demands consideration. In a 1984 interview with Anna Grimshaw, James comments that although he helped raise the “Woman Question” within the SWP in the U.S. during the 1940s, he acknowledges that he did not pursue it as he did the black

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question.79 For James, the “Woman Question” could only gather momentum if women themselves were engaged in its advancement. He recalls a 1950 conversation with Selma Weinstein—who later became Selma James when they married in 1956—who noted the absence of the discussion of women in The Invading Socialist Society as well as the JFT’s failure to develop a consistent interrogation of gender inequality and oppression. In response, James suggested that she address this oversight by engaging the issue herself, apparently returning to the anti-vanguardist position on developing a generalised politics through the enunciation of particular interests from their specific social and subjective locations. On one hand, this can be understood quite simply as the recognition of the integrity and autonomy of women’s struggles, supported by his suspicion of a didactic vanguard removed from the practical reality of those it putatively represents. On the other hand, however, it is incongruous with his demand for the education of white male workers and anti-racist party activists in the historical and social conditions of the black struggle. Therefore, in terms of theoretical and prescriptive consistency, James ought to call for the education of men regarding patriarchal structures and processes and the historical development of the women’s movement. Indeed, given that the concept of an organic coming-to-political-consciousness is perhaps the most interesting and vexing aspect of James’s spontaneity, although he identifies the separation of various struggles, his key political point is that they must be recombined within a popular radicalism through empathetic understanding. Therefore, this retreat to a putative solipsism on the “Woman Question” represents a dangerous fracturing of the popular independent Marxist coalition that he sees as the only opportunity for the achievement of revolutionary social change. Selma James, writing with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and perhaps with C. L. R. James in mind, points to a problematic that moves beyond the simple issue of male involvement or non-involvement in feminist politics. James and Dalla Costa suggest that the men who have been able to define the exploitation of women in socialized production could not then go on to understand the exploited position of women in the home; men are too compromised in their relationship with women. For that reason only women can define themselves and move on the woman question.80 Feminism is thus presented as a separate women’s realm only because of the compromised position of men in their relationships with women, not because of an essentially gendered political alignment. Such disputes over the relationship of men to feminist politics notwithstanding, the numerous assertions of women and men recognising the political desirability and necessity for men to commit to gender equality counteracts James’s distancing of himself from the “woman question” because of his disqualification

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as a man.81 Angela Davis eloquently makes this case in her assertion that alliances between “women of colour” need not be self-referential towards womanism and feminism, but instead should work at the intersection of chosen political projects, and that the different meanings of feminism for women and men should not prevent the development of political movements across a variety of social and historical differences.82 The scenario James and Dalla Costa present points to the political challenge of understanding the full implications and responsibilities of domestic labour and socialised production facing men that would remove their contingent exclusion from women’s struggles and feminist politics. Bearing this in mind, James’s hesitance to extend the imperative of educating white workers in the historical specificity of the black struggle as a basis for interracial proletarian alliance to men in terms of gender politics is problematical. Although the indemnity of a historical defence against presentist perspectives of the mutual construction of race, class, and gender through the concept of intersectionality might be invoked here, it is a rather weak caveat.83 Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 Le Deuxième Sexe, and its quick (and deeply flawed) English translation published by Knopf in the U.S. in 1953, was published broadly within the same period that James was writing what would be posthumously published as American Civilization. The themes of women’s relationship to domesticity, maternalism, biological determinism, and idealised femininity, on which James declaims, are among those de Beauvoir takes up in her more expansive treatment. Indeed, as Robert A. Hill argues, it is possible to discern an analytical and political convergence between de Beauvoir and James in their mutual recognition of the synergy between the women’s and black struggles.84 However, while de Beauvoir examines the moribund social situation of women as an effect of their status as the men’s “Other,” and deconstructs the patriarchal artifice of “woman,” imprisoned in her biology and the “eternal feminine,” James accepts “woman” as an empirical given within a “man-dominated civilization”; it is not “woman,” then, that is problematic, but the society in which she finds herself.85 This divergence not only compromises men in their domestic relationships with women, as James and Dalla Costa suggest, but also seriously compromises the spontaneous objectives of an organic political association that does not consider the provenance of the subject prior to self-activity. If the comparison between James and de Beauvoir appears unfair along contextual and presentist lines, there is an allied, perhaps stronger example of James’s limitations. Many black feminists, working before, alongside, and after James understood the practical and analytical synergy between race, class, and gender, as well as the political implications of a failure to develop an activist movement on such a tripartite basis. The lack of such a commitment from James cannot be excused as the necessitation of an unheralded epistemological or political advance akin to a paradigm shift. Claudia Jones, for example, who was born in Trinidad in 1915 and moved to America with her family in 1922, wrote extensively as a member of the Communist Party

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USA on the social position and struggles of black women. While she and James certainly knew each other later, it is not unimaginable that he was at least aware of her work, since she lived in New York City where he spent considerable amounts of time.86 The commonalties in the issues they address are indeed notable—Jones addresses the autonomy of the black struggle, the problem of organisation, and the vitality of radical popular self-activity without an adequate leftist organ within which to express itself productively. In her remarkable 1948 essay (that serves as an indirect rejoinder to James), “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Woman!,” Jones develops a critique of the marginalisation of black women within formal, organised labour and political movements. Starting with the observation that black women are the most exploited group in the U.S., she asserts their insistent militancy, especially within trades unions—when allowed to join and participate. Although one might imagine James’s objections on sectarian grounds, Jones’s position is carefully moderated. While the essay culminates in a call for black women to join the Communist Party as a means to advance their struggle, it refers to the disregard of black women within the broad labour movement, including left-progressives and the Communist Party, while acknowledging that the most serious assessment of black women emanates from Marxist-Leninists (of whom James’s group might be said to be included). However, James’s generic black masses that form the vanguard of American radicalism are replaced by black women who demonstrate radical self-activity, rather than possess a latent capacity: “Negro women are the real active forces—the organizers and workers—in all the institutions and organizations of the Negro people.”87 The economic hardships of low-waged labour within domestic service and service trades left black women outside of labour union and employment legislation protection. In Jones’s calculation, this meant that existing minimum wage legislation did not cover about one in ten of all black female workers. But in addition to this, she echoes many black feminists before her by noting that black women are subject to patriarchal domination at the hands of a white supremacist America and black men. If emancipation ended legal slavery (for the most part), she argues that black men asserted their superiority within the domestic and community spheres in reaction to the ensuing endemic racial stratification that qualified their freedom and limited their life-chances. And again reiterating the claims of legions of black feminists, Jones notes the failure of the white-dominated women’s movement to support black women, which leads her to a position that is both resonant with and yet distant from James: the “Negro Question” takes precedence over the “Woman Question,” since the racial oppression of black women is the foundation of what is familiarly referred to as their “triple burden” of being black, women, and working class. However, it is black women who are entrusted with acting as a stimulus for the broader women’s movement, not black women and men en masse or the organised labour movement. Therefore, it is the duty of black women to support the

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“progressive” women’s movement—Jones is careful here that it is a progressive women’s movement that is to be supported, and not the same association privileging white petit bourgeois and bourgeois women’s interests—in order to build a socialist America that will offer “the final and full guarantee of woman’s emancipation.”88 Against this model of the intra-racial and intra-proletarian exclusion of black women, the organic solidarity of spontaneity and its practical ethics falls far short. Its corrective stands in Jones’s movement, beyond James’s workerist paradigm and its formal political imperatives, organised around the industrial plant and trades union towards the various clubs and associations (including the National Association of Negro Women and the National Council of Negro Women) to uncover actually existing examples of coherent black organisation and struggle. However, the point here is not to castigate James; that is a rather futile exercise now. Instead, it serves as a reminder to not simply gesture at the complexity of social structure and its concomitant relations and identities, but to work assiduously towards the articulation of various modes of social oppression, enabling, for example, an interconnected analysis of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.89 This enterprise is precisely what James’s theory of spontaneity demands but fails to fully anticipate or conceptualise. Even if its only meaningful resource is to be that of hope, the idealisation of the organic coming-to-politicalconsciousness of particular groups, in empathy and solidarity with the sum of oppressed groups in the social collective, cannot afford not to confront this shortcoming.

WHITHER SPONTANEISM? James’s conceptualisation of spontaneity has a notable neologising effect. Although it attempts to reform theory, praxis, and organisation, it often appears to have its own conceptual and explanatory salience. It is not simply the mode of spontaneous activity that is important, but the radical resources available within spontaneity as a mode of consciousness. As such, spontaneity is axiomatic: it equates to a cohesive theoretical system of spontaneism. It tautologically offers a theoretical explanation as well as a descriptive account of its own emergence and activity; thus, spontaneous revolutionary action is possible because of organically radical spontaneous thought. With this in mind, it is important to consider the extent to which James’s idea of spontaneism functions effectively or whether he simply retraces familiar ground, already covered by Lenin, Luxemburg, and others, and reiterates the opposition between them but with different actors and modes and sites of struggle. But it is first worth noting that James’s attempt to uncover the sociohistorical and anticapitalist basis for a transracial, organically emerging socialist alliance could be predicated on a tacit acceptance of the America where this will take place, a country founded on an immovable

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egalitarian multiculturalism—or, as the (re)articulation of the “American Dream” and the “melting pot” theses.90 Paul Buhle offers a strong critique of the inadequacies of James’s conceptualisation of spontaneity and collectivised, transracial, radical proletarian self-activity, in that his ideas took too little notice of the deep racial and gender attitudes which penetrated working-class social life, and the consequent psychological appeal that anti-Communism made to the self-image of the white, male worker in particular. They could not grasp, in theory, the individualistic impulses that home ownership and suburbanization, commodities and wage hikes, gratified in return for industrial pacification. And they had no appreciation of the real plight of the unrecalcitrant radical, the antiracist, anti-war Communist or Trotskyist or independent, factory operative or minor leader, who simply did not find in fellow workers the traits that James described.91 Buhle suggests a fundamental theoretical problem with the efficacy of spontaneity as an explanatory theoretical system: the paradox between the laudable intention of realising radical self-activity freed from the constraints of party vanguard organisation, and the vague notion of an organic comingto-political-consciousness. The sheer theoretical and political scale of this problematic can be profitably examined alongside Sartre’s own attempt to grapple with this conundrum. In what was to be his magnum opus (but is often understood as an unmitigated disaster), Sartre’s two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason famously aimed towards the reconciliation of free individuality with its concomitant sociohistorical dimensions. His effort to marry existentialism with Marxism, or at least his attempt to rescue aspects of the former capable of renovating the latter, “posed anew the classical question of social theory: how can we understand both concrete individuals and the social world to which they belong?”92 While the reasons for the “failure” of Sartre’s Critique are manifold, among them the allegedly rushed and inchoate character of his argument and manuscript, the project is ultimately undone by the sheer scale of the problematic at hand.93 Indeed, the very attempt to theorise—let alone write—an “anthropology of history” is perhaps more the speculative domain of the theological imagination, that accepts the task of explaining the mysteries of human existence (without the demands of theoretical rigour) as its raison d’etre. The foundation of this dilemma is not solely Sartrean. Even though James does not share Sartre’s concern with metaphysical human explanation, the problems of building a totalising account of the relationship between individual will and social formation manifest within the Critique were already present within James’s different and yet related spontaneist project. Ultimately, in their distinctive ways, they both attempt to imagine the necessary conditions for individuals to understand the equitable distribution of social goods and egalitarian reformation of productive forces and relations as

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reflections of their own particular interest, that to all intents and purposes, are indivisible from broader collective interests. Upon sober reflection, such an aim is a truly monumental task and requires a colossal conjuring trick. And while Sartre’s cavalier approach to guiding disciplinary and political frameworks is legendary, James’s concern with freeing the radical potentiality of individuality emerges as an antivanguardist position firmly located within Marxism. James, then, is committed to certain analytical approaches and evaluative conclusions, such as historical materialism and the degenerative internal dynamics of capitalism, yet he realises that in an unadulterated state, these tools cannot perform the political task at hand: social and human emancipation. But given that James remained a Marxist, the obstacle of organisation, the problem of comingto-political-consciousness, and the practicable cohesiveness of constituent groups within an organically unified social collective, constituted larger problems that required the reimagining of Marxism. If this is evocative of a contemporary post-marxist problematic (more of which below), the magnitude of such a project is evident in its central task: the separation of the autonomous individual from the determining social structure followed by the establishment of steps necessary to affect their radically progressive reconciliation. For Sartre, such a transformation entails moving from the “seriality” of individual lives within a “collective” towards the form of meaningful human sociability, evident within the “fused group.”94 However, the sheer distinctiveness and antithetical character of each of these ontological situations presents the transition from seriality to group as a huge barrier to be surmounted. On one hand, seriality refers to the state of individuals living alongside each other—as a series of individual human beings—within a collective environment, yet who are disconnected and only concerned with their own narrow individual interests; seriality and the collective, therefore, is simply “a plurality of isolations.”95 Conversely, within given extreme circumstances such as social and political crises, the potential realisation of human social commonality erased within seriality becomes apparent, thus enabling the emergence of the fused group characterised by a unity of interests and sincere reciprocal action. Leaving aside the salience of this vision as an attainable state, the monumental theoretical and organisational political resources necessary to cross the gulf between seriality and the group—that might actually affect a radical shift in individual consciousness and social formation—clearly illustrate the barrier facing James and Sartre. If James responds to this demand through the rather vague notion of an organic process of coming-to-political-consciousness, whereby individuals recognise sociability and collective interest for and by themselves, Sartre follows a different analytical path. Perhaps prompted by his declared intention of formulating an existentialist ethics connecting individual free will and a collectively responsible sociability, Sartre returns to the individual in offering a dialectical proposal for the theoretical realisation of the transition

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from the collective to the fused group. In effect, he reverses James’s intimation that the group concretely exists in ideal form awaiting discovery by the serialised individual by suggesting that the group has neither internal coherence nor objective form, but rather it is constructed through the activities of individuals.96 This means that group formation is not bound to prior historical and organisational laws, but that it will emerge in process as the reactions of individuals finding each other within specific moments of crisis. In this constitutive moment, Sartre and James each allude to the limitations of the other. While James seems to depend on a quasi-spiritual ideal that somehow ushers individuals towards discovering a Marxian morality of good and the unity of social interests, Sartre promotes a conscious commitment to the maintenance of the fused group that individuals freely enter and for which they assume responsibility. The I/other recognition, that Sartre concretises as the result of a socialised consciousness, appears within James’s thought as a naturalised capacity or quasi-spiritual force: this is not James’s intention, but it is an effect of his describing the transition from, in Sartre’s terms, seriality to fused group, without developing an explanation. Put differently, while Sartre addresses why humans should behave as social instead of individual actors, James focuses on what such reciprocal activity would look like and evaluates its broader social and political implications. This difference has an important effect on the possibility and formation of praxis. The formulation of transitional steps between seriality or alienation (existent if incommodious ontological states) and group cohesion or common humanity (desirable if not implausible ends) is also an analytical and practical proposition. Should, for example, such a political transition be conceived of primarily in concrete social terms, or established through a set of theoretical permutations? Of course, the concept of praxis asserts the obsolescence of such a strict theory/practice distinction, but in relation to James and Sartre’s responses to the desirable cohesion of human and social life, one is reminded of C. Wright Mills’s assessment of the structuring context that enables a loose distinction to be made between Marxist thinkers as freely theoretical and Marxist politicians as tightly ideological.97 As such, Sartre’s engaged intellectualism and James’s activist-intellectualism approach the same question of individual will and social existence from respective philosophical and political standpoints, driven by their different associated demands. Although this might appear to be a horribly reductive point, it reflects the different orientations of “theoretical practice”—such as the empiricist Leninist variety privileging action, and the Althusserian theoreticist mode reflecting the autonomy of science and scientific concepts—making theory responsible, yet irreducible to, its material social context and function.98 In this sense, the philosophical/political distinction is more a reflection of the respective materialist and phenomenological bases of James and Sartre’s totalising approaches. This is further contextualised in the issue of milieu and its productive effect, where Sartre’s independence as an essayist

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and political journalist is oriented towards an informative and sometimes moralistic function, and James’s disciplined involvement in political cells and agitational journalism often compelled him towards the project of movement-building.99 On the other hand, James’s lack of an ontological explanation perhaps reflects an attempt to retain the principles of historical materialism, whereby individual consciousness is never external to concrete materiality. For example, his critique of original sin and heavenly redemption as the avoidance of “concrete universality” by foregrounding a subjective immaterial afterlife that dispels any urgent and necessary concern with present material conditions, asserts that historical materialism internalises the dialectic of freedom and happiness as the “purpose of man’s existence.”100 This illuminates two problem areas in Sartre’s analysis. First, given the fused group’s basis in individual consciousness instead of organic or natural unity, Sartre faces the problem of sustaining the group without it retreating to the collective state.101 In the event of the conciliatory (as opposed to radical) resolution of a particular social crisis through negotiation, compromise, or concession, what would prevent a drift back to seriality of a momentary group—whose reason for forming has disappeared—if their ensemble activity is not cohered by a larger force such as the material force of history?102 And second, the “fraternity-terror” that secures Sartrean group voluntarism and commitment, around a dread of the punitive sanctions to be exercised on the individual by the remainder of the group in the event of a failure to fulfil their pledge to the community, is not particularly ethically compelling given its basis in negation—preventing censure instead of producing positive aims—and totalitarian sensibility.103 With this in mind, James’s humanistic sense of unity of struggles cohered through an empathetic response to human oppression instead of fear, despite its Samaritan tenor, is perhaps not as objectionable as first appears. The problems James and Sartre encounter in their attempts to theorise the leap from seriality to the fused group are amplified when they consider the concrete political steps that might enable a human praxis. For Sartre, the inherent contradiction between the party and the mass is the axial point of the problem and the paradox of praxis: the mass is politically inert without the party’s igniting impulse, and on its own remains within seriality; however, the institutionalisation of the party is a reactionary force in relation to the very “fused group” that it produces.104 Furthermore, the very ideal of classconsciousness pursued by the party is obviated by the ensemble of homogeneous elements and groups that “fuse”; as such, the concrete bond exists within the fused group, while the broader class unity is a symbolic order subject to significant internal fissures. Sartre’s suggestion of this fracturing of the class, the existence of serialised workers alongside fused groups, and the disturbances and disruptions to fused groups caused by serialised connections such as those external to their work environment, directly contests James’s spontaneist praxis of the organic inter-group’s abstract empathy and

152 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics concrete recognition of commonalties in struggle. Instead, for Sartre, it is impossible to isolate class spontaneity, and alternately it is only possible to speak of groups, produced by particular circumstances, and which create themselves in the course of particular situations; in thus creating themselves, they do not rediscover some kind of underlying spontaneity, but rather experience a specific condition on the basis of specific situations of exploitation and of particular demands; and it is in the course of their experience that they achieve a more or less accurate consciousness of themselves.105 Substantively, Sartre is not left with much in the sense of a “traditional” praxis. There is the integrity of distinct groups that understand the concrete demands of their particular situations more clearly than the institutional, ideological apparatus of the party, but they nevertheless remain separated from other groups and the serialised mass. The party retains an important function in preventing the complete collapse of the mass into seriality, and facilitates communication between groups formed in the course of political struggle. Yet paradoxically, it “finds itself as a general rule compelled either to absorb or to reject the fused group which it has itself helped to create.”106 THE OPTIMISM OF INTELLECT AND WILL The fractious relationship between Marxism and existentialist thought is evident in the assertive stand Sartre takes against the conceptual inflation of class-consciousness and class struggle existing prior to political struggles. His insistence that the “only a priori is the objective situation of class exploitation” reflects his famous formulation of existence and essence, and leads him to note that “[c]onsciousness is only born in struggle: the class struggle only exists insofar as there exist places where an actual struggle is going on.”107 Therefore, consciousness and struggle are, for Sartre but only intermittently for James, essentially active categories that are fought out, as opposed to instead of dialectical negations that lurk as latent possibilities within the structural contradictions of capitalism. Without recourse to a formal itinerary of objective ends stipulated and pursued by an authority such as a party, Sartre, as it is with Jamesian spontaneism, is left without any solid guarantee that this autodidactic process of individual social consciousness will yield a radicalised consciousness, evinced in the opportunistic cult of spontaneity that met revolutionary outbursts in France during the 1968 uprisings.108 He is simply left to acknowledge the thoughts of a fused group as truer reflections of experience because they are not institutionally mediated through the party ideological apparatus. In response to the question of whether a revolutionary alternative might avoid pure voluntarism, subjectivity, or teleological evolutionism, Sartre

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points to the lack of a viable Marxist theory of the transition to socialism. He argues that existing ideas amount to a theory of the achievement of power—or, in Leninist terms, its “seizure”—that lacks a concrete consideration of the objective demands of a transitional stage and the necessary intermediate steps. Unsurprisingly, this Sartrean rendition of the crisis of (Marxist) political imagination offers no concrete proposal, reflecting his entrenchment within the reflective mode of critique and self-confessed inability to reconcile organisational necessity with the allied problems of stabilised structures.109 But with James in mind, the political futility of Sartre’s attempt at grand social theory in the face of the demands of praxis bears a salutary lesson. Just as Sartre’s conceptualisation of social revolution is apparently condemned to the ineffectuality of transient fused groups, and offers, at best, a practical ethics instead of a grand revolutionary theory, we are forced to reconsider James’s position at the same practico-theoretical juncture.110 In typical polemical fashion, James and the JFT summarily dismissed criticisms of their “revolutionary romanticism and idealistic belief in the proletariat” levelled at them by the WP and SWP.111 However, taking up these charges, Anthony Bogues insightfully suggests a series of crucial gaps in James’s conception of organic proletarian radicalism.112 Juxtaposing Jamesian spontaneism with Gramscian hegemony, Bogues points to the continual struggle between opposed ideological formations that James largely ignores in his privileging of proletarian self-activity. For Bogues, James strategically seeks to turn setbacks into experiences that can be positively reconstituted without having a degenerative effect on the development of a revolutionary consciousness. James’s strategy is significantly different from Gramsci’s suggestion that the cumulative effects of the defeat of the 1917 Russian Revolution would have been a recognizable and tangible barrier to future proletarian mobilisation, having a considerable impact on the workers’ political consciousness and affecting the salience of subsequent workers’ initiatives. Bogues offers the crucial observation that James appears to have no contingency for proletarian self-activity revealing anything other than a revolutionary consciousness, and even more significantly, he notes that “the weakness in James’s position [on spontaneity] is that he did not pay attention to how ideological hegemony was constructed and its functions in capitalist society.”113 The evasion of ideological and hegemonic processes within Jamesian spontaneity becomes transparent in his conceptualisation of the radical inevitability and integrity of individual and mass agency. In his critique of popular culture and its demonstration of nascent social dissatisfaction and dissent, James simplistically presents the actuality of mass agency, noting that a collective response to a social problem is evidence of “a common collectivized social attitude to that problem.”114 This statement ignores the question of how people come to hold the beliefs and attitudes that they do, that would later consume structuralist Marxism as the issue of

154 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics interpellation. The primacy of conscious self-activity in James’s work cannot account for the disconnection of ideology from consciousness in that ideology is “profoundly unconscious,” and fails to understand the extent to which individuals develop particular ideas in relation to corresponding ideas forged within ideology, as if they were the products of their own individual consciousness.115 This weakness is patent in that when James does recognise ideological apparatuses, instead of identifying their plurality and historicity as part of an ongoing struggle for the control of civil society, he tends to refer to them in a commonsense manner as propagandistic falsification.116 By adopting this position, James subscribes to an unsophisticated realism that implies a “pure” discourse exists outside social and political mediation, perhaps attributable to his dedication to the project of recovering an absolute egalitarian human(ist) truth and his steadfast faith in workers’ radical consciousness and revolutionary potential. Furthermore, the utter dependence of James’s easy reconciliation of the individual and the collective through the organic orientation of individual experience towards collectivised radicalism fails to entertain the possibility that this individualist activity may lead to an introspective and insular political position, as opposed to an expansive vision of sociality. Similarly, the range of potentially infinite and contradictory identities, and the appeal of their endless display of difference, diffuses possibilities for unitary belonging and concrete mass political mobilisation—organic or otherwise. This creates difficulties in the establishment of political alliances and presents potentially injudicious choices: subordinate groups may mobilise in accordance with categories formed for the purposes of domination, and individuals’ multiple identities may be compromised by the fragmentation entailed within category politics.117 In addition, the workerist paradigm provides a special challenge to Jamesian spontaneism by limiting its applicability to a traditionally defined proletariat. As we have seen, this formulation is susceptible to a masculinist archetype that is unable to account for patriarchal intra-proletarian structures, which dissolve the truly progressive potential of a putatively organic radical politics. But these problems are not James’s alone. Rather, they reflect long-standing formative and operational dilemmas within Marxian theories of spontaneity. Rosa Luxemburg’s assessment of the mass strike, as what we might call a “constructed” as opposed to “pure” form of spontaneity, provides an important a case in point. In approaching the mass strike as a peculiarly historical event that emerges from given social conditions with historical inevitability, Luxemburg argues that it informs historical context and social conditions by indicating the present phase of class struggle, not through “abstract speculations” on its prospective occurrence, efficacy, or deleterious effects.118 This is to say that the mass strike ought to be understood through an “objective investigation” of its historical sources and their evolving dialectic, instead of a “subjective criticism” of what is socially desirous.

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This ostensibly contextualist approach confronts the obvious question of the relationship between “objective” historical and social conditions and the “subjective” understanding and actions of spontaneous actors. With this relationship effectively in mind, Lenin, in What Is To Be Done?, separates literal and conscious spontaneity, distinguishing between spontaneity that is politically conscious—or, we may say, demonstrative of a proactive classconsciousness—and spontaneity that reacts to antagonisms without framing the class struggle as the focal point of its expression.119 For Lenin, socialist organisation was tasked with directing an instinctive proletarian antagonistic impulse towards class-consciousness without diluting the autonomy and integrity of the struggle. Lenin’s rejection of Luxemburg’s assumption of a radicalised human response to material conditions and his preference for a didactic organisation capable of directing the correct subjective action in response to an objective event points specifically to the conundrum facing James and the JFT. Within each of these formulations, the individual is either subject to objective material conditions or external party directives. What James and the JFT wanted instead was a synergistic political relationship between the individual and the social. The resulting imprecision of the constitutive bond between a serialised individual and a class-conscious group results from James and the JFT’s attempt to bring into being, as it were, the individual responsive to objective conditions and the correct, reflexive model of formal organisation—but not determined by either. This situation reflects what Ernest Mandel articulates in his distinction between the theory of spontaneity (reservedly attributable to Luxemburg) and the Leninist theory of organisation.120 For Mandel, the difference between these two theories is clear when viewing mass initiative in terms of its limitations instead of its underestimation. This is to say that “pure” political spontaneity cannot be underestimated because it is a fictive abstraction. Its improvisatory character is antithetical to class-conscious political activity, and it always reflects an element of external political influence—such as the intervention of a vanguard group member or trade union agitation—and as such, it has endemic limitations. Therefore, James’s inefficacious theorisation of spontaneity might be the result of attempting the impossible task of establishing spontaneity in its pure form, whereas in Mandel’s formulation, it cannot exist without influence from vanguard elements. A further critique of Luxemburg—that might also be levelled at James—is that some struggles are over-determined in relation to others, as an inevitable consequence of understanding the developmental process of revolutionary consciousness as spontaneous.121 This is to say that there are no organic premises that internally bind classes in struggle, and the differentiated subject positions collapsed within the constructed unity of the working class is a “symbolic unity” that circumscribes its political salience as a mode of mass identification. Within Althusserian anti-humanism, this constitutes a perpetual problem facing Marxian praxis: the manner in which humans move

156 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics within the procession of historical epochs is not spontaneous, but rather it is indicative of an assiduously regulated reality where such movement is “constantly assumed, dominated and controlled.”122 This problem reiterates the limitations imposed on Jamesian spontaneity as a result of its avoidance of hegemonic and ideological processes. Althusser’s notion—that practical conceptualisations of struggle emerge at specific historical moments, in an unbalanced state due to the residual theoretical references to the “old ideological universe” of humanism, which is collapsed and distorted in order to remain applicable to contemporary struggles—is important here. It signals the disparity he delineates between ahistorical theoreticism and displaced abstraction, which leads to the creation of a political “direction and a destination without giving an adequate concept of it.”123 This error is discernible within James’s idealisation of workers’ organic radicalism inherently creating the necessary postrevolutionary social reality. Such organicity is inadequate in its failure to countenance the possibility that reactionary workerist sentiments might constitute a counterrevolutionary fault line within a revolutionary process, thus fatally compromising the possibility of radical social transformation. The only consolation for spontaneity here is a minimal offering from a notable, albeit ambivalent, anti-humanist: Frantz Fanon.124 Fanon argues that spontaneous struggles can only be mapped retrospectively, as an ethnography of (popular) political struggle and mobilisation.125 Among a series of factors that deny the viability of assembling a template of political spontaneity, Fanon notes that classes are constituted differently within colonial and metropolitan contexts, and thus cannot be expected to act identically according to a single model of praxis. Similarly, the meaning of specific political tenets and the ways in which they are used differ across contexts: for example, rural settlements and urban centres. Therefore, Fanon confronts the circular and potentially paradoxical logic of mapping spontaneity which, when applied to James, simply poses different insoluble questions: Can organisation exist without a vanguard (of whatever inclination) or function whilst disorganised in an organic sense? Or can the direction of organic self-activity be assumed in a manner that is neither tightly teleological nor randomly contingent? Nonetheless, James’s concern—with surpassing a supplementary critique of human immiseration to develop a prescriptive mode of organic political mobilisation that might realise human creative potentiality and emotional fulfilment—is beyond reproach in its desire to realise human freedom and happiness instead of simply to lament its absence. If the integrity of the individual is compromised by the responsibilities of sociality and atomised when set adrift from a collective, Jamesian spontaneity represents a worthy enterprise. Even his indisputable failings—his tacit support for a masculinist industrial proletariat and his reliance on reductive binarisms such as black/ white and proletarian/bourgeoisie—if specific to their contexts, confront us today as reminders of the necessity of critical introspection and dialogue.

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As we confront the contemporary radical impasse over the efficacy of micro-category politics in relation to macro-class politics, as well as the multifarious distractions from social and political life that keep us from the “sober senses” Marx imagined, James’s reminder—that the “real history of humanity” can only begin when we are freely active and creative126—is an ideal worth aspiring to. As a result, what may simply look like a Jamesian fault line resulting from muddled thinking might more sympathetically be regarded as his thought process through the problem of vanguardism alongside the demands of coherent political commitment and organisation. Indeed, his wide-ranging concerns and humanistic ambition may be incomplete and provisional, yet they nevertheless amount to a valuable point of departure. James’s long fascination with Rousseau acknowledges Rousseau’s inability to satisfactorily describe the circumstances whereby the majority’s expression of the general will shall be obeyed by the minority without the emergence of a tyrannical society. Nevertheless, Rousseau remains a compelling figure for James, because while he raises discomforting spectres, his enduring value lies precisely in the fact that he “does not shirk difficulties.”127

5

“Freedom Is Creative Universality, Not Utility” Sociality and the Cultural Politics of Cricket

The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labour and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a labouring society. . . . It is a society of labourers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labour, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition As early as 1941 I had begun to question the premises of Trotskyism. It took nearly a decade of incessant labour and collaboration to break with it and reorganize my Marxist ideas to cope with the post-war world. . . . In my private mind, however, I was increasingly aware of large areas of human existence that my history and politics did not seem to cover. What did men live by? What did they want? What did history show that they had wanted? Had they wanted then what they wanted now? The men I had known, what had they wanted? What exactly was art and what exactly culture? C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary The question of spontaneity and organic radical self-activity is not simply an issue of political method within James’s social thought; it also reflects a key substantive concern. It is not just the question of how people may be freed to act in truly autonomous ways that exercises James, but also the issue of exactly what constitutes truly autonomous activity. For James, the economistic assumption that productive forces and class struggle govern the entirety of social formation crudely—and falsely—reduces humanistic impulses and poetic concerns to frivolous esoterica that serve as a form of bourgeois political distraction. Simply put, this injunction asks whether all social interaction is reducible to social structure. If this substantive problematic appears to simply invite the presentation of a structuration model as an obvious antidote, James’s approach raises an allied methodological issue that is not so easily remedied: what is the proper status of the material and the ideal, and the practical and the symbolic? And more importantly, what

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is their analytical relationship to each other and individual validity in the building of social explanations and prescriptions? This endeavour forms the bedrock of James’s elective affinities of race, politics, and poetics as the conceptual and practical modalities that triangulate to offer an explanans of modernity. The racialized black Jacobins were pivotal to industrial and political modernisation in part due to the creolised, truly modern, and inclusively human culture that they forged in the crucible of the New World. This move attempts to offer an insight into the spatialtemporal formation of modernity by reconnecting its customarily separated economic, political, and cultural vectors. Of course this metaphysical conceptualisation of modernity-as-totality bears a Hegelian debt, but it is also reflective of the utter inseparability of James’s political and poetic affinities that, as discussed above, demonstrate the convergence of the subjective and biographical with the intellectual and political. Nevertheless, although it is important to note that racialization is crucial to James’s descriptive and analytical totalisation of modernity, it is not necessarily germane to his conceptualisation of totality in itself. This relegation of the racial within the conceptualisation of totality is neither accidental nor incidental, since his totality of modernity is itself informed by a broader historical totality. As James’s combination of Marxist and humanist principles developed from the late 1940s onwards, Hellenic nostalgia became a far more discernable thread within his social thought. If this Hellenic tribute emerges as a paean to direct democracy in the 1956 pamphlet “Every Cook Can Govern,” and is famously accentuated in the celebration of the social and cultural reverence of athleticism within the ancient Olympic Games in Beyond a Boundary, it marks a distinctive departure within radical social thought and criticism. Reflecting and expanding his characterisation of Ishmael as a representation of the atomised intellectual in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, James remarks in a 1954 letter to Grace Lee that modern intellectuals are stultified by a false diversification of social processes that effectively divides their personalities. On the one hand, this is a formal critique of the intellectual compartmentalisation of social questions into distinct avenues of inquiry, each subject to discrete conventions. But on the other hand, it is also a subjective lament on the degradation of the holistic vocation of the life of the mind idealised within the figure of the polymath human and natural scientist. James relocates this archetypal figure, customarily synonymous with the “Renaissance man,” within a broader frame of totality. However, for James, a portentous event took place during the Renaissance, leading to the gestation of the atomised modern subject: Renaissance scientism objectified knowledge as something distinctly separable from subjective experience, and the fabled ideal of the integrated, complete self was lost to a disembodied consciousness that thought and felt within two separate and competing registers: as rational and emotive beings.1 Furthermore, this cleaving of the human distinguished the sentient from the cognizant self within privileged orders where the physical could only be apprehended as external to the mental.

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While this begins a rather standard rehearsal of the anti-Cartesian refrain, James’s point combines analytical critique with political purpose. It is not just the ontological character of and relationship between the knower and knowledge that is altered, but also the social basis of human existence. This distinction between orders of knowing and being leads to categories of (social) existence which do not just benignly reflect reality, but form the basis for explanations and justifications of human immiseration anaesthetised to the visceral immediacy of suffering. Given his estimation that types of knowledge beget types of knower, and that both are socially stratified with injurious political consequences, James ends the letter to Lee by stating that the dialectical reconciliation of individuality and popular democracy is the major problem facing modern society.2 James therefore understands the separation of knowledge and knowers as a political and intellectual conundrum, and he grieves the loss of the integrated personality that was not an accident of Greek antiquity, but a result of its direct democracy that cultivated individuals who understood and exercised their rights, liberties, freedoms, and possibilities in relation to their community. And as an empirical example of his idealised conceptualisation of spontaneity, the popular democracy of the city-state of ancient Greece managed the fundamental political problem of the balance between individual right and communal good far more satisfactorily than has been achieved previously or since.3 In calling for the reintegration of the individual with society, James not only asserts the need for the development of suitable democratic instruments of political organisation and governance, but also a reconceptualisation of social and political space. He envisions a civil society that dismantles this distinction between the mental and the physical, the intellectual and the sentient, and advocates forms of embodied culture that rectify the false division of mind and body. For its time, this also entails initiating a set of analytical resources unfamiliar to Marxist critique; his insights are dependent on the inextricable interconnectedness and dialectic between the material and symbolic realms, instead of privileging the former over the latter. The significance of this intervention is confirmed in James’s unshakeable conviction that human existence is not distilled to material premises that reiterate the liberal economistic matrix which assesses human life within the axes of scarcity and abundance. Given that the psychic traumas and spiritual impoverishments of modernity—in the dislocating effects of mass migrations, urbanization, industrialisation, and so on—will not be ameliorated by greater material provision, James realises that leftist critique must expand its analytical and prescriptive horizon beyond material redistribution to include a concern with the sentient and sensual being. He comments, again in a 1957 letter to Lee, of his work on “the book on sport”—presumably Beyond a Boundary—that he is consumed by the need to establish what people themselves desire in life instead of relying on the obsolete itinerary of human needs.4 If the material and economic emphases of Marxist orthodoxy constitute the redundant ideas of human needs that must be replaced by the integrated

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personality found within Greek antiquity, whose freedom was reconciled with the good of their community, James confronts two significant dilemmas. First, given that the bankruptcy of orthodox Marxist ideas and conceptions are surely specific varieties of Marxian thought and praxis, the basis and justification of their irrelevance needs to be secured through more assiduous argument. This is to say that the “old” ideas that are unsustainable must be explicitly identified and a basis for their rejection advanced. Second, accepting his pragmatic recognition of the city-state system’s imperfections, James is left to ponder which, if any, of its aspects are to be faithfully reconstructed, strategically amended, or completely jettisoned. I want to argue that an attempt at this innovative Marxist project is more coherently elaborated in James’s later works, especially in his cricket writing and the quasiautobiographical Beyond a Boundary. Cricket, and James’s deep affection for it, perfectly encapsulates the series of reconciliations that he wishes to effect, as well as his elective affinities of race, politics, and poetics. Cricket provides a space for James to construct a sociopoetic methodological approach, and its attendant substantive interventions, through a series of unconventional articulations: the empirical and the imaginative; the material and the ideal; the individual and the communal; the transcendent and the immanent; the technical and the intuitive. In short, cricket harbours the possibility of reuniting the sentient and rational in the human being, who then acts towards social purpose through instinctive will. If this sounds familiarly romantic and mystical, James offers no apology. To employ Bourdieu’s terms, he points to the “symbolic violence” of moral and affective obligations that “gently” and “invisibly” reproduce repressive relationships between individuals through acceptable “euphemistic” means.5 In James’s estimation, the protection of culture as a rarefied social class sphere not only excludes the masses from meaningful cultural participation, but also, and more importantly, denies their capacity for the enriching humanistic impulses and desires contained within the cultural. However, unlike Bourdieu’s concern with the stratifying aspects of the cultural, James typically appeals to a strong form of popular aestheticism. Cricket is, for James, an art form evinced in the capacity of the spectator, as a specialist and autodidact, to discern the internal nuances and stylistic codes of the game. In James’s estimation, the participant and spectator are individually and collectively responsible for producing the artistic spectacle, as well as for making cricket a truly accessible, popular art form.6

”WHAT DO THEY KNOW OF CRICKET WHO ONLY CRICKET KNOW?” In Leftist Theories of Sport, William J. Morgan presents a set of compelling objections to two broad paradigms within Marxian analyses of sport, which he labels “New Left” and “hegemony” perspectives.7 The New Left critique

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of sport is summarily dismissed as a reductionary model of sport-as-work that is descriptively imprecise and has limited explanatory value.8 Its main shortcomings are a conceptual inflation of labour and an overdetermination of the superstructure by the economic base, which leads to three significant analytical errors: first, it ignores the non-purposive aspects of sport—its unproductive and gratuitous elements; second, it mistakes the resemblance between labour and sport for a causal relationship; and third, it marginalises the formative social relations of sport. Countering the New Left’s exaggeration of material-structural constraints, hegemony theorists reconceptualise sport as a “social practice” that reflects the shifting relationship between social structure and individual/group agency and represents diverse political interests.9 However, despite hegemony theorists’ significant advance on New Left economism, they are limited by their own structural and institutional determinism that fails to recognise the intrinsic character of “sporting goals” in relation to “life goals.” Ultimately, Morgan indicts hegemony theorists’ putatively emancipatory project, arguing that it is mired in a “cautious optimism” that recognises resistance and agency but is unable to realise it. Morgan’s basic contention—that leftist theories of sport-as-domination are unable to comprehend the captivating qualities of sport, and its gratuitous and unpredictable character that make it quite unlike ordinary life—draws special attention to a problematic theoretical weltanschauung. Put simply, Morgan recognises sport as an activity generally approached through two theoretical routes: the transcendent and the immanent.10 The analytical problem emerges when the transcendent is placed in a zero-sum relationship with the immanent: as such, the meaning of sport is either attributable to its intrinsic value or its specific historical and social context. Morgan’s general argument is worth reconstructing because it reflects the framework within which that James’s cricket writing, as a form of social and cultural criticism, is often considered.11 While it is unsurprising that leftist critiques should eschew a transcendental framework in favour of a vulgar or multifactorial version of the immanent perspective, James’s longstanding attempt to understand cricket, in a manner sensitive towards its enchanting and disenchanting aspects, is particularly noteworthy yet seldom recognised. Indeed, although the debates Morgan engages date principally from the 1970s and 1980s, many of its controversies and points of impasse are strenuously explored within James’s work, especially Beyond a Boundary. Neither deceived by its seductively sensuous aesthetic nor constrained by an awareness of its divisive social function, James’s appreciation of cricket offers a distinctive and valuable critique that did not even recognise, let alone entertain, what he would have understood as the false separation of its character into transcendent or immanent categories. When James asks “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” at the beginning and end of Beyond a Boundary, he addresses the local significance of cricket as well as the monumental problematic of meaning and purpose in art. His own reflections on cricket recognise sport as an ‘urgent’

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social need in transitional historical moments: within the context of colonial governance and anticolonial struggle, cricket is neither self-referential nor self-explanatory, but a socially embedded practice. However, the notion of the social employed here is not an omnipotent monolith characterised by the formal institutional apparatuses of crown colony government. For James, understanding cricket is, at least partially, an interpretive enterprise that “involves ideas as well as facts.”12 His perception of the function of cricket within Trinidadian society is that it is a tangible form of physical discipline, organised along strictly demarcated class and racial lines, ideationally reinforced through the hegemonic moral authority of its ethical code. Although it is not a vulgar determinism, this understanding evokes Althusserian state apparatuses and initially appears to conform to the immanent perspective identified by Morgan. However, if this seems to suggest that “not much” is the probable answer to his question of “[w]hat do they know of cricket who only cricket know?,” James’s foundational concern with individual agency and radical self-activity significantly points to the transformative impact of the human imagination on the social. In Beyond a Boundary, for example, James is as concerned with an assessment of the relationship between social forces and individual creativity as he is with the political anti/colonial struggles sublimated by cricket. Exceptional epochal figures, such as W. G. Grace and George Headley, are portentous of impending social shifts inasmuch as their actions reflect a cricketing zeitgeist. Within cricket, James observes how the relationship between the evolution of batsmen’s stylistic repertoires and broader strategic shifts of personal expression are inextricably linked to societal pressures and imaginative impulses.13 Therefore, given that changing styles mirror social evolution, the radical imagination of alternative social organisation might be reflected in the creation of unorthodox styles. The batsman is thus framed as the World Historical figure James often favours; his individualistic brilliance does not simply indicate or anticipate change, but inspires public passion in the social possibilities ahead. For example, as we will see, the seditious idea of self-determination, rendered implausible within the limited possibilities offered on the social horizon, is first dialectically imagined on the cricket pitch. Individuals are not inert automatons subject to the sterile determinism of immanent approaches, but actors who bring history and society to life. The assertion of the human imagination and individual creativity acting back upon history and creating concrete social conditions is a crucial point, with deep analytical significance beyond the specificity of cricket. It also engages the issue of meaning and purpose in art noted above. Three possibilities are tacitly entertained within the question “[w]hat do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” First, it suggests that one might only know cricket; second, it suggests that from a particular standpoint, only knowing cricket is an entirely legitimate enterprise instead of a limitation; and finally, it suggests that there is something to be known or worth knowing per se about cricket. Of course, despite the reservations of some of his

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critics, James eschews a purely transcendental stance here, but notes that just because cricket is not the epitome of innocence, it is not disqualified from having any beguiling characteristics. This contention encapsulates the ideal of relative autonomy that is central to James’s cricketing analysis and cultural criticism, yet is so often misunderstood. To use terms alien to his framework, cricket is simply immanent and transcendent, and those who ignore this—whichever predicate they invoke— will never fully grasp the “grandeur” of its ability to perform a representative social function while remaining a pleasurable pastime.14 The capacity of cricket to retain its aesthetic delights and elements of jouissance as a form of play exists alongside, not instead of or despite, its heavy social responsibility and political resonance. This balance is entirely consistent with James’s affinity with the progressive promise of modernity that has been corroded by the interests of capital; he remains committed to the inviolate aesthetic spirit of cricket that, although temporarily compromised by the machinations of colonial real politik, can be rescued by its true inheritors. Perhaps a tenuous association with the transcendental ideal of art—liberated from the constraints of worldly meaning and prosaic function popularised in Oscar Wilde’s “art for art’s sake” ideal—explains the unfavourable reception of James’s attempt to understand the shifting contexts and intrinsic complexity of cricket. Indeed, if Wilde’s dictum has often been simplistically explained as an antidote to Victorian moralism or as an indication of a decadent bourgeois individualism, James’s project has been similarly misunderstood as a personal and political flight of fancy.15 This misunderstanding perhaps occurs because, for many, it is difficult to reconcile James’s affection for cricket with his commitment to anticolonialism and Marxism—especially as his cricket writings are the least explicitly Marxist texts, at least in terms of vocabulary, within his corpus.16 Strident critiques indict his aesthetic concerns and analysis of preVictorian and Victorian social history in Beyond a Boundary as a failure to rework Eurocentric cultural motifs into West Indian specificity, and his irresponsible aestheticism that trivialises the material inequalities of capitalist society.17 And while a more moderated analysis questions James’s belief in cricket as a beautiful game, given the basic inequity of its social context and spurious pseudo-freedoms, capable of imagining liberation but not realising it, a foundational antagonism remains between the immanent and transcendental.18 In turn, this raises further questions over the form and function of cricket: Do its stylistic codes reflect worthy humanistic and aesthetic values, or the repressive ideals that Bourdieu identifies within sport as “consensual fetishes”?19 And does a concern with cricketing aesthetics lead to an edifying sentient experience and human emotional enrichment, or to the obfuscation of social reality and political distraction? The perceived intrinsic antagonism between real and imaginary, fact and value, that informs Helen Tiffin’s irritation with James’s analysis, where “individuals have creative moments which lift them, with one stroke or ball

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out of the realm of social reality and into art” privileges the concrete social as an epiphenomenon devoid of significant imaginative elements (which is unacceptable for James).20 The task of establishing a causal relationship between the social and the artistic in cricket, central to the objections outlined above, is utterly irrelevant to the Jamesian paradigm. It is not just that a causal relationship between social reality and art is indefinable (or nonexistent), but that such a hypothesis misunderstands the capacity of cricket to connect the complexity of human existence to its concrete environment: on the one hand, the aesthetic lexis and technical sophistication of cricket enables it to express social complexities, and on the other, social complexities inform and produce the representative sophistication of cricket. These objections also indicate an enduring perception of the incompatibility of aesthetic pursuits and radical social transformation as well as the irrelevance of sport to both, found across a wide political spectrum but strongly refuted by James. In Beyond a Boundary, James stridently argues against the denial of aesthetic values within sport, asserting that our understanding of art is only possible within an integrated notion of the arts that combines, for example, sporting and sculptural appreciation.21 If the claim for sport as art is debatable in terms of the differing purposive characteristics between the two, James penetrates this strict formalism to point out its social implications.22 In reference to the creation and representation of the “perfect flow of motion” that he sees as an intrinsic human need, James firmly declares that the term “art” cannot be rarefied; this is not only descriptively inaccurate, but misrepresents history and promotes distorted values.23 Therefore, instead of indulging in the semantics of formal distinctions between sport and art, James focuses on the qualitative judgments that inform social perceptions of the distinction between the two. The charges of naïve Anglophilia and bourgeois individualism levelled at James begin to unravel when his cricket writing is assessed as cultural criticism instead of as a capitulation to autobiographical sentimentality and the suspension of his Marxism. Presaging the key cultural studies critique of the view of culture as “in minority keeping” found within strands of the “culture and civilization” tradition as well as Bourdieu’s notable sociological critiques of standards of taste and disinterested cultural dispositions, James offers a set of useful insights into the formation of cultural politics.24 In questioning the descriptive validity of the distinction between elitist culture and popular pastimes and, more importantly, their evaluative presuppositions, James claims artistic qualities and cultural characteristics for cricket. This is not, as some would have it, simply a move for social legitimacy on James’s part; he is clear that he does not seek recognition from establishment art historians.25 In fact it is their intellectual capacity that is diminished by their elitist intractability and scorn for the aesthetic merits of cricket and its popular artistic resonance. Therefore, it is not just that canonic cultural forms are not better than the popular, but that the narrow elitist perspective ought to recognise the popular arts, since it has much to learn from

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them. But besides this critique, James is more concerned with reclaiming the characteristics of emotion, imagination, and creativity central to the human condition from their sequestration within the rarefied domain of the leisured classes under the restricted category of “culture.” As we will see, the point that cannot be overstated here is that James avoids defining the masses solely through their relationship to productive waged labour. The free expression of the imagination and ingenuity of the masses, exemplified by the black Jacobins who simply “brought themselves,” might be socially constrained by material circumstance and necessity but nevertheless shares the same human essence—distorted as the privilege of the leisured classes who are freed from such profane constraint by their ownership of capital and independent means. This illustration of the hierarchical distinction between fine art, as the contemplative pursuit of human cultivation, and sport as a corporeal activity oriented towards purposive ends, offers invaluable observations of the character of culture and its relationship to the political. In noting the subtle pedagogical processes at work within cricket, James questions the putatively benign function of the game as “recreation.” Instead, Beyond a Boundary informs us of the powerful political capacity of cricket that exists alongside its Arnoldian tenets of sweetness and light: the educative effects of the game (such as the encouragement of universally agreeable traits such as “good character”), when not incidental, are actually highly partisan prescriptions. However, avoiding the habitual pessimism Morgan assigns to leftist critiques of sport, James’s analysis disavows simplistic explanations of cricket as a space for the reproduction of colonial hierarchical order and is suffused with an optimism of intellect and will. Numerous events narrated in Beyond a Boundary serve as transparent examples of the various accommodations and adaptations of cricketing, ideals, practices, and social codes that directly reflect the oscillating hegemonic struggle for political legitimacy and social authority between coloniser and colonised.26 Defining cricket more broadly as a particular sport and cultural practice, it is neither total domination nor pure resistance. Rather, cricket represents a vital cultural-political space for the production, contestation, reproduction, and reinvention of social orders and relations. This means that although cricket has effectively served as the British colonial game, this is not its inherent function, and it has a progressive potentiality. It is precisely through an understanding of the historical emergence and prior disciplinary function of cricket within the colonial social order that the critic (as participant or observer), facing an expanded horizon of political possibility, might reimagine the emancipatory potential internalised within the structure of the game. This realisation of cricket as a form of cultural politics informs James’s disagreement with Trotsky’s assertion that sport distracts workers from politics.27 In offering this criticism, James not only asserts the explicit political significance of sporting activity, but invaluably points to the limitations

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of certain conceptions of political engagement and the cultural conservatism inherent within particular strands of supposedly radical politics. One can clearly discern the equation of political activity with a certain institutionalised configuration of the political and the compartmentalisation of radical class-consciousness that conceptualises the cultural as a subordinate sphere. For example, Surin’s relegation of cricket to a subordinate role in the “wider” political project, whose “moment of completion” will reveal the beauty in cricket, is invested in a traditional conception of political organisation.28 This position unintentionally reflects the problematic paternalism notably characterised within the metropolitan proletariat as the vanguard of revolutionary class struggle. The presuppositions and values attached to cricket are then ultimately determined by its immanent (post/colonial) social hierarchy: by extension, James’s commitment to the humanistic captivating qualities of cricket is an esoteric and futile imaginative enterprise that is utterly subordinate to concrete social reality. Of course, this is not to suggest that the cultural realm has not enjoyed any efficacy within Marxist thought. Indeed, considering Trotsky’s own appreciation of literature and the necessary conditions for its possible function as a radical political instrument in the service of social realist art, it is clear that the cultural sphere and creative expression are not inherently politically degenerate.29 Similarly, Mikhail Lifshitz questions the assumed antagonism between aesthetic value and Marxian analysis, alluded to by some of James’s critics, by his noteworthy excavation of Marx’s aesthetic appreciation.30 For Lifshitz, Marx frames the historical emergence of social preconditions that produce and stimulate artistic creativity and aesthetic sensibility, instead of recognising them as supernatural phenomena or ingrained human spiritual desires. Lifshitz then carefully details Marx’s belief in creative art—when the artist’s individuality is identified with a political doctrine instead of a devotion to vacuous principles of romanticism, primitivism, and mysticism. And although James’s cricket writings do not “vigorously” emphasise the “‘accent and dialect’ of a political party” that Lifshitz presents as Marx’s guiding stipulation, the foresight and enduring value of James’s critique lie in his refusal to believe that cultural processes are economically determined, while he recognises the structuring role of social forces and the ingenuity of a human will to expression.31 As such, James presents a holistic portrait of culture that encompasses (but does not formally recognise) the synergy between its transcendent and immanent contexts, and notes that modern artistic techniques are developed dialectically in response to the prevailing social conditions.32 Creative expression is, therefore, neither completely bound by nor free of its formative environment, and artistic techniques do not necessarily mirror repressive social forces but can also constitute a counteracting progressive force. There is, or ought to be, a clear dilemma in the proposition that sports constitute a form of false consciousness that distracts or dissuades the masses from class consciousness and radical engagement found within traditional

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forms of political mobilisation. Its dilemmatic character emerges within the narrow conception of political space and activity it proposes, further magnified in an equally narrow and perhaps more troubling notion of what constitutes a politically viable cultural resource or the human capabilities of the masses. Although James notes that normative notions of culture distinguish between its authentic “high” variety and its “popular” or “mass” approximations, he is careful not to simplify this hierarchical arrangement as the sole prerogative of a conservative elitism. For James, the characteristics of cerebral development, contemplative reflection, aesthetic sensibility, and sensuous and emotional experience, narrowly attributed to “high” culture, all correspond to core humanistic traits. That the unequal distribution of economic capital and social resources provides one class with greater access to such cultural pursuits indicates disparate life chances and the appropriation of “culture” in a specific form by a privileged social echelon. Effectively, radical objections to cultural pursuits as a political distraction are actually expressions of an antagonism with the stratification of culture, rather than an objection to qualitative forms of human cultivation per se. And the amelioration of the prevailing conditions and relations of production would not necessarily address the fundamental estrangement of labour, as the objectification of creative human faculties, within the capitalist productive process. The dismissal of culture as a narcissistic bourgeois individualism is countered by James’s concern with developing a politics capable of recognising and liberating the entirety of human productive powers, technical and imaginative, across a expansive range of fields from the economic to the cultural.

THE SOCIOPOETIC IMAGINARY James’s attempt in Beyond a Boundary to wrest the postcolonial oppositional potential of cricket from its use as a preferred instrument of colonial hegemony is a spectacular move given its articulation at the apex of West Indian independence struggles. Now, this dialectical existence of resistance within oppression is a staple critique, extensively rehearsed within cultural studies. However, despite much protestation to the contrary, it must be noted that within the cultural studies counter-canon, resistance is best—or can only be—realised within certain forms of oppression. The insistence on sliding signification and the polysemeous word locates resistance most healthily within the discursive formations and linguistic practices of domination, making the physical apparatuses of social control less amenable to subversive de- or re-signification. This proscribed critical space is especially—and unfairly— applied to sport. In this sense, sport is systematically misunderstood as a site of physical domination and ideological manipulation by logocentric social and cultural critics. This critical orthodoxy has effectively suspended its own sophisticated analyses of the complex negotiations and concessions within

170 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics cultural reproduction, and didactically dismissed the existence of any counter-hegemonic capacity within the lower-order sensory repertoires of sport.33 This objection to the denied potentiality of embodied agency is not confined to certain sport sociologists or to others sympathetic to claims for the relative autonomy of sport within society. Similarly, sociologists concerned with the body point to the larger discipline’s “traditional” disdain for questions of the body in society—notable exceptions, such as ethnomethodological approaches, aside—and have urged for the (re)opening of these avenues of inquiry within mainstream disciplinary concerns.34 If, however, the surfeit of literary, cultural, and historical—to name but three—treatments of the body demonstrates sociology’s loss as the humanities’ gain, then influential social analyses of the (inert) body offer a generally pessimistic prognosis. Perhaps reflecting particular strands of psychoanalytical thought that situate the body as the secondary physical site of primary psychic repressions and evasive behaviours, the archetype of the inert body is reified and reiterated. Even if the influence of Freud’s characterisation of the psychosomatic body, wrought by the instinctive thrall of its repulsive appetites and nonsublimated desires, has given way to the Foucaldian notion of the “docile body,” subject to pervasive disciplinary discourses and bio-political regimes, we remain largely in the midst of the abject body. It is also worth noting that contemporary perceptions of the radical recovery of the body, for example, within practices of body modification and gender and sexual identification, are often dependent on understanding that the body is re-inscribed. This metaphorical understanding of the body, as a tablet to be written on and/or a text to be read, reasserts the centrality of formal literacy as well as the intrinsic exteriority of the body to social meaning. The existence of the body prior to signification is then negated, and recognised instead as something that is activated through discourse.35 Although we cannot enter the hornet’s nest of these debates here, the significance of their basis in the antagonism between naturalist and anti-naturalist positions, offering competing explanations of the social, is inescapable.36 However, the question of the location of the sentient, fleshy human within a social order that would structure and dominate existence understood as an analytical problematic awaiting doctrinaire—political or academic—resolution is precisely what exercises James. His totalising descriptive account of cricket, advanced through the rhetorical question “[w]hat do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” prepares the methodological basis for a sociological explanation of its poetics, that attempts to dissolve the customary dichotomies (such as structure/agency, mind/body, and subject/ object) that distort human and social understanding. This recognises the amorphous character of cricket that includes moral, aesthetic, cultural, and political imperatives alongside the immediacy of sentient experience with formal understanding and the external world, which Maurice MerleauPonty evocatively describes as “knowledge in the hands.”37 Therefore, the Jamesian rendition of the individual agent within society is not disembodied

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consciousness, but instead a vital individual whose conscious and socially meaningful activity is articulated through their eloquent body. James’s starting point is the conceptualisation of the totality of cricket, that unifies the customary polarities of fact and value. Neil Lazarus incisively recognises “the indispensability, for James, of a sociopoetics of cricket, an approach to the game that will make neither the mistake of supposing it to be less than a form of art, nor the mistake of supposing it, as a form of art, to be autonomous of society.”38 But this sociopoetic project faces the arduous task of describing the relationship between cricket, with its aesthetic principles, and historical materialism. This project is all the more difficult given the entrenched artistic and activist sectarianism of aesthetic and political gatekeepers that separates humanist poetics from the profane world of “everyday life.”39 James’s task begins with establishing the singularly social and aesthetic functions of cricket. This is essentially a problem of explaining how cricket is constituted in the way that it is. There is, however, an allied problem that, for some, would prevent James from even reaching this stage: the difficulty of describing the social and aesthetic form of cricket. Traditionally, aesthetic form, and notions of the beautiful, represent the most acute point of divergence between transcendent and immanent perspectives: typically, aesthetic values are taken to represent either pure, disinterested ideals of beauty or socially interested manipulation of “pure” ideals. On cursory inspection, as a form of “play” or “leisure,” cricket would appear to be a member of the immanent family; it serves a worldly recreational purpose instead of a transcendental ideal. Indeed, as a sport, and a modern one at that, cricket seems to be typified by the set of formal-structural characteristics, as defined by Allen Guttman, that are either avowedly non-aesthetic or contain an incidental aesthetic that is subordinate to its structural organisation.40 If this makes it difficult for James to press the claims for cricket that he wishes, his difficulty is further compounded by the interpretive demands attached to sport as an immanent form. As Nick Zangwill argues, many oppositional (read: sociological, Marxist, feminist, and postmodernist) critiques stretch their historicist perspectives to the extent that the complexity of aesthetic meaning-making that draws on social and historical factors is lost to analytical dogma.41 The implications of this tendency for James’s sociopoetic approach are clear: the truly transcendental can be subjected to external interpretive understanding, but the enterprise is a false one. The form and properties of the transcendent are intrinsic; anything else would, of course, make it immanent. As a Marxist, James is a member of the radical family of historicist critics Zangwill enumerates, and by association, James is incorporated into normative immanence. To advance his project from within this environment, is to face significant disapprobation; his attempt to conceptualise the dialectic of cricketing aesthetic form and social context from within Marxism is, therefore, an increasingly fractious and yet innovative project.

172 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics Undeterred by this prohibition, the conceptual organisation of James’s sociopoetics is initially clear in his simple assertion that if cricketing technique were simple, the game would be unable to function as the sophisticated form of social expression it is.42 Therefore, cricket is able to encapsulate the complexity of social formation and the interaction between its structures and agents precisely because of its technical sophistication. Furthermore, if cricket were a simple game it could only be understood simplistically in terms of its rudimentary features and would not have any broader social resonance. But at the same time, this technical sophistication is not a simple reflection of social complexity; it is also a demonstration of the purposeful establishment of unnecessary obstacles for the gratuitous reason of complicating and mystifying a potentially mundane activity—which, Morgan argues, is central to the development of sporting practices.43 This is to say that just as imagining and manufacturing hazards, such as bunkers complicate golf, the complexity of cricket is evident in its symbolic and practical formation. Cricket, then, is at once tangible reality and intangible representation: for example, the physical reality of a batsman’s stroke can, as seen in Beyond a Boundary, assume a deeper symbolic significance. Nonetheless, for James, reality and representation are codependent. One must remember that without the available technical repertoire, the batsman is unable to express anything of symbolic significance, and yet the dull repetition of formal technique without expressive and interpretive possibility is rather uninteresting. In dismantling the instrumental rationality of competitive ends that sport is commonly reduced to, James develops a sociopoetic dialectic between technique and representation within the aesthetic form of cricket. This crucial dialectic begins to emerge within the notion of “style,” intrinsic to cricket as an arbitrary set of values that are yet socially distinctive and meaningful. Euphemistic phrases such as “tactile values” and “significant form” are central to the aesthetics of cricket, as well as to James’s sociopoetic formulation. The formal terminological imprecision and explanatory inadequacy of these phrases actually captures the nebulousness of the characteristics that they would convey. In other words, the immediacy of this aestheticism is deeply affective—it relates to sentient experience and engenders emotional responses—and as such, its essential state is only ever experienced and its specificity is lost in translation. Nevertheless, the late broadcaster John Arlott offers an eloquent approximation of experiencing the art of batting: Much of true appreciation of batting, however, lies in the manner of the batsman. Style needs no definition: ease—even elegance—of movement must be apparent to any watcher; nothing is more felicitous than the unhurried flow of a batsman into, and through, a stroke which seems without violence, to charm—almost chasten—the fast ball to the boundary.44

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Arlott’s rich description draws an evocative portrait of a fleeting moment of beauty that can be appreciated but not defined. And it is precisely this dialectical confrontation between actuality and potentiality, the familiar and the novel, that secures the sociopoetic character of cricket as an art form linked to society but irreducible to it. This helps explain the “high and difficult technique” of cricket. The aesthetic code of cricket is tightly linked to its assiduous technique; in battling, for example, a vast array of strokes have normative “textbook” form, that when executed “correctly,” require sequential movement through a series of precise biomechanical actions. This regulatory scheme helps define and separate, for example, a “drive” from a “cut”; however—and this is the beauty of cricket for James—this technical meticulousness does not lead to the specialisation and constraint one might readily expect. Knowledge and mastery of the orthodox does not limit the batsman to its soulless reproduction, but enables the possibility of its rearticulation that represents the pinnacle of cricketing expression. The critical significance of the synergy between the orthodox and its particular expressions is especially apparent taken alongside Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of the importance of the “signature” as the legitimising factor of high modern art, where the sign denotes an authenticity that objectifies social consensus and commercial value.45 His suggestion, that the illegitimacy of the copy only emerged as a late modern development within fine art—especially notable given its own value during the nineteenth century—demonstrates the fetishization of artistic originality and authenticity and the commercial premium placed on individual creativity as an exclusive and private enterprise. Within James’s sociopoetics of cricket, technical orthodoxy operates as a framework for individual expression that produces a copy, yet has artistic integrity. Therefore, although the aesthetic code of cricket is consumed by authenticity and the inauthentic—for example, the vocabulary of batting names “false strokes” and “hoicks” as unacceptable deviations from technical orthodoxy—this concern is not related directly to the fetishization of the conventional stroke or the production of exchange values. In Baudrillardian terms, what is at stake here is the production and meaning of the symbolic value of cricket, albeit formulated in different ways and towards different ends. Instead of producing a commodity that signifies social status and stimulating a process of consumption that sublimates “real life,” the symbolic value of cricket is not a saleable commodity; for James, it is of a purer variety that has a meaning and significance beyond its prosaic function. Unlike luxury commercial products typified by their symbolic value, cricket stimulates an edifying and enduring excitement rather than a transient, meaningless sensation (that, once experienced, is immediately redundant and replaced by the desire for novel experience for its own sake). This symbolic value also provides an important rejoinder to the standard “progressive” criticism of the abhorrent principle of competition central to sport: for example, the notion that “ruthless” sporting competition promotes

174 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics an aggressive, egotistical, capitalist ideology, or that success is equated with the ideal of domination and repressive power.46 Absent within James’s sociopoetic vision of cricket are the top-down structure and massification processes that govern commercial production and interpellate subordinate subjects through the regressive primacy of competition. James imagines a dialogic aesthetic community within cricket, where participant and observer are connected through symbolic exchanges based on (non-market) aesthetic values. The central appreciation of cricketing style reflects a cultivated, popular aesthetic sensibility that is not commodified or elitist, synonymous with what David Inglis and John Hughson usefully identify as the “genuine” form of recreation found within a “proto-aesthetic of the everyday.”47 From James’s sociopoetic outlook, the dialogic character of cricket is conceptually and practically realised by stimulating a humanistic form of recreation in the literal sense of self re-creation. This function works against the enervating experience of alienated individuals within an atomised society: poetically, this is evident in the joyful appreciation of cricket felt by participant and observer, and politically demonstrated in the emergence of the social actor imagined within the theory of spontaneity. Because the technical orthodoxy of cricket depends on particular strokes being instantly recognizable yet subject to different interpretation within shifting social moments, the creative and representative possibilities of the orthodox are manifold. For James, the creative expression of orthodoxy is not deviant, but solidifies the dialogic relationship between participant and observer through a communal aesthetic appreciation that is continually reimagined and remade. James sees “tactile values” within fine art as unchanging, while cricket depends on the continual reconfiguration of the image in a way that fits the spectators’ expectations but, at times, also exceeds it.48 This constant revolutionising, shared by participant and observer, signifies the relationship between the individual and the social. The spectator, as individual and mass, expects and hopes for the reinterpretation of technical orthodoxy and extension of aesthetic standards, while the batsman, again as individual and collective, shares that desire. Throughout his cricket writing, James identifies this impulse within batsmen’s performance of spontaneous and inventive creativity—that has an enduring impact as profound as any artistic experience performed by a validated, high cultural virtuoso.49 Importantly, this imaginative impulse is not limited to “great” batsmen, and it is separated from any rational calculation of gain. It is neither born of practical necessity nor the quest for victory, but is the result of improvisational skill; like the long process of organic-coming-to-political-consciousness, the aesthetic impulse is a spontaneous creative outburst. However, like political spontaneity, this cricketing virtuosity might be regarded with suspicion as a romantic idealisation, or a tautology that seeks to combine an account of its emergence and its expression in a flawed circular logic: cricket is a beautiful game because it is played beautifully, and it is played beautifully because it is a beautiful game.

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This proposition is recognised within cultural analyses of sport, where improvisation and spontaneity are familiar indicative themes. Andrew Blake likens the sporting quest for the unfamiliar to the improvisational process in jazz and Michael Eric Dyson calls the “will to spontaneity” one of the defining aesthetic characteristics of Michael Jordan’s athleticism.50 However, Blake recognises unfamiliarity within sport as something either constrained by opposition or as the result of serendipitous events, such as luck or injury. Furthermore, the analogy between Adorno’s critique of jazz, which dismisses improvisation as a formulaic activity, pre-planned with “machinelike precision,” and Blake’s acknowledgment of routinised strategies that produce “quasi-improvisatory” sporting practices, draws a critical distinction between actual and apparent spontaneity.51 Similarly, Dyson recognises the “stylization of the performed self” central to Jordan’s athletic aesthetic as an indication of the complex relationship between cultural commodification and social and racial stratification, and cautions against the superficial acceptance of aesthetic invention as a non-commodified autonomous act. If this would seem to diminish James’s argument, it is easy to state the claim that the esoteric character of cricket, its long days and slow process, high ritual, and penchant for minutiae make it an unsuitable candidate for massification as a culture industry commodity—unlike, we might say, popular music like jazz or end-oriented sports like basketball.52 However, it is not that James’s aesthetic vision of improvised and spontaneous creativity is inserted into the social at a different trajectory than jazz and basketball—as a specialist-technical form as opposed to a popular-accessible one—but that its relationship to the social is qualitatively different. The very productive aspects of jazz that alarm Adorno, the “pseudo-individualization” and its “perennial sameness,” result in a form of cultural intoxication and social anaesthesia that are reversed within the Jamesian cricket aesthetic. For James, cricket enables the cultivation of an invigorating public space and intellectual edification and provides an admirable emotional stimulus. This intellectual and emotional capacity is exemplified in James’s assertion that cricket remains a game while it has a profound social resonance. He points to its Janus-faced ability to fulfil aesthetic and political needs without compromising either its structural coherence or cultural integrity. The fundamental beauty of cricket, therefore, lies in its capacity to manage the complex and often incoherent demands made of it by the vicissitudes of social life and the vagaries of human consciousness. This possibility is demonstrated in a highly charged encounter during the West Indies 1963 tour of England: There was another stroke that I remember in the Oval match by the little wicket-keeper, Murray. He came in and Trueman or somebody bowled him a short ball. And then he got back on his right foot and put him through extra-cover to the boundary. Soon he was out but that stroke had been made.53

176 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics The historical and geographical, as well as the social and political, context of this moment is extremely significant. West Indian nations are gaining independence from Britain. The scene is Kennington, in the heart of the heart of the metropolis, five years after the Notting Hill riots and five years before Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. However, James isolates the creative moment, the spontaneous expression of a moment of beauty, from the competitive outcome and political symbolism of the match: “Soon he was out but that stroke had been made.” At once, the beauty of Murray’s moment retains its aesthetic integrity without being subsumed by the rude imposition of immanent meaning, yet it does not fully transcend its material context. James argues that within cricket, through the representational processes woven into the game, individual creativity is both a personal and social event. Each individual on the field is a discrete subject charged with performing a distinct role; however, at the same time, their role only assumes meaning in relation to the roles performed by others. Batsman, bowler, and fielder are, therefore, individual tasks, but their individuated tasks are enabled by relation to the associated tasks carried out by others. This set of individual yet interconnected roles does not appear to distinguish cricket from any other sport, or indeed any other social form. However, James argues that this structural interrelation inherently and simultaneously contains symbolic, performative, and interpretive possibilities that are profoundly dramatic and compelling.54 It is James’s contention that the complex symbolic and organisational structures of cricket invaluably facilitate the combination of technical expression and social representation within an aesthetic sensibility. And the social actor at the centre is not an egotistical personality or a self-aggrandising performer, but a representative of an individualistic, communally aware expression, in the spirit of The Paris Commune. This is to say that Murray represents himself, his team, and his nation, and also, as we shall see, an internationalist, postcolonial community cohered through its humanistic aesthetic commitments. The shared aesthetic investments of diverse cricket aficionados provide a basis for the coexistence of social differences. It also symbolically engages, in sublimated form, the politically raw moment of end of Empire and postcolonial self-determination. This is why the result does not matter but Murray’s inventiveness does: when cricket is a game and yet more than a game, creative capacity, with bat in hand, is at once aesthetic expression and political claim. In addition to the social parity signalled by competitive success, Murray’s expressive ability bears indisputable testimony to his humanity, the repudiation of which was central to the validation of colonial dominion and the suppression of claims to self-determination.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF AESTHETICS This, then, is the formal inventory of James’s sociopoetics of cricket: its social and artistic parameters; its technical sophistication and symbolic resonance;

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and its enabling structures that produce aesthetic value. The social is continually alluded to in terms of the conceptual formation of technique, symbolic representation, and aesthetic expression, and it becomes apparent when one considers the substantive production, meaning, and function of cricket more closely alongside its poetic abstractions. However, this substantive transition between the concrete (social) context and the abstract (aesthetic) is also of immense evaluative importance. In rejecting the dominant archetype of the logocentric body, (re)produced through the word, the efficacy of sentient, embodied knowledge advocated within the Jamesian sociopoetic and its progressive spirit is subject to several potential hazards. James seems to suggest, as does Susan Sontag, that formal interpretive apparatuses assiduously codify and regulate possible meanings at the expense of sensual appreciation.55 And while this points to specific shortcomings of rationalist and formal analysis, the very transcendent form and pleasures James recognises within cricket may promote a naturalising effect. The naturalness of the body and “play” can be easily taken as a phenomenology of embodiment, where the sensuous play and sentient perception of the fleshy body simply reflects patently obvious meaning instead of its social and discursive production. The question, then, is whether the intuitive and affective elements of the aesthetic economy of cricketing orthodoxy, that might precede the discursive processes that bring it into the social world, are either vacuous or dangerous. These perils are perhaps best demonstrated in a series of significant reflections on the articulation of politics through representations of the body, beginning with Walter Benjamin’s famous statement that fascism culminates in “the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” whereby the social opportunity for self-expression and production of “ritual values” have palpable political properties whose validity is intrinsic and indisputable.56 As the meaning of the aesthetic spectacle exists prior and external to interpretation and is self-evident, a politics may be enunciated without recourse to the political activities of dialogue, debate, and dissention. For the performing body, this concern is manifest within Siegfried Kracauer’s assessment of body culture within the mass gymnastic displays in Weimar Germany that worked to produce a (political) community through the massification and mass representation of traditional and social “organic life.”57 Within Kracauer’s formulation, the “magic force” of the mass spectacle is perhaps most important in its capacity to obliterate reason and exalt the spiritual and mythical values of the body. Ironically, this very concern is central to Sontag’s critique of the narration and inculcation of a fascist aesthetics within Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film of the 1936 Olympic Games, Olympia.58 Of course, this is not to suggest that James’s sociopoetics is fascistic. Nevertheless, the ideals and values that Sontag understands are central to the specifically fascist aesthetic in Olympia—the pageantry of discipline; massification of people and the unity of the polity; and the idealised representation of physical perfection and beauty alongside characteristics of courage,

178 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics perseverance, will and domination—resonate partially with the social functions and effects of modern sport. Within his broader model of the “civilizing process,” Norbert Elias recognises a process of “sportization” that typifies a “civilizing spurt.” As “mock contests,” modern sports provide a cathartic and safe release for “stress-tensions,” as well as an important avenue for the sublimation of aggression and violence; for example, fox-hunting as a non-utilitarian sporting practice is predicated on the pleasurable excitement of the chase, where the immediacy of violence is externalised through the delegation of killing to the hounds.59 And even when understood outside of its function as the sublimation of violence, sport often fulfils a desire for excitement lost within the sedentary civility of modern social life: as an embodied encounter with the possible, sport existentially represents the “risk-opportunities” that modern social and cultural domains and covenants have attempted to eradicate from human life.60 The humanistic principles and emotional responses that, for James, are embodied and dramatised within cricket are neither necessarily worthy nor progressive. Besides edification and expressive faculty, the technical and symbolic matrix of cricket can fulfil alternate ideals, as is readily apparent in the social and cultural function of cricket as a repressive instrument in the reproduction of colonial domination. Therefore, as with his compulsion towards spontaneity as a means to imagine the process of coming-toradical-consciousness without a directing vanguard, James’s commitment to the humanistic desires of “ordinary” people, free of the exclusionary and regulating domain of elitist culture, is ethically admirable yet theoretically and practically problematic. It is easy to present the response to these charges levelled at James in absentia. Given Sontag’s critique of Olympia’s appropriation of athletic culture towards a fascist aesthetic in the name of art and documentary, it is indeed ironic that James also appeals to Olympian motifs. However, while Riefenstahl focuses on an Olympian epic of human perfectibility, James concentrates on an antiquarian Olympian sociality, where the athletes were integrated members and representatives of their communities and the Games themselves were intimately connected to intellectual, political, and social life. All this emphasises the wider cultural significance of the games, and it must be remembered that James has neither deity nor guiding deference in mind, whether heavenly Gods or worldly Führer. Furthermore, it is obvious that the struggle between coloniser and colonised on the cricket field is deeply symbolic, and it can be simply explained as the expression of a social and political antagonism (instead of the sublimation of basic human aggressive and violent impulses). The notion that sport contains broadly civilising aspects is, however, commensurate with James’s thought. Indeed, where the colonial encounter has been seen as the reification of “native” (or, in the case of the West Indies, transplanted peoples’) athleticism within the rationalised and organised spectacle of modern sports, James moves to a different interpretation.

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Instead of the exoticization of black athleticism within colonial sport as a voyeuristic popular ethnography or the Victorian concern with the erosion of pure play by the degrading aspects of competitive sports, James harbours no such implicit return to the innocence of the pre-modern.61 And while James is not concerned with traditional forms of indigenous body culture, his focus on cricket is notably and resolutely modern—not in the sportized sense of rational calculation, assiduous regulation, bureaucratisation, standardisation, and so on, but in terms of cricket’s aesthetic economy, akin to other forms of modern secular creative culture such as arts and letters. This is especially important because James does not understand cricket in negation as the sublimation of socially unacceptable behaviours and displays of emotional impropriety—for example, he does not feel that sport provides a necessary public arena for aggressive confrontation and the display of public emotion, or that it contains and disciplines public violence and aggression. Instead, James draws attention to the worthy, edifying facets of the civilising process—such as contemplative endeavour and creative accomplishment, which Elias generally reserves for intellectual pursuits.62 Indeed, where Elias assesses sport in relation to the cultivation of civility, the establishment of cricket and horse racing as national sports, organised by a gentlemanly elite in late eighteenth-century England, exemplify notably elitist or exclusionary examples of sportization. Therefore, instead of understandings of sport as elitist, or aspirational in assisting middle class emulation of the cultural refinement and civilised social values of the aristocracy and gentry, James attempts to recover a popular, accessible aesthetic from its rarefied, exclusive domain. Even though James manages to escape the fascistic connotations and aggressive human nature vaguely consonant with his sociopoetic formulation, he confronts a different obstacle. The aesthetic beauty James alludes to is not simply a sedate appreciation, but a captivating emotional force that evokes the notion of the sublime. Blake also sees it prevalent within sport, exemplified in diverse figures from the Victorian mountaineer to the contemporary high jumper.63 Edmund Burke captures this sensibility in his formulation of the sublime: that which produces “the strongest emotion . . . the mind is capable of feeling.”64 And as Burke is convinced that “the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure,” the sublime is stimulated by the excitement of ideas of pain and danger that operates “in a manner analogous to terror.”65 In nature, this sensation of “delightful horror” also emerges specifically from the sense of infinity, engendered by the inability to comprehend the bounds of an immense form such as an ocean or mountain. Kant provides an example of the distinctive quality of this sensation, in the vertiginous rock face that represents but does not necessarily induce fear; the powerful magnitude of the rock is awe-inspiring and reminds us of our own puny insignificance and mortality, yet “provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness.”66 Such monumental natural forms

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are definitively sublime because “they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature.”67 This “delightful terror” and “attractive fearfulness” are central to sports. The anticipation of athletic competition produces a visceral anxiety that is at once almost debilitating and an essential stimulant of emotional energy. And the release of this nervous energy within the athletic arena oriented towards the engagement and domination of exacting opponents might suggest the Kantian notion of mortal courageousness in the face of the immortal omnipotence of nature. But it is precisely this will-to-mastery at the core of sporting competition that some radical analyses regard as an inherent political regression that is beyond progressive redemption.68 Therefore, the objective of domination and subjugation central to sport is not a benign example of “sportization” providing a safe arena for the sublimation of aggression, but signals a socially sanctioned space for the violent expression of proliferating homophobic, misogynistic, and xenophobic attitudes.69 Drawing on Klaus Theweleit’s recognition of the close association between sexuality and aggression within the production of homoeroticism, Allen Guttman argues that the eroticism central to the aesthetics of sport refracts sexual aggression within athletic activities that often mimic sexual excitement and release.70 But just as with the fascistic affinity, it is fair to say that this association with the sublime in its domineering form is incommensurate with James’s sociopoetic ideal. Just as James rejects the principle of sport, advanced by Elias, as a modernising force in the nonnegative sense of sublimating violence, he appears to have more in common with the positive aspects of the sublime—such as “magnificence” in Burke’s formulation of the sublime, that is an expression of the delightful without the correlate of dread. Instead of a terrifying, awe-inducing encounter that leaves the individual intimidated, James’s notion of the powerful emotional responses engendered within an aesthetic medium consonant with the sublime is more dialogic within cricket as a dramatic narrative of human creative expression. But it is in the attempt to clearly separate from such a reactionary immanent possibility that James’s sociopoetic commitment to the transcendental tactile values of style, grace, and elegance faces its strongest challenge. This is to say that if the fascistic, the subliminal, and the intimidating sublime are relatively easily dismissed as facets that are only tenuously associated with the specificity of the Jamesian sociopoetic, the aesthetic discourses of style, grace, and elegance are central to James’s vision and, as such, their problems are also James’s. The question of whether the aesthetic register of cricket can possess any transcendental qualities that are somehow relatively autonomous from their stratified immanent context is astutely problematised in Derek Birley’s observation that cricket “is not so much a game as institutionalised nostalgia.”71

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According to this view, the cricketing aesthetic performs a dual function: within the domain of the leisured classes its esoteric sensibilities reinforce the advantages of cultural capital, while in reference to the population at large, it becomes a pedagogical instrument or tool of domination. Even though the cricketing aesthetic carries no market values and is meant to express certain non-immanent “tactile values,” such as grace and elegance, it is not a socially transcendent practice. This is to say that although the symbolic values expressed within cricket are irreducible to notions of bourgeois individualism and narcissistic aesthetic indulgence, as Mike Marqusee argues, distinct class connotations are nonetheless present: In becoming “more than a game” under the aegis of the amateurs, cricket acquired not only a moral, but also an aesthetic justification. . . . In the “Golden Age” of 1895–1914, style was supreme. The model amateur batsman combined elegance and power. His play appeared “effortless,” a telling adjective. The off-drive, transmuting the pace of the bowler into its opposite through timing and footwork, was the consummate expression of this aesthetic. How you looked became as important as how many you scored. And the counterposition of the aesthetic to the utilitarian was frequently seen as a question of class.72 These “Golden Age” aesthetic values of elegance, best expressed as “ease” through off-side play was, as Marqusee points out, an extremely difficult enterprise; the appearance of “ease” was, and is, actually rather difficult to achieve. However, it is important to note that this penchant for on-side play denotes not its greater objective difficulty, but a cultivated preference. As Marqusee notes, on-side play enjoyed a temporary aesthetic preeminence among public school, amateur batsmen, as off-side play developed its own aesthetic value in subsequent periods; however, this historical “fetish” is the domain of a particular class of batsmen who disdained the vulgar “breadand-butter” scoring shots on the “on-side.” James’s attempt to separate the aesthetic code of cricket from its hierarchical moral directive is beset by a significant problem of stratification. For James, while the aesthetic code is a popular form, it is appropriated by a particular privileged class evident within the historical distinction between “gentlemen” (amateurs) and “players” (professionals). Mark Kingwell usefully notes that unlike the working class “player” concerned with financial gain, the financially secure “gentleman” of leisure has the resources to pursue aesthetic values, thus limiting access to aesthetic sensibility in terms of the batsman’s relationship to capital.73 Therefore, in direct contradistinction to James, the pursuit of aesthetic values and possession of taste and discrimination is reserved for the moneyed and leisured classes, while the working class is solely defined through its encounter with productive waged labour. The colonial context amplifies this uneven aesthetic access. Cricket was exported to the British Empire as early as the late eighteenth century and

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throughout the nineteenth century—the Calcutta Cricket Club was founded in 1792 and cricket was played in Barbados from 1806—and it maintained the same class distinctions and privileges reflected in the prevailing gentlemen/player dichotomy “at home.”74 However, as Harold Perkin notes, the gentlemanly principles of amateurism also formed a bulwark against defeat at the hands of professional working class athletes and prevented “social pollution” by undesirable natives. These class and racial hierarchies are reflected in aesthetic distinctions and cricketing practice: “locals” were routinely used throughout the British Empire to bowl at garrisoned officers in the practice nets, and as a gentlemanly art, batting was the vocation of the officer while the native, lacking in refinement, was more suited to the artisan endeavours of bowling. This situation of racial and social stratification returns us to the historicist and sociological dilemma of aesthetic description and assessment and the relationship between the conceptual and social status of art.

“WITH A BAT IN HIS HAND . . .” “Sport,” writes Pierre Bourdieu, “is . . . one of the terrains in which is posed with the maximum acuteness the problem of the relations between theory and practice, and also between language and the body.”75 The task of developing a nuanced approach to this analytical problem involves understanding the complexity of this symbolic battlefield, without deferring to a deterministic sociology of domination at the expense of recognising the possibilities of resistance evident within the development of collective agency.76 At the beginning of Beyond a Boundary, James provides a wonderfully eloquent example by tackling the tortuous dialectic between the transcendent and the immanent through the brief, yet deeply significant, story of Matthew Bondman. Introducing us to Bondman and his family, who lived next door, James depicts them as the antithesis of the Puritanical reserve of the Jameses, from whom they rented their home. James remembers Matthew as an aggressive young man with an antisocial demeanour: He was generally dirty. He would not work. His eyes were fierce, his language was violent and his voice was loud. His lips curled back naturally and he intensified it by an almost perpetual snarl. My grandmother and aunts detested him. He would often without shame walk up the main street barefooted.77 However, Matthew Bondman represented one of James’s earliest encounters with the “personality in society.”78 For while the young James was disturbed by Bondman’s talent for invective and aggressive behaviour, it was his cricketing performance that was truly captivating and renders the memory of Matthew with an acute resonance: “For ne’er do well, in fact vicious

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character as he was, Matthew had one saving grace—Matthew could bat. More than that, Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with a bat in his hand was all grace and style.”79 Given the proximity of Bondman’s broader social persona to archetypes of black male hypermasculinity, this transformation at the crease might appear a particularly insidious colonial version of the myth of underclass betterment through the cultivation of civilised deportment, popularised in Pygmalion. However, for James, Bondman’s cricketing talent did not elevate him from the adverse material conditions of his life; it simply profoundly impacted those around him, and the very act of witnessing him at play with bat in hand transformed their lives. This concern with Bondman’s creativity and transformative impact on his social environment exemplifies the agency foundational to James’s social thought, and it positions Matthew Bondman as a crucial symbolic figure. In discussing the disparity between Bondman’s aggressive behaviour and his stylish strokeplay at the wicket, Sylvia Wynter argues that he inhabited a liminal space directly transmitted from the social conditions of plantation society; this obstructed the creativity of the slaves, thereby maintaining their capital value as labour and preventing “their living their own radical historicity.”80 Interestingly, Wynter renames Bondman “Bondsman” in order to draw a link between his individual identity and the collective condition of New World blacks, whose autonomy was subordinated to the proscribed social roles set aside for them.81 In a different, yet compatible assessment, Ian Baucom suggests that the aesthetic ideal performs a disciplinary and an expressive function, noting that “Bondman not only masters the stroke, the stroke masters him. . . . At play in the fields of the empire, Bondman’s violent alterity is disciplined, and he is invested, for a moment, with that fetishistic if shifting quality which British colonialism both worshiped and, in part, invented: Englishness.”82 Although what James calls Bondman’s “pitiable existence” is indisputable, the disparity between Bondman’s aggressiveness and the grace with which he expressed himself at the wicket presents a crucial problematic. If, as Baucom suggests, the stroke incorporates Bondman into the very society from which he is excluded, what does this partial inclusion and continuing exclusion illustrate about the regimes of social management and the possibility of imagining alternatives? How could Bondman represent such a transgressive social personality in combination with an archetypal elegant expression of the quintessential “English” game? These questions probe the efficacy of partial incorporation, inasmuch as they suggest the prior existence of discrete aesthetic-social practices, as well as their political indefensibility. The assertion that “Englishness” is in part “invented” by British colonialism can be read in two ways, depending on how one understands the mediating “in part,” clause: either Englishness is part invented and part real, with the former produced by British colonialism, or Englishness is wholly invented but only partially so by British

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colonialism. That Bondman’s entire existence is supposedly oriented upon external, normative colonial standards seems to favour the former interpretation. His aesthetic proficiency (read: submission to Anglicised norms) and general intransigence towards the dominant order, that respectively engender his cricketing inclusion and social exclusion, are both external products of colonial governance; as such, Bondman reacts to an already existing Englishness but does not impact it. In contrast, while not wishing to discard any notion of socially structured behaviour, James also wants to maintain a conceptual space for the enactment of agency and an empirical example of the multilateral production of colonial and imperial society and culture. Simply put, as with his historiography of the emergence of modernity, he is committed to portraying the dialogic formative relationship between colony and metropole: the latter does not simply give birth to the former. The distortion of aesthetic value, making cricket out to be an irredeemable façade of bourgeois individualism and colonial domination, has a strong effect. Personalised critiques that cast James as a sycophantic Anglophile are perhaps unsurprising given that an “admission” to a degree of cultural ambivalence among West Indians—“obviously” manifest within James’s affinity with the normative cricketing aesthetic and the anticolonial struggle—can validate accusations of a “lack of patriotism or of being Uncle Toms or Afro-Saxons.”83 However, James’s simple injunction to avoid a search for pristine national and cultural forms advances an alternative analytical prerogative that seeks to trace the entangled constitutive processes of colonial and metropolitan sociocultural formation. Instead of surrendering to the hegemonic political ground that divisively labels aesthetic concerns as irretrievably bourgeois and/or colonial ideological tools, he attempts to recover the redemptive sociopoetic qualities of cricket. Quite simply, for James, the set of abstract aesthetic and structural principles of cricket are not an a priori colonial mechanism. Rather, when reimagined within an egalitarian, humanistic social frame, they are broadly edifying and gratifying. This possibility becomes clearer when, returning to the example of Matthew Bondman, one confronts the vexing question of why he batted in the manner that he did. Given his wilful obduracy and complete disregard for basic social etiquette, the incorporation argument (and its notion of colonial/metropolitan social and cultural separation) does not adequately explain his momentary investment in and voluntary submission to “Englishness.” Considering Bondman’s aggressive social personality, the expectation is not that he would embody “grace and style,” but that he would attempt to expel the ball to the boundary with all the violence that he could summon. However, James’s sociopoetic approach offers a useful framework for assessing the esoteric qualities of Bondman’s batting alongside its explicit exoteric function beyond the limited imaginative horizon and political defeatism of an immanent perspective and incorporation argument. It must be noted that Bondman’s “style and grace” was not a simple mimetic act, but a perfect

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encapsulation of the creative venture into the imaginative representational space opened up by mastery of technical orthodoxy. The main significance of James’s commitment to establishing claims for cricket as a creative and contemplative culture that privileges an “aesthetics of unpredictability”84 is transparent in Bondman’s inestimable ability to create a moment of beauty with a popular resonance: When he practiced on an afternoon with the local club people stayed to watch and walked away when he was finished. He had one particular stroke that he played by going down low on one knee. It may have been a slash through the covers or a sweep to leg. But, whatever it was, whenever Matthew sank down and made it, a long, low “Ah!” came from many a spectator, and my own little soul thrilled with recognition and delight.85 This communal experience that would transcend the deleterious modern synthetic distinctions between material and ideal, the individual and the many, is revelatory for James. His memory of Bondman, reframed by maturity in Beyond a Boundary, informs an expansive conception of politics able to reunite the diversity of the personality that has been systematically lost to the rational specialisation and compartmentalism of modern life. By contravening the elitist appropriation of aesthetic value and returning it to a popular domain without submitting to the oppressive norms of civility or attempting to claim the social distinction typically afforded cultivated expression, Bondman undermines the social hierarchy that is tangibly reproduced through modes and relations of production and tacitly naturalised through the cultural domain. A broader humanist and political significance is apparent in what appears—as a result of Bondman’s disinclination for practise and failure to pay club subscription fees—to be the “unhappy ending” of the Bondman story: “They persevered with him, helping him out with flannels and white shoes for matches. I remember Razac, the Indian, watching him practise one day and shaking his head with deep regret: how could a man who could bat like that so waste his talent?”86 If one accepts Bondman’s talent as a resource to be exploited and maximised, then his underachievement and the brevity of his career is indeed a waste. James avoids such sentimentality however, and simply tries to understand how it was that Bondman’s ability to play cricket could possibly atone—as it did—for his “abominable way of life.” Bondman’s “waste” is also suggestive of the comprehensive disparity between the communal context of the aesthetic ideal and the hegemonic social context of cricket. People congregating to watch Bondman were prepared to do so in a non-competitive context—they came to watch him practise—and wished to see the extension of orthodox technique and the creation of significant form, not a purposive activity oriented towards a given end.

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The “waste” of Bondman’s refusal to submit to the formal dictates of the competitive sphere is counteracted by another refusal: that of work.87 It might be said, therefore, that Bondman refused to “work” at cricket just as he refused paid employment in general. Although his brief career deprived the spectators of further aesthetic delights, this was Bondman’s choice; however, James’s recollection demonstrates the structuring aspects of his sociopoetic perspective that conceptualises Bondman’s relative autonomy but not his complete independence. In this vein, James recognises the twofold significance and meaning of Bondman. First, he bats as he does simply because he can and is able to—his underclass status does not debar him from artistic faculties. Second, his performance is neither egotistical nor narcissistic but is communal and social—his craft with the bat provides others with an edifying experience and situates him firmly within the society to which he is otherwise peripheral.

POSTCOLONIAL REDEMPTION This intervention attempts to declare the humanity of the proletariat dehumanised firstly through their inveterate association with labour, and secondly by the inability of leftist critique to countenance the political validity of the humanistic cultural sphere. Correcting the reduction of oppressed peoples to automatons of capitalist production, James seeks to expand a critical understanding of the role of cultural reproduction in maintaining social (and colonial) stratification. But given his ongoing commitment to an international proletariat cohered across national and racial lines, the aesthetic code to which he partially subscribes might be seen as a relatively autonomous sociopoetic construct that has transnational as well local implications. This is to ask the question of whether the local aesthetic constituency to whom Bondman’s innovative strokeplay appeals is itself part of a common culture. Just as the problematical question of the causal relationship between “Englishness” and British colonialism invites a set of imperial national and cultural absolutisms, the very nebulousness of James’s cricketing sociopoetics counteracts this tendency. This is not simply to make a familiar statement for cultural syncretism, but rather to initiate a political, humanist argument for the progressive potentiality of the cricketing aesthetic and postcolonial futurity. Writing Beyond a Boundary within a new zeitgeist characterised by the “wind of change” crossing the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean, James recognises a new position of cricket within the popular imagination, no longer mired in Constantine’s “they are no better than we” defensive posture. While the English have centuries of history, tradition, and heritage to look back on in order know themselves, West Indians watch cricket without such cathartic comforts. Instead, West Indians have to look to the present and future in order to constitute themselves; in this sense, the deep social

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resonance of cricket has a significant impact and performs a major role in instilling a sense of collective identity among West Indians.88 Importantly, for James, this process of national invention and development of a postcolonial comity of nations belies a humanist imperative. The high (but not elitist) aesthetic idealism of cricket and its sociopoetic significance informs a cultural politics that effects a broader civilisational transformation, as well as a decolonisation, on three fronts: first, cricket culture demonstrates a popular aesthetic and restores full human sensibilities to the proletariat; second, the technical acumen and orthodox creativity discernible among coloniser and colonised explodes myths of superiority and dissolves iniquitous racialised distinctions; and finally, given this exposé of class and racial hierarchy, a broadly inclusive postcolonial sociality is more imaginable, more transparent, and less of a bitter irony within a faithful appreciation of the cricketing aesthetic. For example, at the denouement of the 1963 West Indian tour of England, James noted that Worrell had become a member of the “British public family” and that this “adoption” signalled that in British eyes and minds he was a person as well as a cricketer. And lest this appear as an instance of the self-infantilised (post)colonial subject submitting to the approval of the imperial patriarch, James sees it differently as an important stage in earnest self-understanding: “It was not that the British people had accepted the West Indians; it was far more than that. The West Indians had accepted, recognized themselves.”89 Within James’s vision, the specific possibility of humanist and postcolonial redemption through cricket can be seen in two interconnected senses: first, in terms of the particular exigencies of West Indian self-determination and nation creation; and second, in terms of a general human reconciliation against various forms of false separation—for example, Cartesian, racial, national, and cultural. With the ineluctable fallacy of colonial moral universalism in mind, James resolves to avoid the same error by spurning the cathartic comforts of a mythologised, homogeneous West Indian condition that attempts to erase all traces of past conquest and European influence. In a 1963 letter to V. S. Naipaul, James unapologetically notes the residual British influences on Beyond a Boundary: But the book is very British. Not only the language but on page after page the (often unconscious) literary references, the turn of phrase, the mental and moral outlook. That is what we are, and we shall never know ourselves until we recognize that fully and freely and without strain.90 The strict implausibility of “unconscious literary references” suggests that the autobiographical tenor of the book invites the intrusions of a personal register where the existential bleeds into the analytical. But more importantly, the historical and existential stain of British influence is central to self-understanding, not inimical to confident self-determination. Perhaps

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mindful of the profound cultural costs of Dessalines’ postrevolutionary bloodletting on Haiti’s future, James is wary of the psychosocial dangers resultant from selective amnesia and refusal of reconciliation. The constitution of what we might now label the postcolonial, therefore, points to the necessity of recognising and accepting the range of historical antecedents, however traumatic or unpalatable they might be. Nevertheless, alongside the humanist excoriation of Dessalines’ merciless terror, The Black Jacobins also asserts a heroic narrative of black agency that is at once oriented towards self- and other-understanding. In the same letter to Naipaul, James crucially notes that the free and frank acceptance of British influence contributes to a reassessment of “British civilisation” gleaned through West Indians’ intimate knowledge of Britain, that is often more comprehensive than British peoples’ understanding of themselves.91 Although James does not employ the “postcolonial” idiom, his take on the messy concurrent politics of history, nation, and culture perhaps helps give the term some of the substantive content and analytical force that it often lacks in its attempt to operate as a political descriptor and/or an explanatory neologism. Indeed, his concern with the entanglement of selfand other understanding gives concrete shape to a key recurrent idea within postcolonial criticism: that colonialism does not simply refer to the neatly separable and distinct experiences of “them/us,” identifiable as a result of “us/them” being over “there/here” back “then.” Instead, through cricket, James helps illustrate the periodisation of the postcolonial across colonial formation, anticolonial contestation, and in the aftermath of independence as a set of ongoing effects, or as a challenge to the dominant model of social formation produced within the bounded territory of the nation-state.92 But in addition to Stuart Hall’s declarative statement that the postcolonial denotes “a general process of decolonisation which, like colonisation itself, has marked the colonising societies as powerfully as it has the colonised (of course in different ways),” James’s sociopoetics of cricket attempts to build the cultural grounds for political reconciliation through the articulate bodies that wield bat and ball within a boundless aesthetic community.93 The insightful postcolonial vantage point of simultaneous convergence and divergence with British civilisation—that was an idealised stored-up negation for the black Jacobins—now has a political viability, heretofore unrealised. Returning to his notion of the cricketing zeitgeist, James explains the post–World War II shift of English and Australian cricket towards defensive-minded play as a mirroring of the prevalent security-conscious age. In stressing the tempering of individuality and flair, James reads this age as the precursor to the advent of corporatist societies. Conversely, in the same moment that the region anticipated and struggled towards self-rule, West Indian cricket moved in the opposite direction, typified by free expression and a spirit of adventure. However, a long commitment to the interrelated fortunes of a metropolitan working class (whom he understood as also freed

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by the decline of empire in that they were “now ready for new relations, human relations, with colonial peoples for the first time in four centuries”94) and the colonial subject enabled James to see cricket’s immense cultural political capacity for a progressive postcoloniality in its broadest sense. This potential is discernible when James uses cricket to imagine and articulate the reaction to historical circumstance and social constraint from two extremely different exemplars of the batting arts that are yet shared inheritors of its aesthetic idealism. As the creative restrictions enforced by the security-conscious age were exacerbated by the post–World War II dawn of the Cold War, the aesthetic idealism of cricket offered a rare avenue for the expression of social hopes outside of the corporatist historical bloc. In a discussion of the daring batting and flamboyant failures of the England captain Ted Dexter, James characterises him as “a Cavalier among Roundheads” and suggests that criticisms attributing his batting failures to a lack of concentration misunderstand their source. James suggests it is Dexter’s submission to the gravity of the competitive situation, and his position of authority as England captain, that force him to concentrate on ideals and aims alien to his expressive vision. Dexter is thus consigned to the fate of “those who try to sit between two stools, or to be precise, a good man fallen among people whose morals are not his own.”95 As a “Cavalier among Roundheads,” Dexter might represent a rather uninspiring choice: Puritan parliamentarianism or conservative Monarchism, Presbyterian or Divine theocracy. However, in Modern Politics, James’s evaluation of the English Civil War looks beyond these immediate choices, favouring the independent parliamentary democracy advanced by the Levellers.96 What is notable here is that progressive political options remain possible, even within a deeply reactionary moment; it is important, therefore, to have the imagination, courage, and will to move beyond the immediate. To return to modern times, the institutionalised stultification of free individuality and social creativity constraining Dexter, which James characterises as the “welfare state of mind,” is also palpable in the derivative corporatist orthodoxy easily inhabited by mainstream left and right alike. It is this crisis of political imagination, courage, and will that continues to restrict the scope of political possibility for the British people facing the end of empire, which then can only be understood as a threat instead of an opportunity. What James therefore attempts, or imagines, through cricket, is the establishment of cultural conditions for a postcolonial critique that is also anti-capitalist and internationalist, familiar to national-liberationist activist-intellectuals such as himself. If, as a representative figure, Dexter is constrained by the weight of responsibility and convention, and is unable to imagine or conjure a progressive alternative, then the vista of political possibility and imagination opening out before the postcolonial subject is exemplified within one of his contemporaries, the Guyanese batsman Rohan Kanhai. James charts the sociopoetic coalescence of social representation and individual expressive

190 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics brilliance in Kanhai’s batting, seeing in it a portentous quality: “a unique pointer of the West Indian quest for identity, for ways of expressing our potential bursting at every seam.”97 But he carefully rejects naturalised and romanticised explanations in favour of an assiduous calculation that also retains its sense of jouissance. Whereas Don Bradman was “a ruthless executioner of bowlers,” Kanhai faced his challenges “with a grin that could be seen a mile away.”98 Instead of giving a facile journalistic impression, James counterposes the joy of self-discovery and inner confidence as an affirmative project with the dour persona and domineering force typical of those consumed by a desire for repetitive success.99 The personal and social fruits of Kanhai’s batting are neither triumphalist nor narcissistic, but representative of a moment of poiesis: he was again free; to create not only “a house for Mr Biswas,” a house like other houses, but to sail the seas that open out before the East Indian who no longer has to prove himself to anybody or to himself. It was no longer: anything you can do I can do better. . . . At that moment, Edgbaston in 1964, the West Indian could strike from his feet the dust of centuries. The match did not impose any burdensome weight of responsibility. He was free as few West Indians have been free.100 This unfettered individuality, alongside Worrell’s mode of leadership that stimulated individual self-activity towards a collective end, is the Jamesian pinnacle of free, spontaneous agency. It is crucially the outcome of the struggle for happiness—not its possession. In a 1965 address, James notes the concrete application of the Heideggerian “dasein” in Wilson Harris’s novel The Palace of the Peacock, where the extremity of living conditions in the inhospitable Guyanese interior produces a vital and urgent existence far removed from the banality and alienation of an inauthentic life of facile comforts and trivial pleasures.101 James places Harris here in direct contrast with Sartre and the latter’s admission, in his memoir Words, of the ultimate absurdity of his work as an indication of the fashionable existentialist quest for dasein, in its comfortable neuroses, as a largely textual exercise. James has a different model of existence, separable from “being,” in mind here. He is concerned with a struggle for freedom, individual and collective, that he finds in the West Indies and the West Indians of Harris and Kanhai’s generation. Their struggle, and what they are becoming, is not insular, but collectively oriented and humanistic in reach; they are “a people of the middle of our disturbed century, concerned with the discovery of themselves, determined to discover themselves, but without hatred or malice against the foreigner, even the bitter imperialist past.”102 If, in this estimation, West Indian independence and literature has exceeded “mere administrative convenience or necessity” and made an original contribution to the “comity of nations’,103 James recognises that West Indian cricket faces an identical

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task. Therefore, the dasein-like existence, also embodied in Harris’ fellow countryman Rohan Kanhai, is not restricted to immanent context. While Kanhai represents the West Indies, he also represents a wider human constituency; similarly, the young Romantic who, James imagines, rearticulates cricketing expression in a way that offers novel forms of fulfilment to “new people,” can emerge from anywhere and yet have an intimate impact on their audience.104 These “new people,” notably, “can emerge from anywhere”; they are not a bounded community in the accepted national, racial, or ethnic sense. And just as the old fetters of arbitrary collective identification and its artificial solidarity have been broken, new human affinities and sensibilities—capable of stimulating the “sober senses” that will enable them to (re)consider their relations with each other—are present within the humanistic aesthetics of cricket. This statement moves to consolidate the creolised form of sociality imagined so eloquently by Césaire’s concluding appeal in Discourse on Colonialism. Césaire asserts that cathartic temptations to replicate the past or revive a bankrupt colonial society are to be resisted in favour of moving forward towards the creation of a “new society” that combines precapitalist fraternity with modern productive power.105 James moves beyond this imaginary vision in a more programmatic vein. He constitutes the inclusive potentiality of cricket in anticipation—albeit in rudimentary form—of the postcolonial cultural prerogative of hybridity, which “seeks to affirm and extend a new collaborative dimension, both within the margins of the nation-space and across boundaries between nations and peoples.”106 As such, cricket exemplifies something of the “third space,” conceptualised by Homi Bhabha as the evaporation of pristine cultural essences displaced by resolutely hybrid and emergent cultures. It is cricket, therefore, operating as what Bhabha identifies as a mode of postcolonial cultural “translation,” that enables and provides the medium for the English and Australian “acceptance” of the West Indies, and the latter’s own unparalleled level of self-understanding during the 1960s. The capacity of “British people,” poisoned by the myth of the “white man’s burden,” to begin to recognise the humanity of its former colonial subjects—that exists within the orthodox social and political realm only as a latent and potential class-consciousness—can be easily imagined and practically realised within cricket. It is James’s view that the British people desired such rapprochement but remained unsure of how to proceed in practice. In his estimation, cricket as a dramatic art offers a means for the expression of epochal social shifts that would enable the task of racial and national conciliation to be staged within the game. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such an encounter provides the conclusion to the complex personal, social, historical, and cultural odyssey of Beyond a Boundary. During the ceremonial conclusion of the 1961 West Indian tour of Australia, James notes that Frank Worrell was “crowned with the olive,” a spontaneous gesture of the Australian people that demonstrated

192 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics “one people speaking to another.” “Clearing their way with bat and ball,” that moment marks, for James, the “public entry” of West Indians into “the comity of nations.” Feeling that “Thomas Arnold, Thomas Hughes and the Old Master himself would have recognized Frank Worrell as their boy,” James is especially moved by the moment as a poignant testament to the fact that “beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.”107

Epilogue “The Struggle for Happiness”: From Epiphany to Poiesis

The intellectual stands alone because no one has mandated him. Now one of his contradictions is that he cannot liberate himself unless others liberate themselves at the same time. . . . Thus the intellectual, once he grasps his own contradiction as an individual expression of objective contradictions, is in solidarity with every man who struggles for himself and for others against these contradictions Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals” The sense of hopelessness among the intellectuals exists because they are hopeless. C. L. R. James, American Civilization The Jamesian elective affinities explored within this book are not simply distinct thematic concerns, but overlapping facets of the broad problematic of recovering humanity in the midst of a profoundly dehumanising modernity. The racial, the political, and the poetic are at once exemplary sites of modern alienation and conduits of liberation. For James, modern democracy and its emancipatory promise despoiled is transparent across these spheres: it is racially evident within Atlantic slavery, imperial expansion, and colonialism; it is politically manifest within the gross inequities of capitalism and depredations of totalitarianism; and it is socially regulated and reinforced through disingenuous cultural distinctions between civilised and primitive and the restriction of free creative expression. Nonetheless, for James, this situation is neither inherent nor necessary. The proletarian internationalism of the black Jacobins and the magnanimity of postcolonial peoples towards their former masters and oppressors demonstrates the humanistic pedagogical capacity of racialized social experiences and relations; the organic forms of social organisation and popular political participation, evident, for example, within the Paris Commune and Hungarian Workers Councils, illustrate the democratic ideal of self-activity in the collective interest. The production of a popular aesthetic, as demonstrated within cricket, concretises the cultural universality of human creative and emotional desires falsely divided across various lines including race, class, and caste.

194 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics This book, as the introduction states, is driven by an observation that Stuart Hall has made, namely that James has not been engaged with as seriously and critically as he might be, given his intellectual stature. With this in mind, the preceding chapters have sought to explicate and analyse James’s personal and intellectual development, key aspects of his social thought, and his praxis and political prescriptions. I now want to offer some summary statements and suggestions for his continued and enduring relevance. This is important because of a compelling temptation to read James “historically”—in terms of his retrospective significance. Instead, as an unabashed dialectician, James professes to draw a set of insights into historical understanding that link the past to the present and are suggestive of the future. To this end, what follows is animated by a simple question: why should we read James now and what does he have to tell us that is germane to our own present? Guided by the triumvirate of race, politics, and poetics, I want to suggest three enduring Jamesian insights that remain instructive for us. First, politically, James’s distinctive independent Marxism, that struggled over the articulation of race and class, as well as the problem of the party as an efficacious model of political organisation, might be considered as a confrontation of what we might call a proto–post-marxist problematic. As such, James’s travails might be able to tell us something about the particularity/universality tension within radical politics that has reached its apogee in the internecine struggle between Marxism and post-marxism. Second, James’s concern with radical agency reanimates the issue, central to collective political ambition, of people’s creative self-activity—which raises the question of how we might reconcile individual freedom with social commitment. The same question is being revisited with increased frequency and fervour in contemporary debates on renovating some notion of the human within a humanist politics, against a now orthodox anti-humanism. Finally, James’s recognition that politics is irreducible to purely material needs and concerns testifies to the importance of the often ignored question of human emotional fulfilment and inter-subjective relations as an undeniably political enterprise. I take the possibility of raising and addressing these questions as evidence of his ideas in process, and as a fitting epitaph for a rich intellectual and political life.

I The tension between James’s munificent objectives, critical myopia, and political limitations are mirrored in many of the dilemmas facing contemporary radical politics. More specifically, the Jamesian conundrum of dispensing with mass political organisation for spontaneous mobilisation oriented towards truly radical ends is also apparent in contemporary post-marxist debates on the conceptual and practical formation of leftist politics. The constitution of integrated class units in classical Marxist analysis has, on the one hand, been critiqued in its distillation of complex social subjects

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to a unitary (class) selfhood, and on the other, defended against the postmarxist evacuation of politics.1 However, while these contemporary debates are novel in their specificity, they have historical precedents. Even if utterly impracticable, the ambition and limits of Jamesian spontaneity vividly demonstrate the enduring predicament of leftist thought on the analytical tools best able to understand social complexity. This project is all the more taxing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, given the acceptance of the proliferation of social struggles along various lines of identity and interest, corroding monolithic Marxist “truths” of the centrality of class conflict and struggle to radical politics. This contemporary crisis is not simply a continuation of the imploding tendencies of sectarian leftisms and their periodic border skirmishes, but owes more to wider external forces: the seismic European shifts of 1989 as the denouement of history, chronicled by Francis Fukuyama as the triumph of liberal democracy, as well as the loose analytical protocols of poststructuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism and their radical political progeny, post-marxism.2 As such, the epistemological erosion of the “old” certainties of (organised) class struggle and framework of historical materialism signals the death of unitary subjectivity and its explanatory “grand narratives.” This “break” is also discernible within the emergence of newly unfettered multiple and subaltern identities and situated knowledges as well as the concomitant political expression found, for example, within Civil Rights and Women’s movements. This irresistible march of identity politics and postmodernism, however, does not necessarily tell of the rigorous internal Marxist examination and auto-critique that has brought us to the threshold of post-marxism and, more specifically, of James’s place within it. The implosion of the leftist coalition, as the story goes, was precipitated by the post-1956 world of the New Left—newly concerned with complex social problems extending far beyond the labour sphere—is mirrored within some of James’s key concerns. For example, the increasing significance of Third World liberationist struggles, inadequacies of the monolithic Western proletarian revolutionary subject, and “traditional” forms of Left-Communist praxis based on class struggle and the industrial proletariat central to the New Left are clear within James’s Pan-Africanism, support for the sectional black struggle, and reservations over vanguard-centralism.3 In attempting to characterise individual and extra-class group activity within historical and social movement, James grapples with a proto–post-marxist problematic. James’s steadfast refusal of doctrinaire Communism and continued commitment to grand social explanation arguably shares a key New Left political concern combined with the totalising methodology characteristic of the Old Left. Grand theoretical designs aside, his ostensibly social contractarian analytic frame, and its concurrent concepts of the human and the social central to his reconciliation of human activity and social life, is not incompatible with the New Left sensitivity towards “politics from below.” And even if his preoccupation with agency is now unfashionable, it is worth recalling the

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humanism of the post-1956 Third Worldist and identitarian engagements, and the later anti-humanist turn characterised by Althusserian theoreticism, as concurrent elements in the development of the New Left that would shape the terrain of post-marxism. Nonetheless, the case should not be overstated. James cannot be squared with anti-humanism or contorted to epitomise the trajectory of the New Left when his sympathies are with its inception. For James there is, to paraphrase Gramsci, a relatively autonomous human social subject exposed to structuring historical and social forces. And it is this precarious position that situates them at the threshold of a post-marxist quandary, now familiar to us in terms of the proliferation of political sites and agents and its impact on meaningful radical political activity. As we read James today, mindful of contemporary political questions, his own predicament may help shed light on our own. Just as he contemplated the race/class problematic within Marxism as somewhat of a renegade, this dilemma has long taken centre stage, proliferated into a series of additional sectional categories and struggles, and produced a different and altogether more fractious problematic. On one hand, as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue, the historical and political shifts underwriting post-marxist reservations “imply an extension of social conflictuality to a wide range of areas, which creates the potential, but no more than the potential, for an advance towards more free, democratic and egalitarian societies.”4 On the other hand, this is taken by Norman Geras as an anti-marxism or repudiation of Marxism: what is presented as a post-marxist extension of Marxism is in fact a repudiation that bears little or no relation.5 But instead of an insoluble impasse with deleterious results for radical politics, this position might rather serve as a provocation towards a progressive politics that is aware of and sympathetic to diverse political sites and actors. As Jacques Derrida suggests, the analytical and political resourcefulness of Marxism is not obsolete, but it can be reconsidered and reimagined with reverence to its enduring progressive spirit.6 Furthermore, post-marxism does not necessarily signal the decisive “break” that it implies: Stuart Sim, for example, usefully presents post-marxism and post-marxism as qualitatively different enterprises: the former stresses linear movement and the surpassing of Marxism, while the latter affirms its existence, albeit in modified form.7 There is a case for approaching Sim’s injunction cautioning against the most extreme assessments of the fractious Marxism/post-marxism divide, as a form of what Robert K. Merton terms “sociological ambivalence.”8 Although ostensibly concerned with social stratification, Merton instructively identifies the problematic situation that arises when cultural expectations are compromised by social restrictions. Viewed as a sociological example of ambivalence, this situation is irreducible to a discrete cultural or social crisis; instead, it points to a contradiction between cultural and social structures. This, then, can be used to frame the existence of what we may call cultures of Marxist and post-marxist exposition that offer competing accounts and explanations of stratified social relations and statuses. The weltanschauung

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of Marxism, its culture, is based on a non-negotiable principle of class struggles within principal arenas, which, are based on a specific observation and understanding of antagonistic social structure. Coming out of this culture, post-marxist social understanding recognises the transformation of said class actors and social structure; the expansion of the middle class, rise of a technocratic class, working-class social mobility, and the emergence of an enterprise culture, for example, all indicate a profound social and historical shift. Sociologically, the analytical and political struggles between Marxism and post-marxism are partially indicative of an ambivalence forged by the distinction between their divergent descriptions of social structure, as well as the values internalised within their separate analytic modes. However, taken together, these positions reflect a set of leftist cultures that, nonetheless, share a political concern with social exploitation and inequality. James is useful here because his work encourages us to consider what it is about Marxism, as an ethical-explanatory analytical system and political orientation, that retains post-marxist interest, however qualified. Indeed, remembering Sim’s caveat with an emphasis on the Marxist, James embraces the challenge of forging a radical politics committed to activist engagement and social transformation and the particular interests and concerns of an internally differentiated class coalition. In his attempts to transcend the universal/particular and material/symbolic antagonisms, James presents the potential reformation of Marxism as a perhaps less decisive rupture from its past than is sometimes assumed. His position is echoed within contemporary perspectives on the reconstitution of Marxism that foreground the strategic maintenance of certain methodological and political imperatives. For example, while accepting the highly problematical determinism of its orthodox manifestations, historical materialism nevertheless generates a series of valuable core insights. And just as James consistently asserts the need to develop conceptual tools relevant to concrete social situations, historical materialism might yet continue to inform and enable discussions of the forces, relations, and modes of production, and provide a means to link social change to political struggles. Even if the symmetry between social change and class struggle is denied, this understanding of historical materialism is irreducible to a reactionary nostalgia, and remains important because its central intuition remains implicit throughout contemporary Marxism: that the epochal sweep of human history is not a random walk, but a coherent structure, which can be made the object of history. History is not simply a chain of events strung together; it is characterized by fundamental, underlying tendencies that give social change directionality and make certain kinds of futures more likely than others.9 Parallel to this understanding, James defends dialectical materialism against charges of its meta-theoretisation of a radical end-of-history. He states that while hypotheses are conceptual necessities for grouping facts,

198 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics it is the content and orientation of these hypotheses that are progressive or regressive—not the hypotheses themselves.10 Therefore, although he accepts its importance for himself, James appears to be less fixated on whether one subscribes to the dialectical method of historical development or not. Ultimately, he seems more concerned with what conclusions are drawn from historical analysis and, more importantly, its purpose in terms of the practical political projects it informs. There is, of course, the question of the correspondence between hypothesis, method, and result, in that variation in hypothesis and method may give rise to different results. Nevertheless, in the face of an escalating barbarism, James argues that dialectical materialism is a means to develop social understanding projected towards the establishment of a progressive politics; he does not seem to suggest that it is either the only means or that only Marxist dialecticians are the authentic carriers of the radical vocation. What is really at stake for James is the risk of surrendering practico-theoretical revolutionary goals and practices for a fatalistic hope in the conjuring of solutions to social divisions without radical political struggle. While this focus on political objectives may appear to some as eminently sensible, others rightly raise objections over the formalism of dialectical materialism and the analytical and political rigidities that often ensue. But if Marxism is not simply to be regarded as a decomposing body, James offers a way in which it can be seen as a system undergoing a process of metamorphosis and self-regeneration. Indeed, the thorny political nettle James grasps in articulating the demands of racial, class, and gender politics represents an attempt to refine the Marxist tradition into a mode of political thought and praxis sensitive to these disparate demands. Such an attempt anticipates— although at a different trajectory—the objections raised within post-marxist perspectives. The foundational tensions of our present conjuncture, populated by complex social subjects that have largely, if not wholly, rendered orthodox class affiliation obsolete, exist in embryonic form within James’s thought. His strategic directive for placing different contextual emphases on the articulation of race and class, whereby “[l]ife presents you with some strange difficulties and, at times, you have to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,” may be somewhat of a pragmatic fudge, but nonetheless it is driven by the demands of responding analytically and politically to complex social situations.11 It constitutes an attempt to respond to the ceaseless social shifts that doctrinaire leftist positions cannot hope to engage with any precision and empathy through a protracted “war of manoeuvre.” More importantly, James’s unrepentant Marxism and his commitment to recognise and understand diffuse social identities and claims may be used to institute a moratorium on the ensuing counter-productive friendly fire and collateral damage characteristic of the post-marxist/Marxist schism. This does not mean that debate should be avoided or disagreement swept under the carpet, but rather that discussions should be developed substantively, instead of within an atmosphere charged with moralistic recrimination that

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seems to be the default mode of discourse within the Marxism/post-marxism divide. Although James did not always achieve this substantiveness in his disputes with Soviet Communism—the schism of his day—much of his critique of state capitalism is precisely that: a substantive critique. If there is an ethnocentric and unreflexive orientation within Marxism, James’s legacy as a Socratic enabler and a sometimes cordial critic would appear to suggest that he attempted dialogue and debate wherever possible, especially when those glowering at each other over the divide share, in principle, broad social concerns.

II In terms of understanding the opening of the post-marxist breach it is undeniably important that anti-humanism and the denigration of the “essence of the subject” are unable to countenance the discrete class identities and associated subjectivity at the core of Marxism. These objections also have the effect of making James’s humanism—to some—unfashionable and unpalatable. But a nuanced analysis of James’s work demonstrates the extent to which this antagonism between the primacy of plural identities and reification of a singular human subject is a tenuous, if not false, opposition. James’s position asks an exacting political question of anti-humanism: For what purpose should “the human” be jettisoned as an analytical and political category? In response, we can initially look to the severity of contemporary objections to humanism as concretisations of Althusser’s protestation at the creation of a universal essence of “man” specific to each individual as “its real subject.”12 This artifice then suggests an “empiricism of the subject” contradicted by the implication that each and every empirical human subject carries the entire human essence, resulting in an untenable “idealism of the essence.”13 But while this is a largely compelling and fashionable argument, it presents a peculiar dilemma: by rejecting the strategic artifice of human subject as social agent in favour of locating the specificities of individual, cultural, and sexual identities and differences ad infinitum, the task of building a coherent oppositional politics capable of affecting practical and largescale social transformation moves further beyond our grasp.14 Indeed, this is not just a random historical occurrence. Rather, it signifies the disintegration of a Western intellectual formalism directed towards the development of a democratic social infrastructure during the latter half of the twentieth century, which has been replaced by a critical vacuum that, with socially debilitating effects, has encouraged the abdication of political engagement.15 Whether or not one wishes to accept this thesis, and the allied notion of the atomisation of the political subject, the question of humanism has notably reemerged in a variety of guises, including feminist and postracial, that asks whether the iniquitous Enlightenment project of humanism can be revised into a more egalitarian and responsive form, able to reinvigorate an

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oppositional politics of radical social transformation.16 For Edward Said, this constitutive project is consonant with poiesis: it demands a reflexive engagement of the high Protestant humanism that ignores and represses interests outside of those identified as its own.17 Instead, Said urges criticism of humanism in the name of humanism in order to make a secular, cosmopolitan humanism, charged with the immense political task of assuming responsibility for creating the thoughts and actions that shape the social world. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley’s promotion of a “critical humanism” outlines this attempt to rescue and revise humanism. Halliwell and Mousley advocate a “baggy humanism” informed by a “post-foundationalist” conception of the human that is appreciative of “the postmodern suspicion of essentialist categories” while, most importantly, it resists the notion that the human is “so lacking in foundations that it disappears.”18 Arguing that some views of humanism—for example, from certain critical theory perspectives—are gross simplifications that present and depend on a tidy homogeneous ideal of humanism that does not exist, they suggest that the diversity of humanist approaches is often ignored within anti-humanist critique. Furthermore, this analytical anti-humanist critique is politically reinforced by the presupposition that the notion of humanism is simply a variety of classical liberal individualism.19 This assessment of humanism as the progeny of classical Liberalism is, then, as much political objection as analytical critique. The injunction Althusser sets against “theoretical Humanism” as an “epistemological obstacle” that, as a counter-revolutionary petty-bourgeois moral ideology, prevents the correct understanding of social process, is symptomatic of the dilemmatic character of morality within Marxism.20 Steven Lukes draws attention to this in his assessment of contradictory Marxist approaches to morality: on one hand, morality serves as a political-ideological instrument that naturalises the value-acceptance of a hierarchical social order, and on the other hand, the critique of capitalism and human immiseration is dependent on a graphic and tacit moral understanding of human liberation.21 This tension resurfaces as a key characteristic of the sociological ambivalence at the centre of disputes over (post)Marxism, evident in Norman Geras’s recognition that the ambiguous relationship of Marxism to morality is a key point in the Marxist/post-marxist rupture.22 Distinguishing between empty and realist moralising, Geras asserts that Marxism is not unconcerned with morality; rather, he argues that Marxism seeks to connect moral ideals of human liberation to practical projects, such as informing agency and building movements—instead of misperceiving the moral dimension as an end in itself. And it is perhaps sensitivity towards this sense of moralism, and its sacred stain, as a free-floating resource—that can be (ab)used as a metaexplanatory device in justification for all manna of belief—that perturbs scientific Marxists and secular cosmopolitan post-marxists alike. With this in mind, Halliwell and Mousley’s rationale for a critical humanism—“if the human does not operate as some kind of given, then words like

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alienation, depersonalisation, and degradation lose their evaluative and ethical force”23—is worth consideration. And even though their support for a baseline idea of a human being as a means to recognise human degradation simply invites a counter-assertion—that such a natural-social being is a reified construct which obscures actually existing social processes—the resulting unsatisfactory circular debate resonates with James’s activist-intellectual journey across similar terrain. In his assessment of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, James notes that within modern American civilisation, the category of the human is equivalent with an inhumane barbarism. For Melville, James argues, material progress generated an inanimate mechanical creativity that, in turn, produced a human characterised by a ruthless, atomised individualism. It is this notion of the human, an extreme version of the liberal subject distanced from communal and moral life and reduced to utilitarian calculation and gain, that provides fertile ground for the development of totalitarianism: in their different guises and roles, the monomaniacal, fellow-traveller, and pusillanimous ideal-typical individuals who populate the Pequod as a microcosm of modern society are all instrumental in the escalation of modern barbarism. But before this is taken as evidence of an anti-humanist strain within James’s work, it must be noted that he is referring specifically to this degraded version of the human and not the human as it might otherwise be—a creative, integrated personality. It is the inhumane version of modernity that is responsible for destroying collective and emotional human life in favour of a totalitarian personality within a barbaric society that has no purpose except to maximise the frightening power at its disposal. Within this society, James argues that humanity will disappear, and in its place “there would remain only abstract intellect, abstract science, abstract technology, alive, but blank, serving no human purpose but merely the abstract purpose itself.”24 And even Ahab, the totalitarian figure par excellence, responsible for dehumanising his subjects and himself, falls within the redemptive possibilities of James’s authentic human. Quite simply, James recognises—as Césaire does so poignantly in Discourse on Colonialism—that inhumane behaviour dehumanises the perpetrator. Indeed, James suggests that Melville identifies and condemns the predicament consuming Ahab thus: “It is this weight of consciousness and of knowledge, absence of naturalness, lack of human association, delving into the inner consciousness, seeking to answer problems which cannot be answered, but which the tortured personality in its misery must continue to ask.”25 Scientific knowledge and technological advancement that is disdainful of worthy humanistic moral objectives therefore sentences the modern human to an isolated, meaninglessly introspective, and ultimately atrophying existence. In American Civilization, James notes that the only hope lies in the reintegration of arts and science and in the establishment of meaningful forms of humanistic association and recreation. In an earlier 1944 letter to Constance Webb, he went so far as to suggest that “[i]n a socialist society,

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a man [sic] will not be a drudge, scared of losing his job, suppressed and crushed from birth. He will be stable, because society will be stable, and yet he will be able to develop the creative capacity that exists in every human being to some degree or other.”26 Re-read within the framework of “critical humanism,” Marxism combines a depiction of existing empirical objects, such as society and capital, with an intuitive form of “emotional intelligence” that enables radically driven value judgements of social situations on moral terms.27 Similarly, assuming James intends the “creative capacity” of human beings to be understood as an indisputable “good,” then the normative concept of human need within Marxism exceeds a simple means/ends calculation—which is one of his most significant, if largely ignored and underestimated, critical interventions. This can be traced through James’s approach to what we might call cultural politics, that is perhaps most clearly evident within, and yet extends beyond, the specific sociopoetics of cricket. In paying attention to the particular forms of participatory self-activity that cricket and its high aestheticism stimulate, James addresses the wider question of exactly what such qualitatively “new” people and their satisfactions are. The starting point is the predicament Jean-Paul Sartre identifies in Black Orpheus: “It is necessary . . . to recognize that it is the present circumstances of the class struggle which turn the worker from poetic expression. Oppressed by technical forces, he wishes to be technician; because he knows that these technical forces will be the instrument of his liberation.”28 James, therefore, seeks liberation in two senses: from alienation and exploitation, and in what he calls “creative universality.” This first imperative leans heavily on the “young Marx,” seeking the liberation of human productive capacity from the constraints of the objectification of labour and its productive power, exterior to its producer.29 The second aim, however, is more distinctively Jamesian. Whereas that same Marx would note that labour produces material beauty as well as the privation, stupidity, and cretinism of the worker, whose own spontaneous activity remains independent of and external to them, James seeks to uncover forms of imaginative and creative human endeavour not governed by “alien activity,” whether it be external labour or “gods or devils.” The value of James’s commitment to a holistic politics that at least recognises the breadth of human social consciousness, desire, and existence is inestimable. He clearly understands that a radical politics might readily imagine the amelioration of material privation, but that this ideal of negation, even if realised, cannot and will not nourish the affirmative struggle for human subjective happiness.

III James’s recognition of the “struggle for happiness” within the United States has been understood as “an intense desire among people to bring the

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separate facets of human experience into an active relationship, to express their full and free individuality within new and expanded conceptions of social life.”30 This is without doubt an immense task. Such a specific concern is arguably barely implied within Marxism, alluded to only as a teleological proposition: for example, as detailed in The Communist Manifesto, that once humans are freed from the degradations of capital and the guiding hand of the market, they will enjoy the “sober senses” that will enable them to (re)consider their relations with each other. If this suggestion has been subsequently reinterpreted as the possibility of workers creating the necessary society and ethical order within given historical circumstances, it is worth considering the potentially reactionary and ultimately counterrevolutionary effects of such pragmatic radicalism. James’s radical spontaneity, for example, reflects such morphological principles, and is unable to fully account for various significant reactionary and contradictory social forces such as patriarchy. However, in his later works, including American Civilization and Beyond a Boundary, the mature James ponders the social and human within the problematic dialectic of individual and ethical will and collective and practical duty that seriously compromised his attempt to imagine a spontaneous radical consciousness and its concomitant organic political organisation in a more productive vein. Accepting humans as social animals by practical consequence if not intrinsic design, James recognises that the subjective struggle for happiness is also inter-subjective. Therefore, while his concept of spontaneity, articulated explicitly in his work of the 1940s such as Notes on Dialectics, was predicated on a normative account of organic self-activity and organisational process, he neither built a detailed conceptual model of spontaneity nor gave an adequate theoretical explanation of it. Although James was, arguably, totally uninterested in such a formal analytical undertaking, the theoretical elements of this problem are important given its affinity with the grand ethical and analytical problematic faced by classical positivist sociology and modern moral philosophy. In general, dominant attempts to address the issue of modern human and social fulfilment have followed two paths. At one level, classical sociological attempts to isolate the basis of social solidarity identified a problematic that was at once structural and rational but, perhaps most importantly, also moral. The structure and rules of social organisation could not be correctly established by simply identifying their underlying principles of reason. The development of sociological understanding, then, also required building an appreciation of the underlying moral sense of the good and the right that enabled and cohered the social. As such, Auguste Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” and Émile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” represent attempts to build a holistic account of social morphology. At another, dominant level of analysis, modernity is characteristic of a fundamental moral crisis. The advance of secularity has either left human action dangerously adrift without a moral compass, as Alasdair MacIntyre suggests, or it has

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encouraged humans to assume the position of deity as Adorno and Horkheimer argue, each with disastrous results.31 Therefore, within extensively rehearsed evaluations of secular modernity, the status of moral life veers somewhere between “problem” and “crisis”; effectively, this makes a serious concern with worldly human-made “happiness” at best foolishly naïve and at worst a disingenuous ruse. James approaches this arduous task from a simple starting point: the reintegration of human emotional and social life: “politics, art, life, love in the modern world, all become so closely integrated that to understand one is to understand all.”32 This statement suggests a project analogous to the sociological imagination sketched at the outset of this book—that social understanding demands an appreciation of the individual and vice versa. Initially, for James, this calls for an “integrated personality,” characterised by the sum of their existence instead of by false compartmentalisations into different spheres of activity. Thus even though intimate relationships, mental contemplation, physical labour, and creative recreation, for example, are specific facets of human existence, they are not wholly separate and distinct from each other; in order to understand and know human existence, it must be understood in its totality. The representative figure of James as polymath activist-intellectual is an instructive example, which Sylvia Wynter recognises in the various positionalities—black and yet British, colonial and classically educated, middle class with proletarian affinities, Marxist and Puritan, and so on—that created a “pluri-consciousness of the Jamesian identity.”33 While this statement is obvious enough, it provides the basis for Wynter’s important and inestimable point that the “quest to contain them all came to constitute the Jamesian poiesis,”34 and even though they constituted profane contradictions that James himself lived, they are not necessarily incompatible. Similarly, for James, there is nothing to suggest that situated national, class, attitudinal, racialized, political and cultural perspectives, to name but a few, must be separated out within a “vision of life.” Rather, he argues that the sometimes paradoxical and antagonistic relationship between these existential modalities indicates the pressures of social life under the constraints of industrial capitalism; the end result of this anomie is the distortion of the true capacities of human consciousness and potentialities of human social life. Therefore, as Wynter notes, James is concerned with recovering the noble quest for human freedom as creative expression and edification that is lost within the commodity relations of capitalism and its utilitarian ethics of human action. From his social and personal vantage point as an activist and intellectual, James eschews the stark choice of a commitment to either the class struggle as fundamental or the contingent heterogeneity of social identities and subject positions. This refusal is superficially apparent in his enduring engagement with questions of race, politics, and poetics, and develops through the continual negotiations he undertakes in the pursuit of effecting

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social change, all the while retaining sight of the individual. Indeed, James’s elective affinities endow his legacy with the capacity to engage with and inform a range of contemporary concerns that cannot be attributed to a modish eclecticism without principled political and methodological concern. This capacity is evinced by reconstructions of his thought, allied to various contemporary critical approaches: therefore we have James the deconstructionist; James the proto-postcolonialist; the James who is implicated within the emergence of poststructuralism; and James the harbinger of identity politics.35 Although some of these associations are, at best, tenuous, many are reasonable (re)interpretations of James, made possible by the depth of his principled commitments to Marxism and humanism that allow him to move between them both and their (for him) artificial divide.36 However, beyond his expansive analytical frame, James’s commitment to holistic understanding is suffused with the irreducibility of human social and moral life to prosaic subsistence. And although, as we have seen, this contention is controversial in that it validates esoteric obscurantism and bourgeois individualism, James remains unrepentant. As in Robert Oppenheim’s poem, in James’s recognition of and commitment to the material satisfaction, humanistic edification, and psychic peace of human social actors, a diet of bread and roses is the order of the day. At this critical moment we are party to the transition from epiphany— stated as a modern problematic in various texts such as Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and American Civilization—to poiesis, sketched in his letters to Constance Webb and the later Beyond a Boundary. As a matter of poiesis, the making of “free creative universality,” James embarks on a secular eschatological project traditionally resisted within Marxism. It is, therefore, not enough to establish “goods” within human emotional and social life, with regard to quantity and utility, without an appreciation of principles of quality and inter-subjective relations. Thus, James asserts that a politics needs to build positive prescriptions for human emotional and psychic fulfilment. The recognition of the modern integration of “politics, art, life, and love” is not only necessary for understanding the human and social, but crucial for their creative development into unparalleled realms of free expression and fulfilment: Always remembering however that the poet reacts to life emotionally— and without that, though he were the wisest man in the world, he could not write a line of verse. But the more humanity develops the more the emotional response depends upon a conception of the world which does not so much guide the poetry, but releases and expands the personality, integrates it, opens horizons, and thus gives the emotional responses a range and depth and power impossible otherwise. . . . The glory of life in our age is that this intense, individual, personal life can, in fact must, be lived, in harmony with the great social forces that are now striving to carry humanity over the last barrier.37

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This poiesis returns us to a familiar proposition: spontaneity. Politically, an approximation of Jamesian spontaneity may be found within contemporary processes of “transcommunality”—the purposive relationship between different groups and organisations that is developed by engaging in”‘common tasks,” characterised by horizontal procedures of constant negotiation, instead of vertical or top-down directives.38 However, this proposition is entirely different within personal life. In the Greek popular democracy with which James is so enamoured, this problem is resolved through a relatively straightforward reconciliation of reason and ethics, whereby once one is aware of the ethically correct response, one is rationally compelled to undertake that course of action.39 While James’s Hellenic nostalgia arguably shares an affinity with this attempt to secure an indissoluble bond between the rationally right and ethically good, he offers no such formalist explanation. Instead, James presents his vision of a radical human poiesis within the attempt at unqualified self-expression and the idealised state of authentic being-in-itself, which Sartre recognises as “sincerity.” However, such sincere creative personal expression is not introspective and individualist, but it has a profound collective and social resonance. James describes it in a letter to Constance Webb thus: the more genuinely yourself you are, the more you express your own genuine personality, the easier it is for people to recognise that you express something which is inside them. Often they don’t know it. The artist, writer, actor, painter expresses something by strenuous effort. And people say “Yes, that’s wonderful.” They mean “I have felt that all along.”40 Even though this dialogic exchange between expression and understanding is entirely predicated on a pivotal “I”—the artist/producer and the spectator/consumer—James characterises this as a highly empathetic exchange. The “I,” although arguably egocentric in terms of perception, is nonetheless relational, and their fulfilment, as Tzvetan Todorov argues, emerges from the establishment of our consciousness, selves, and existence as “constitutively incomplete” without interaction with others.41 Todorov thus places the quality of inter-subjective relations central to human desire, the aim of which is not pleasure but a certain quality of human, interpersonal relations. Given the “affections” that Todorov argues “constitute the essential part of our lives, and . . . depend on others”—albeit after the satisfaction of basic subsistence needs—the task for James is to establish the forms of social relations that typify an integrated human.42 This existence would reconcile political and poetic desires alongside the negation of immiseration and affirmation of love. With this impossible yet vital pursuit in mind, James’s own poignant reflection, in a 1943 letter to Constance Webb, is unsurpassed; it bears repeating at length and is presented without further mediation on my part:

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I am sitting and watching the water and feel a strange inability to say what I want to say. Let me try again. I am political. I live at present in the daily expectation of the beginning of an upheaval in Europe, marking the beginning of the socialist revolution. I think of that many hours every day. It keeps me alive. It governs my every activity. I feel life is worth living on account of that. I want to give every drop I have in me to help the cause on. And yet if someone were to say wish two wishes, I would say (1) the socialist revolution and (2) to sit on the platform with Constance and watch the evening sun go down. The connection may seem to some monstrous. It isn’t. Somehow the intensity of a personal experience, even at this distance, the sense of beauty and companionship, which are so very rare, such things when exercised only in imagination and over a continent’s distance, seem to give a personal meaning and significance to the great struggles opening up in Europe.43 It is not incidental that my statements here regarding the human have had little to say affirmatively about race. It bears noting that within the idyllic Jamesian coalescence of the political and the poetic there is minimal, indeed if any, significant mention of the racial. Instead, James notes—as Fanon would develop in greater detail and depth in a few short years—the debilitating existential effects of racialization, affecting the personality of all—particularly . . . the ones that are discriminated against. They are conscious of difference and if they have grown up in an atmosphere where this difference is oppressive, or live in it, then they are twisted some way unless they wrestle with it and acquire a philosophic attitude—which is not easy.44 Therefore, given that “Negro nationalism” serves as a strategy for developing affirmative self-understanding and cohesive organisation that enables struggles for integration into American society, the value of racial identification appears to be instrumental and not intrinsic. Neither black nor white America has confronted the “Negro question” as a fundamental aspect of “the life of the nation as a whole.”45 The implication that it is national (social) life which is fundamental to the “Negro question,” and not the “problem” or issue of race relations per se, is highly significant. James seems to be advancing a variety of the “anti-racist racism,” identified within Negritude, that assaults white supremacy through the dialectical negation of blackness which, as negativity, cannot persist: “dedicated to its own destruction, it is passage and not objective, means and not ultimate goal.”46 Maybe it is this ambition to be human that produces the James who is self-declaredly unaffected by the rude intrusions of racism into his life, and who understands race to be (empirically) supplemental to class and yet not (analytically) incidental. As a Marxist, racial struggles are, for James, inextricably linked to class struggles and he cannot countenance a metaphysical

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notion of race. But, most importantly, as a humanist Marxist, racism is a real, visceral, and debilitating human experience that can never be dismissed as incidental; and yet, the idealised figure of the human that James conjures is never racial or racialized. It is characterised by foundational moral, intellectual, creative and political qualities that James takes—or hopes—to be authentically universal. Insights and errors together, James’s monumental social thought remains relevant. Interdisciplinary in approach and optimistic in its substantive evaluations, James’s Marxism moves beyond the activity of critique. Reflecting the spirit of Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach, James attempts to move from a recognition of the modern epiphanies of human freedom and democratic sociality towards their realisation. Therefore, the mundane ordinariness of cultural pursuits and individual and collective existence constitute important political activity; the making of human moral and social life constitutes an imaginative Jamesian odyssey from epiphany to poiesis. As chronicled in the pages above, there is much to take issue with—especially James’s fetishised concentration on human agency that often comes at the expense of a serious consideration of its social limits. However, as much as this is a serious weakness, for me, it is never quite a fatal flaw. James’s stubborn refusal to submit to the social, historical, and analytical forces of alienation, and the politics of negation they demand, is a compelling intellectual strength and political virtue. As we confront the positive project of building affirmative political goals, developed through ongoing dialogic negotiation and subject to ethical justification, James remains instructive. James’s faith in the emancipating force of human creativity, his trust in social agents’ insurgent self-activity, and his hope for an ethics of collective social commitment are laudable secular epiphanies that represent an exemplary radical humanist ambition worth aspiring to.

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1970), 9. 2. Chetan Bhatt, “Contemporary Geopolitics and ‘Alterity’ Research,” in Researching Race and Racism, ed. Martin Bulmer and John Solomos (London: Routledge, 2004), 16–17. 3. James’s birthplace in Trinidad is hotly disputed. Two of his biographers, Paul Buhle and Kent Worcester, differ, citing Port-of-Spain and Caroni respectively, while Selwyn Cudjoe strongly disagrees with both, stating that James was born in Tunapuna. See Buhle, C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Verso, 1988), 15; Kent Worcester, C. L. R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 3; and Selwyn Cudjoe, “C. L. R. James and the Trinidad and Tobago Intellectual Tradition, or, Not Learning Shakespeare Under a Mango Tree,” New Left Review 223 (1997): 114–25. 4. See Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary; Anna Grimshaw, “C. L. R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the Twentieth Century” in The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Stuart Hall, “C. L. R. James: A Portrait” in C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, ed. Paul Buhle and Paget Henry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992); and Worcester, Political Biography. 5. C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (London: Allison and Busby, 1980). 6. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 22. 7. See Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (London: Bookmarks, 1993). 8. Erich Fromm, On Being Human (New York: Continuum, 1994), 139–41; Leszek Kolakowski, “The Priest and the Jester,” in Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 10. 9. See Corliss Lamont, Humanism as a Philosophy, 3rd ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950); Paul Kurtz, Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for a New Planetary Humanism (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000); A. C. Grayling, Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lewis Vaughn and Austin Dacey, The Case for Humanism: An Introduction (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Richard Norman, On Humanism (London: Routledge, 2004); and Jim Herrick, Humanism: An Introduction (New York: Prometheus Books, 2005). 10. John Bracey, “Remembering C. L. R. James,” in C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C. L. R. James, 1939–1949, ed. Scott

210 Notes

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

McLemee and Paul Le Blanc (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), 54; emphasis added. Zhang Longxi, “Marxism: From Scientific to Utopian,” in Wither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective, ed. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (London: Routledge, 1995), 76. Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary, 4. Erich Fromm, On Being Human, 16. C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1995), 150. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: New Left Books, 1979). Zygmunt Bauman’s account of the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a paradigmatic example of modern rational calculation and bureaucratic efficiency that sets it apart from previous genocidal events is worth considering here. Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Interactionism (London: Sage, 1989), 15. Ibid., 19. Throughout this book, I refer to certain singular nouns such as “the individual” as sociological concepts and political entities. Therefore, I will use plural pronouns instead of singular pronouns when referring to these singular nouns in the sociological and political sense. Of course, poetics might be considered largely irrelevant to a work such as Notes on Dialectics; nonetheless the book has a core political concern that makes reference to racial struggles. My main point is that at least one, but more often than not two or more, of the three themes are central to James’s individual works. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), 102. Hall, “Portrait,” 3. Martin Glaberman, “C. L. R. James: A Recollection” in C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, 47. Ibid. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1989), 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “More on Power/Knowledge,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. D. Landry and G. Maclean (London: Routledge, 1996), 142. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), 300–06. Paul Buhle, “Rethinking the Rethinking,” The C. L. R. James Journal 6, no. 1 (1998): 66.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983); Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22, (winter 1981): 3–14 and “Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). I refer to these four titles as indicative texts; a more extensive list would include titles such as the following: Barry Smart,

Notes

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

211

Facing Modernity: Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Morality (London: Sage, 1999); Nigel Dodd, Social Theory and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1999); and Scott Lash, Another Modernity, a Different Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). This list is numerous and includes Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983); Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Couze Venn, Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity (London: Sage, 2001). Aldon Lynn Nielsen, C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 77; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Stuart Hall , “Breaking Bread with History: C. L. R. James and The Black Jacobins,” interview by Bill Schwarz, History Workshop Journal 46 (1998): 17–31. I refer to “San Domingo” instead of the accepted “Saint Domingue” for the purpose of consistency with James’s terminology. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1995). Giddens, Consequences of Modernity. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), ix. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980) 140–41. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 140. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995); and Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London, Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2000), 44–45. James, Black Jacobins, 12. Kadiatu Kanneh, African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures (London: Routledge, 1998), 68. James, Black Jacobins, 12. Ibid., 13. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 136, italics in the original. Ibid. Ibid. James, Black Jacobins, 9. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139. James, Black Jacobins, 13. See David Lyon, The Rise of Surveillance Society: Computers and Social Control in Context (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). It has been suggested that English colonies attempted to import the template of representative government for the production of slave laws determined by slave owners, in contrast to Spanish colonies where such laws were issued directly from the “mother country.” See Sidney W. Mintz, “Slavery and Emergent Capitalisms,” in Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History, ed.

212 Notes

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1969); and Bonham C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). James Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London: Routledge, 1996). A major example of this is found in Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For other discussions, see Gregor McLennan, Pluralism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1995), 18–19; and Caroline Ramazanoglu, ed., Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism (London: Routledge, 1993). An example here might be the divergence between an appreciation of power as producing certain (even unintentional) effects and ascertaining how particular counter-discourses and oppositional practices may emerge as the manifestation of an autonomous and radically reflexive consciousness. See Stuart Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” interview by Lawrence Grossberg, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996). Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Post-marxism: Between/Beyond Critical Postmodernism and Cultural Studies,” Media, Culture and Society 13, no. 1 (1991): 35–51. For an interesting discussion with Foucault on the role of the intellectual in the construction of and struggle against their formal expertise as a political problematic, see “Intellectuals and Power,” trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989). Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 226 emphasis in original. James, Modern Politics pp 16–18. C. L. R. James, Modern Politics (Detroit: Bewick, 1973), 16–18. Stuart Hall, “When was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996). Giddens, Consequences of Modernity; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1993); and Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). See Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmoderism and Identity (London: Sage, 1995); and Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Giddens, Modernity. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (London: New Beacon Books, 1970), 10. James, Black Jacobins, 405. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 55. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 71. Ibid., 98. See O. Nigel Boland “Creolization and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History,” in Intellectuals in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, vol. 1: Spectre of the New Class: The Commonwealth Caribbean, ed. Alistair Hennessy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Brathwaite, Folk

Notes

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

213

Culture of the Slaves and Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1974); Glissant, Caribbean Discourse; Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1967); and M. G. Smith, Culture, Race and Class in the Commonwealth Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1984). Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, 16. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); and James Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (London: Cassell, 2000). Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). James, Black Jacobins, 407. Anthony Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C. L. R. James (London: Pluto, 1997). Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary, 59. See James’s 1939 article “The Destiny of the Negro: An Historical Overview,” in C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” ed. Scott McLemee (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996). C. L. R. James, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of Their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World,” in Amistad 1: Writings on Black History and Culture ed. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris (New York: Random House, 1972), 132–133. Gilroy, Black Atlantic; and Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994). Paul Gilroy, “To Be Real: The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture,” in Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (London: ICA 1995); Glissant, Caribbean Discourse. James, “Atlantic Slave Trade,”132–33. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 98. Martin Glaberman, “Theory and Practice,” appendix to Marxism For Our Times: C. L. R. James on Revolutionary Organization, ed. Martin Glaberman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). C. L. R. James, “George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary,” in At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison and Busby, 1984). Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom, 24. The Johnson Forest Tendency—usually referred to as the JFT—was the name given to the small group working within the Fourth International in the U.S. The name was taken from the pen names of its founders, “J. R. Johnson” (James) and “Freddie Forest” (Raya Dunayevskaya). Olga Domanski to the Resident Editorial Board, n.d., in Pre-Plenum Discussion Bulletin No. 2 (Chicago: News and Letters, 1989), 1–10. Ibid., 6. Ibid. The implosion of the JFT and its subsequent splintering into the respective Jamesian and Dunayevskayian groups, “Correspondence” and “News and Letters,” means that this dispute is difficult to resolve, driven perhaps as much by personal enmity as philosophical and political principle. Nielsen, Critical Introduction, 111. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 65–66.

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65. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 13. 66. Ibid., 13. 67. James, Black Jacobins, 249. 68. C. L. R. James, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” in C. L. R. James Reader, 166. 69. See Barbara J. Webb, Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). 70. Wilson Harris, History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas (Wellesley: Calaloux, 1995). 71. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1968); and Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 72. Baruch Hirson, “Communalism and Socialism in Africa: The Misdirection of C. L. R. James,” Searchlight South Africa 1 no. 4 (1990): 64. 73. Kara Rabbitt, “C. L. R. James’s Figuring of Toussaint-Louverture: The Black Jacobins and the Literary Hero,” in C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). 74. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), 11. 75. Ibid., 14. 76. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, new ed. (London: Faber, 1993). 77. James, Black Jacobins, 25–26. 78. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 79. Ibid., 377. 80. Ibid., 1033, italics in the original. 81. James, “Atlantic Slave Trade,” 119–164. 82. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery and The Negro in the Caribbean (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1969); and Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975). 83. James, “Atlantic Slave Trade,” 134. 84. James, Black Jacobins, 25. 85. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), 93. 86. ———, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in The First International and After: Political Writings, vol. 3, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). 87. See Gregor McLennan’s interesting discussion of the rhetorical force of The Communist Manifesto as a crucial strategic supplement to its substantive coherence that combines the analytical demands of the human sciences with an ethics of understanding and political commitment. “Re-Canonizing Marx,” Cultural Studies 13, no. 4 (1999): 555–76. 88. James, Black Jacobins, 25. 89. Ibid., 85–86, emphasis added. 90. Hall, “Breaking Bread,” 23. 91. Brian Meeks, Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bahr (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1996). 92. James, Black Jacobins, 19. 93. C. L. R. James, “The Case for West Indian Self-Government,” in C. L. R. James Reader, 51.

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94. However, this tension is also apparent in influential anthropological research of that era. For example, Ruth Benedict identifies racial groups as “in-groups” and “out-groups,” whose competition for scarce social and economic resources led to the naturalisation of their social differences, yet who never fully escaped the traces of racial biologism. See Patterns of Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1935). Similarly, in his own discussion of relations and tensions between West Indians of East Indian and African descent, James characterises black prejudice as a “social sickness,” learnt and transmitted from dominant prejudices within slave and colonial society. His simple response is to state that such prejudices are overcome through concrete activities, such as trades union organising or intermarriage between black men and Asian women, without exploring the specific terms of these relationships at any length. See James, “West Indians of East Indian Descent,” IBIS Pamphlet, no. 1 (Port of Spain: Trinidad, 1965). 95. James, “Destiny of the Negro,” 90, emphasis added. 96. See David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); and Peter Wade, Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (London: Pluto, 2002). 97. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 103. 98. While I disagree with the salience of the term “mulatto,” I refer to it with respect to James’s usage and for the purpose of consistency. 99. James, Black Jacobins, 230. 100. Ibid., 207. 101. Karl Marx, “Letters on Ireland,” in First International and After, 169. 102. Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary. 103. James, Black Jacobins, 81–82. 104. Ibid., 120. 105. James, “Atlantic Slave Trade,”146. 106. James, Black Jacobins, 138–39. 107. Ibid., 283. 108. Brennan, Home In the World, 227; and Caliban’s Freedom, 43–44. 109. Nielsen, Critical Introduction, 128. 110. Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary, 62. 111. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, “C. L. R. James, Blackness, and the Making of a NeoMarxist Diasporan Historiography,” Nature, Society and Thought 11 (spring 1998): 53–89. 112. C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” in C. L. R. James Reader, 404. 113. James, Black Jacobins, xi. 114. Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000). 115. Although James places both the Paris masses and the black Jacobins within the same internationalist proletarian frame and develops an account of the parallels between their radical activity, he does not specify a correspondence between their subjective characters. While it is clear that the black Jacobins develop a revolutionary consciousness through an acute awareness of material exploitation and human injustice as central to their situation, as well as a desire for psychic peace, James does not fully identify a similar radical subject within the French Revolution. Even if this disparity is understandable, given that San Domingo is his prime authorial concern, it renders the formulation and efficacy of his internationalism incomplete, and it invites the reification of the black Jacobins as exemplars of the modern social personality and as the vanguard of revolutionary social transformation.

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Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. Judith Ryan, in Goethe: The Collected Works, vol. 11, ed. David E. Wellbery (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 234. 2. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 3. Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 201–02. 4. James, “Atlantic Slave Trade,” 156, emphasis added. 5. Marshall Berman, Adventures in Marxism (London: Verso, 1999), 14. 6. Berman, All That Is Solid, 92. 7. James, Beyond a Boundary. 8. Jim Murray, “The Boy at the Window,” afterword to Rethinking C. L. R. James, ed. Grant Farred (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 9. Nielsen, Critical Introduction. 10. James, Beyond a Boundary, 28. 11. Ibid., 25. 12. Ibid., 30. 13. See Janet G. Vaillant, Black, French and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 14. James, Beyond a Boundary, 32. 15. Ibid., 50. 16. Ibid., 53. 17. Grant Farred, “The Maple Man: How Cricket Made a Postcolonial Intellectual,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James, 167. 18. James, Beyond a Boundary, 41. 19. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 20. ———, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 21. Cf. Theodor Adorno’s argument that the lived experience of artworks enables a depth of understanding that cannot be achieved through detached contemplation of an abstracted and inanimate object. Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 22. James, Beyond a Boundary, 34. 23. Hazel V. Carby, Race Men: The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). 24. C. L. R. James, “The Intelligence of the Negro,” in From Trinidad: An Anthology of Early West Indian Writing, ed. R. W. Sander (New York: Africana, 1978). 25. James, Beyond a Boundary, chap. 17. 26. Ibid., 222. 27. Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 41. 28. James, Beyond a Boundary, 222. 29. Ibid., 39. 30. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in Voices From the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 47. 31. Vaillant, Black, French and African, 91–94. 32. See Stanislas Adotevi, “The Strategy of Culture,” The Black Scholar 1, no. 1 (1969): 27–35; A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Rex Nettleford, “The Aesthetics of Négritude: A Metaphor for Liberation” in Intellectuals in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean. Spectre of the New Class:

Notes

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

217

The Commonwealth Caribbean, vol. 1, ed. Alistair Hennessy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); and Vaillant, Black, French and African. Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in Voices From the Harlem Renaissance, 396. For an excellent discussion of the Hurston/Wright dispute, see William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 153–78. Examples of such debates include Du Bois and Langston Hughes’s disagreement over Carl Van Vechten’s controversial novel Nigger Heaven (1926), and whether it is defensible through an appeal to artistic freedoms or unconscionable in its advocacy of traditional, derogatory black stereotypes; meditations on the (un)desirable role of propaganda within art in Du Bois’s “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) and Alain Locke’s “Art or Propaganda” (1928); and the theme of racial pride as an individual and collective group enterprise in Du Bois’s “On Being Ashamed of Oneself” (1933) and Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) in Voices From the Harlem Renaissance. James, “Case for West Indian Self-Government.” See Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary, 53–59; Robert A. Hill, “In England, 1932– 1938,” in C. L. R. James: His Life and Work, ed. Paul Buhle (London: Allison and Busby, 1986); Worcester, Political Biography, 31–41; Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom, 38–40. For some of James’s own recollections on this intervention, see C. L. R. James, interview by Alan Mackenzie and Paul Gilroy, in ed. Henry Abelove & E. P. Thompson, Visions of History (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Visions of History, 267. Worcester, Political Biography, 24. See Anthony Bogues, afterword to Small Axe 8 (2000): 113–17 and Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003). C. L. R. James, “The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction: A Comparative Analysis,” Small Axe 8, (2000): 83–98. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 85. Bogues, afterword, 115–16. James, “The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction,” 84. C. L. R. James, “How I Would Rewrite The Black Jacobins,” Small Axe 8 (2000): 100. Bogues, afterword, 116. Ibid., 117, emphasis in original. Bogues, Black Heretics 80. C. L. R. James, “How I Wrote The Black Jacobins,” Small Axe 8 (2000): 67–72. Bogues, Black Heretics, 81–82. See Charles W. Mills’s useful discussion, “Under Class Under Standings,” in From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Leon Trotsky, “The Discussions in Coyoacán,” in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, 2nd ed., ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), 33–69. James’s reference to black anti-Semitism as a class antagonism provides a dangerous case in point: “The movements which seek ‘to drive the Jew out of Harlem and the South Side’ have a valid class base. They are the reactions of the resentful Negro seeking economic relief and some salve for his humiliated racial pride. That these sentiments can be exploited by fanatical idiots, Negro

218

56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

Notes anti-Semites, or self-seeking businessmen, does not alter their fundamentally progressive basis.” “The Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society,” in C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 83. If, as thinkers from Adorno and Horkheimer to Etienne Balibar have suggested, anti-Semitism contains an insidious form of “cultural racism” partially sustained by the symbolic economy of a moral racial taxonomy, then the “fundamentally progressive” character of the “class antagonism” defence breaks down when articulated through nebulous non-class symbolic elements such as “racial pride.” Cf. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 168–208 and Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism,’ ” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 23–24. Beginning with his assessment of the appointment of a Negro department within the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1936 as a move that enabled unified black and white activity in various struggles, James then cites the example of whites working with blacks in the Southern sharecroppers’ union as a basis to erode their “agelong prejudices.” “Self-Determination for the American Negroes,” in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism, 41. Ibid., 39–42. C. L. R. James, “Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question,” in C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 8, italics in the original. For a seminal polemic on the Communist Party USA’s “Black Belt” policy, see Max Shachtman, Race and Revolution (London: Verso, 2003). For an overview, see Susan Campbell, “‘Black Bolsheviks’ and Recognition of AfricanAmerica’s Right to Self-Determination by the Communist Party USA,” Science and Society 58, no. 4 (1994–1995): 440–70. James, “Plans for the Negro Organization,” in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism, 61; and “Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question,” in C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 8. James, “Self-Determination,” 48. C. L. R. James, “The Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society,” in C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 64–65. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 18. Ibid., 24. John Bracey, “Nello,” in C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, 54. Ibid. James, Black Jacobins, 288. James, “How I would rewrite The Black Jacobins,” 110. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 153–69. James, Notes on Dialectics, 175–76. C. L. R. James, “The Old World and the New,” in At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison and Busby, 1984). James, “The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction.” C. L. R. James, “The Caribbean Rejection” (paper presented at a conference on “Politics, Philosophy and Creative Literature,” Makerere University College, Uganda, 23–25 August, 1968). James, Black Jacobins, 401. Cf. James, Black Jacobins, 401, lines 15–22, with Césaire, Notebook of a Return, 125, lines 39–41; 127, lines 1–3; and 124, lines 39–41 and 1–3. Césaire, Notebook of a Return, 125, lines 40–41. C. L. R. James, “A National Purpose for West Indian Peoples,” in At the Rendezvous of Victory, 146. Lorenzo Simpson, The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism (London: Routledge, 2001), 11.

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79. Frank Birbalsingh, The Rise of Westindian Cricket: From Colony to Nation (St John’s, Antigua: Hansib, 1996), 239. 80. Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso, 1998), 25. 81. C. L. R. James, “Caribbean Rejection.” 82. Nicole King, C. L. R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001). 83. Ibid., 37. 84. Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 341; and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 138. 85. F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). 86. See Richard Wright, “The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People” and “Tradition and Industrialization” in White Man, Listen! Lectures in Europe, 1950–1956 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995). 87. Léopold Senghor, “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century,” in The Africa Reader, ed. Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson (New York: Random House 1970). His biographer, Janet Vailliant, notes that Senghor later revised this Manichean divide, and moved towards an understanding of the respective intuitive and discursive reason of Africa and Europe as complimentary and reflective of the cultural syncretism of métissage that was crucial to individual and social progression. Vailliant, Black, French and African, 264–67. 88. In his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, Gobineau asserts: “The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or, if intelligent, both weak and ugly.” Joseph Arthur comte de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967), 209. 89. Arnold, Modernism and Negritude, 40–41. 90. Gilroy, Between Camps. 91. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1978), 266–67. 92. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity,” from “Shadow and Act” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 82. 93. Carl Pedersen, “Sea Change: The Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Imagination,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 94. Bill Schwarz, “Black Metropolis, White England,” in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (London: Routledge, 1996). 95. Tina Campt’s study of black Germans within the Third Reich provides a remarkable example that expands the normative Jewish/Nazi frame for understanding Nazi racial hygiene. It also explores the subjection of black populations to the dictates of racial purity outside of accustomed sociohistorical and analytical frames. Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 96. C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (London: Allison and Busby, 1977), 34. 97. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 41.

220

Notes

98. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Radical Black Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 177–78. 99. Even though its conflations are extremely controversial, David Cannadine’s suggestion—that the British establishment subjected its own working class to forms of paternalistic domination the equal of that exacted throughout the Empire—is worth consideration. What is perhaps most useful is the question of whether race can be adequately approached as an epiphenomenona, where the “fact” of race proves its consequences and racism is explicable as racially based. See Canadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 100. Hazel V. Carby, “Proletarian or Revolutionary Literature: C. L. R. James and the Politics of the Trinidadian Renaissance,” new formations 10, (1990) 99–108. 101. Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary, 27; Carby, “Proletarian or Revolutionary Literature.” 102. Reinhard W. Sander, “The Thirties and Forties,” in West Indian Literature, 2nd ed., ed. Bruce King (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 41. 103. Paul Buhle’s criticism of Cultural Studies’ appropriation of James, with Blackwell’s Rethinking C. L. R. James especially in mind, is founded on an assessment of its depoliticized academic interests. See Buhle, “Rethinking the Rethinking.” Similarly, Kent Worcester suggests that American Civilization indicates a shift in James’s work away from the Trotskyist movement, while Anna Grimshaw discerns this moment as an engagement of “new questions” of art and creative culture. Worcester, Political Biography; and Grimshaw, “Revolutionary Vision.” 104. Farred, “Maple Man”; Nielsen, Critical Introduction 105. Ibid. 106. Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom. 107. Supriya Nair, Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 108. Ian Munro and Reinhard Sander, Kas Kas: Interviews with Three Caribbean Writers in Texas (Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, University of Austin at Texas, 1972), 33 109. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Detroit: Bewick, 1978); and “Preface to Criticism,” in The C. L. R. James Reader. 110. See Cynthia Hamilton, “A Way of Seeing: Culture as Political Expression in the Works of C. L. R. James,” Journal of Black Studies 22 no. 3 (1992) 429– 43; Robert A. Hill, “In England, 1932–1938,” in James: His Life and Work; Jasmine Huggins, “On Literature: A Review of Minty Alley,” in Tribute to a Scholar: Appreciating C. L. R. James, ed. B. Ragoonath (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 1990); and Helen Pyne-Timothy, “Identity, Society and Meaning: A Study of the Early Short Stories of C. L. R. James,” in James: His Intellectual Legacies. 111. Carby, Race Men. 112. Carby, “Proletarian or Revolutionary Literature.” 113. Huggins, “On Literature,” 76. 114. Grant Farred, What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 100–01. 115. Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 419. 116. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, chap. 1. 117. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press), 93; Antonio Gramsci, “For a Cultural Association,” in Selections From Cultural Writings, trans.

Notes

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

221

William Boelhower and ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). C. L. R. James, American Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 118–19. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 122. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Theodor W. Adorno, “Perennial Fashion—Jazz” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967). James, American Civilization, 123. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 148. See Astrida Orle Tantillo, Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the Critics (Rochester: Camden House, 2001). Goethe, Elective Affinities, 114. Brian W. Alleyne, “Cultural Politics and Globalized Infomedia: C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno and Mass Culture Criticism,” Interventions 1, no. 3 (1999): 361–72; Brennan, Home in the World; and Andrew Ross, “Civilization in One Country?,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James. James, American Civilization, 127, emphasis added. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933). Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization vol. 2, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Nielsen, Critical Introduction, 46. It is also worth noting that, mirroring his arguments against instituting the Westminster model of government in post-colonial societies in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, James states that post-independence West Indian societies are faced with the challenge of developing an alternative and more appropriate governmental system that supplants the iniquitous colonial legacy of parliamentary democracy. C. L. R. James, “Open Letter to West Indian Students,” Martin Glaberman Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit. Aimé Césaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1957), 15. C. L. R. James, “The Black Scholar Interview: C. L. R. James,” The Black Scholar 2, no. 1 (1970): 39. C. L. R. James, “Othello and The Merchant of Venice,” (1963) in Spheres of Existence (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 141. Ibid., 144. Ernest Mandel, Trotsky as Alternative (London: Verso, 1995), 140. Richard H. King, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Washington, D.C./Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 219. Ibid., 236.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Grant Farred, “Maple Man”; Hall, “Portrait”; Robin D. G. Kelley, “The World Diaspora Made: C. L. R. James and the Politics of History,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James; Nielsen, Critical Introduction. 2. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage, 1996). 3. Ibid., 53. 4. Ibid.

222 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

Notes Farred, “Maple Man.” Nielsen, Critical Introduction. Ibid., 13. James, Beyond a Boundary, 111. George Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking,” in The Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison and Busby 1984); Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary; Anna Grimshaw, “Revolutionary Vision”; Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966—1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London: New Beacon Books, 1992); Worcester, Political Biography. Frantz Fanon, “West Indians and Africans,” in trans. Haakon Chevalier Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (New York: Grove Press 1967), 20, emphasis added. Fanon makes this point most assertively and caustically in reference to Mayotte Capécia’s Je Suis Martiniquaise and her utter submission to whiteness and disdain for blackness. Black Skin, White Masks, chap. 2. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (New York: Vintage, 1981). Lamming, “Occasion for Speaking,” 30. Ibid., 24. C. L. R. James, “Discovering Literature in Trinidad: The 1930s,” in Spheres of Existence, 244. James, Beyond a Boundary, 41–42. C. L. R. James, “Bloomsbury: An Encounter with Edith Sitwell,” in C. L. R. James Reader. Louise Cripps, C. L. R. James: Memories and Commentaries (London: Cornwall Books, 1997). Frederic Warburg, An Occupation For Gentlemen (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 182 quoted in Grace Lee Boggs, Living For Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 47. Ibid. Anna Grimshaw, “Revolutionary Vision”; Cripps, Memories and Commentaries. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Cripps does not state when she received the excerpt of James’s unpublished autobiography, but given that James worked on it periodically during the 1970s, it is safe to assume that she could not have received it before then. Strictly speaking, James’s recognition of such exoticization and sexual objectification need not necessarily have been an entirely negative experience. The behaviour of Naipaul’s character Lebrun in A Way in the World, who is fond of boasting of his appeal to women and sexual performance, tends to suggest that James rather enjoyed the attention from and sexual reputation among women. Of course, Naipaul’s dramatic account of a figure based on James contains many significant differences—Lebrun’s ultra-Leftist Communism, for example—but nevertheless, the (real or imagined) inspiration for this particular narrative emerged from somewhere. Cripps recognizes the James-Lebrun parallel and discerns the voice of the former in the latter. See Naipaul, A Way in the World (London: Minerva, 1995). Cripps, Memories and Commentaries, 72. Davey uses this term in reference to Cunard’s Afrophilia and her assumption of a role as its guardian and arbiter of Africanist authenticity. This role carries the ability and authority to declaim on African matters and point to deficiencies of certain black Americans who may be inauthentic or lacking in this regard. See Kevin Davey, English Imaginaries: Six Studies in Anglo-British Modernity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 27–54.

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27. Cripps first entertained this thought when she heard of the marriage of the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps and “an African leader” at St. Marylebone Church, her “family’s church.” She deemed this interesting in that “someone with my name had married a black leader from Africa, as I might have married a black leader from the West Indies if he had chosen a different path.” Cripps, Memories and Commentaries, 80. 28. Bill Schwarz, “Becoming Postcolonial,” in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, ed. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Goldberg and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000), 279–80. 29. Richard Small, “The Training of an Intellectual, the Making of a Marxist,” in James: His Life and Work. 30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1989), 49. 31. Ibid. 32. W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory: The Methodology of Social Theory, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 315–18. 33. See Simone de Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren (New York: New Press, 1999). 34. James, Beyond a Boundary, 119. 35. Stuart Hall, “A Conversation with C. L. R. James,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James, 21. 36. Robert A. Hill, “In England 1932–1938,” in James: His Life and Work. 37. C. L. R. James, interview by Ted Crawford, Barry Buitekant and Al Richardson, “C. L. R. James and British Trotskyism: An Interview” (London: Socialist Platform, 1986). 38. Kelley, “World Diaspora”; Tony Martin, “C. L. R. James and the Race/Class Question,” Race xiv (1972); 184–93; Helen Tiffin, “Cricket, Literature and the Politics of De-colonization: The Case of C. L. R. James,” in Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, ed. Hilary McD Beckles and Brian Stoddart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 39. Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 56. 40. Ibid. 41. Trotsky, “Discussions.” 42. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998), 41. 43. Naipaul, Way in the World, 129. 44. James, Beyond a Boundary, 31, emphasis added. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 59. 47. Ibid., 240–41. 48. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 53. 49. However, some suggest that the analytical distance between Sartre and Freud is less dramatic than presented by the former, and is subject to a later rapprochement. Christina Howells’s argument that Freud’s replacement, circa 1920, of the conscious/unconscious distinction with id, ego, and superego enabled him to distinguish between mental qualities and regions in order to more satisfactorily address the problem of resistance to analysis. Sartre’s objection to the notion of unconscious repression without conscious complicity is therefore addressed through Freud’s understanding of the conscious activities and unconscious behaviours of the ego. Christina Howells, “Sartre and Freud,” French Studies 33, no. 2 (1979): 157–76. 50. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 52, emphasis added.

224

Notes

51. C. L. R. James, “On Native Son By Richard Wright,” in C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 55–58. 52. James, Modern Politics, 151. 53. Nielsen, Critical Introduction; and E. San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 54. Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary. 55. See James, American Civilization. 56. C. L. R. James, “Autobiography” (unpublished manuscript, C. L. R. James Institute, New York, n.d.), 1. 57. Ibid., 2. 58. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 62. 59. For a discussion of this friendship, see Bill Schwarz, “George Padmore,” in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwarz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 60. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950). 61. Hall, “When was the Postcolonial?”; Gilroy, Black Atlantic. 62. Angus Calder, “Review of The C. L. R. James Reader and American Civilization,” Wasafiri 20 (autumn 1994): 64. 63. See Richard Wright, American Hunger (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); and Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, introduction to The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 64. Calder, “Review,” 64. 65. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search For a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968). 66. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 69. 67. Sartre, Search, 136, italics in the original. 68. C. L. R. James, “The Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society,” in C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 80. 69. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 70. Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976). 71. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 67. 72. Ibid., 67–68. 73. James, “Autobiography,” 4. 74. Scott Mc Lemee, “The Enigma of Arrival,” introduction to C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question.” 75. Bill Martin, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 76. Walton Look Lai, “C. L. R. James and Trindadian Nationalism,” in C. L. R. James’s Caribbean. 77. C. L. R. James to Martin Glaberman and the Correspondence Group, 18 December 1962, “Letters on Organization,” in Marxism For Our Times, 85. 78. Worcester, Political Biography, 170. 79. C. L. R. James to Norman Manley, cc. Grantley Adams, 10 November 1960. C. L. R. James Papers, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. 80. Stefano Harney, Nationalism and Identity: Culture and Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora (London: Zed, 1996). 81. Farred, “Maple Man,” 177. 82. Ibid., 179. 83. Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” in Identity and Difference, ed. Kath Woodward (London: Sage, 1997). 84. James, Beyond a Boundary, 80–81.

Notes

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85. C. L. R. James, “Garfield Sobers,” in Cricket, ed. Anna Grimshaw (London: Allison and Busby, 1986). 86. Ibid., 226, emphasis added. 87. C. L. R. James, “West Indian Cricketers in County Cricket,” in Cricket, 248. 88. It is worth noting that the attempt to locate the transcendent spirit of cricket, exemplified outside of the hegemonic distortions of the colonial centre, is not limited to James and his claim for the West Indies. The game has, for example, been identified as a prototypically Indian one. See Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 89. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature (London: Verso, 1992). 90. C. L. R. James, untitled autobiography (manuscript, C. L. R. James Institute, New York, n.d.), 2. 91. Gilroy, Black Atlantic. 92. Brennan, Home In The World and San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory. 93. Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” New Left Review 209 (1995): 3–14. 94. Glaberman, “Recollection”; and Lee Boggs, Living For Change. 95. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 114. 96. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1980). 97. Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary; Glaberman, “Recollection”; Grace Lee Boggs, “C. L. R. James: Organizing in the U.S.A., 1938–1953,” in James: His Intellectual Legacies and Living For Change; Nielsen, Critical Introduction; and Worcester, Political Biography. 98. Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (London: Verso, 1993), 183–85. 99. This situation is recognisable within disputes over the textual and discursive distortion of concrete materiality familiar to postcolonial debates. See Ahmad, In Theory; and Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9, nos. 1 and 2, (1987): 27–58. 100. For a useful outline of the paradoxes between methodological approaches and political concerns, obscurantism, lucidity and linguistic understanding, and theoretical sophistry as an obfuscation of social explanation within debates in postcolonial studies, see Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 164–67. 101. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). 102. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 26–27. 103. James, Beyond a Boundary, 59. 104. Ibid. 105. Sartre, Search, 91. 106. James, Beyond a Boundary, 59. 107. Freud offers a compelling example: “Thus in traumatic neuroses, and particularly in those brought about by the horrors of war, we are unmistakably presented with a self-interested motive on the part of the ego, seeking for protection and advantage—a motive which cannot, perhaps, create the illness by itself but which assents to it and maintains it when once it has come about. This motive tries to preserve the ego from the dangers the threat of which was the precipitating cause of the illness and it will not allow recovery to occur until a repetition of these dangers seems no longer possible or until compensation has been received for the danger that has been endured.” Sigmund Freud,

226

108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121.

Notes “The Common Neurotic State,” in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 429. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Dover 1994), 20. Kenneth Mostern’s work usefully discusses this issue, in relation to the psychoanalytical referents of autobiographical writing in bell hooks’s Talking Back, as an attempt to recover from the personal past that delimits current practice. For Mostern, this autobiographical practice follows a psychoanalytical model that attempts a “re-centring of the self,” against its historical splitting, as a constituent in the process of self-recovery that does not “privilege or celebrate splitness [sic] as such.” Autobiography and Black Identity Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 199–200. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 9. Tiffin, “Cricket.” See C. L. R. James, Letters From London (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2003); and American Civilization. See James, Notes on Dialectics. Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20–21. Farred, What’s My Name? Ibid., 102–03. Ibid., 112 and 109. Ibid. Caryl Phillips, “Mariner, Renegade and Castaway,” The New Republic 5 (August 1996): 32. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York/Cambridge: New Museum of Contemporary Art/ MIT Press, 1990). Lee Boggs, Living For Change.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Anna Grimsaw, ed. “C. L. R. James: Bibliography,” in The C. L. R. James Reader, 433. 2. The 1969 edition is, in fact, the third edition of the book to be published, but it is arbitrarily listed as the second edition. This resolution to the discrepancy is correct given that, in addition to Glaberman’s preface, it reprints the previous preface as that of the second edition. 3. Martin Glaberman, preface to State Capitalism and World Revolution, 2nd ed., by C. L. R. James (Detroit: Bewick, 1969), 5. 4. Ibid., 5–6. 5. Raya Dunayevskaya, “For the Record: The Johnson Forest Tendency, or Theory of State Capitalism, 1941–51; Its Vicissitudes and Ramifications,” 1972:1–6. 6. See Cripps, Memories and Commentaries. James’s assumption of a preeminent role is also discernible in the apparent domination of the collaborative production of Facing Reality. In a letter to Grace Lee, Castoriadis states his annoyance with James’s unilateral assumption of control. (James had proceeded to have the book published without offering Castoriadis the opportunity read and revise the final draft.) Pierre Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis) to Grace Lee, 4 January 1962, Martin Glaberman Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.

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7. See Nielsen, Critical Introduction; San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory; Brennan, Home in the World; Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary; Lee Boggs, Living For Change; Worcester, Political Biography. 8. See Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990); and Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979). 9. James, Beyond a Boundary, 258. 10. Ibid. 11. See Buhle, Marxism in the United States. However, it is also worth noting that for Lee Boggs, the significance of World Revolution is diminished by its slavish pro-Trotskyist tenor. See Living For Change, 95. 12. Johnson-Forest Tendency, “The Balance Sheet Completed,” (manuscript, C. L. R. James Institute, New York, 1951). 13. Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically. 14. C. L. R. James, “Marxism 1963: An Address to the Solidarity Group,” November 1963, Martin Glaberman Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit. 15. Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically. 16. James H. Satterwhite, Varieties of Marxist Humanism: Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). 17. Steven B. Smith, Reading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 18. Brennan, Home in the World. 19. Lee Boggs, under her JFT pseudonym Ria Stone, translated three of the essays (“Alienated Labour,” “Private Property and Communism,” and “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic”) among the manuscripts from the original German into English, which were then published as a pamphlet: Essays by Karl Marx Selected from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (New York: Johnson Forest Tendency, 1947). See Lee Boggs, Living For Change, 58–59. Lee Boggs’s translation ought to be viewed alongside the first full English translation, attributed to Gregor Benton in 1974, in addition to Martin Milligan’s 1959 “alternate translation.” 20. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976). 21. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997). 22. Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary. 23. C. L. R. James, “On Marx’s Essays from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Rendezvous of Victory, 69. 24. Ibid., 72. 25. C. L. R. James, State Capitalism and World Revolution, 3rd ed. (Detroit: Facing Reality, 1969), 35. 26. James, State Capitalism. 27. Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Continuum, 1992). 28. Leszek Kolakowski, “History and Hope,” in Toward a Humanist Marxism, 143–57. 29. On this form/function distinction and its broader significance within utopian thought, see Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (London: Philip Allan, 1990). 30. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. However, this assertion has been explained as a reflection of Engels’s increasing focus on the social and political evolution of socialism and his reservations over the bourgeois idealism of

228

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

Notes impracticable “castles in the air.” Therefore, Engels does not reject the radical imaginative project of utopianism per se, but demonstrates a principled stance in relation to methodology and praxis. See Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 35–58. Alleyne, “Cultural Politics,” 361–72; Brennan, Home in the World; Andrew Ross, “Civilization in One Country?,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James. See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” and “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). Bill Martin, Radical Project, 61. C. L. R. James, “Marxism and the Intellectuals,” in Spheres of Existence. C. L. R. James, Grace C. Lee and Pierre Chaulieu, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick, 1974). C. L. R. James, F. Forest and Ria Stone, The Invading Socialist Society (Detroit: Bewick, 1972). Johnson-Forest Tendency, “Balance Sheet,” 22. James, Notes on Dialectics, 118, italics in the original. However, it must be noted that the JFT understood the sectarian tensions within the Fourth International as undertheorised, where terms such as “ultraleft” and “opportunism” are casually used with defamatory purpose. Conversely, James advocates employing these phrases as political terminology instead of as insults. Johnson-Forest Tendency, Internal Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 2, n.d., Martin Glaberman Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit. James, Notes on Dialectics, 118, emphasis added. Johnson-Forest Tendency, “Balance Sheet,” 15. Johnson-Forest Tendency, Invading Socialist Society, 8, emphasis added. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in First International and After. James, Modern Politics, 35–36 and 49–50. Marx, “Civil War,” 206. Marx, “The Civil War in France,” first draft, in First International and After, 253–54. James, Notes on Dialectics, 117, emphasis added. Johnson-Forest Tendency, Invading Socialist Society, 11, emphasis added. Johnson-Forest Tendency, “Balance Sheet,” 33. J. R. Johnson and F. Forest, “A Letter to the Membership,” 28 April 1947, Martin Glaberman Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit. James, Notes on Dialectics. Alex Callinicos, Race and Class (London: Bookmarks, 1993). James, “Revolutionary Answer,” 80. James, “Historical Development of the Negro,” 140, emphasis added. James, Nkrumah, 221. James, “Historical Development of the Negro” and American Civilization. C. L. R. James, “Three Black Women Writers,” in The C. L. R. James Reader, 415. Johnson-Forest Tendency, “Balance Sheet,” 26. James, American Civilization, 209. Ibid., 214. Carby, Race Men. Ibid., 127. Additionally, Rhonda Cobham notes that the generation of West Indian novelists, such as George Lamming, that James admired for their contribution to the development of a West Indian identity not solely dependent on the colonial metropole, reverse the centrality of female characters in their

Notes

63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

229

social realist narratives. Cobham suggests that the pre-1940 West Indian situation of women—as primary economic supporters of households—changed as the evolution of political reform increased educational and white-collar job opportunities for middle class West Indian men. Introduction to Black Fauns by Alfred Mendes, (London: New Beacon Books, 1984). Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). Examples from American Civilization will be demonstrated below. In addition, one can consider the nurturing domestic roles fulfilled by his mother and aunts; W. G. Grace’s mother in Beyond a Boundary; and Lee Boggs’s assertion that James tended to a exhibit a paternal attitude towards his female comrades in the JFT. Her impression was that George Padmore was the only person he really respected as an intellectual equal. See Living For Change, 74. James, American Civilization. Ibid., 213. There are, of course, exceptions. For example, in a 1981 article James recognises the work of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange as significant indications that women were “beginning” to interrogate the formation and reproduction of patriarchal social structures and relations. However, his perception of this as a nascent phenomenon appears oblivious to long-standing literary traditions, critical gender discourses within radical social movements, and the long history of feminist activist-intellectualism of which he would have been aware. See James, “Three Black Women Writers.” James, “Negro Organisation,” 55–56 and 61. James bases this argument on the isolation of the black petit bourgeois from their white counterparts and the experience of racism making them less susceptible to “corruption.” Furthermore, he notes that there are petty bourgeois members within the SWP movement, which does not automatically exclude participation. See James’s dedication of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (London: Allison and Busby, 1985). In American Civilization, James recognises that the “cult of women” is dependent on eroticized representations of women in advertising and public relations. These images contribute towards the maintenance of patriarchal dominance and, given the absence of meaningful human (heterosexual) relationships within a debased society, represent gendered ideals that assuage a debilitating social reality. Despite his inconsistent engagement of the “woman question,” James is aware of the value of informal or non-capitalist productive work. In relation to the Trinidad carnival, he notes how the assiduous preparation represents highly organised work. “Carnival,” in C. L. R. James Reader, 287. James, American Civilization, 213. Ibid., emphasis added. C. L. R. James, interview by Anna Grimshaw, January 1984., transcript, C. L. R. James Institute, New York, 15. For a critique of normative notions of prehistoric mothering, see Kathleen M. Bolen, “Prehistoric Construction of Mothering,” in Exploring Gender Through Archaeology: Selected Papers from the 1991 Boone Conference, ed. Cheryl Claassen (Madison: Prehistory Press, 1992). See Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview,” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Michèle Barrett, “Marxist-Feminism and the Work of Karl Marx,” in Feminism and Equality, ed. Anne Phillips (New York: New York University Press, 1987).

230

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77. See Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, All Work and No Pay (Bristol: Power of Women Collective/Falling Wall, 1975); Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, 3rd ed. (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975); and Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 70–73. 78. Nielsen, Critical Introduction, 166. An obscure example is also instructive here. In a 1984 interview with Anna Grimshaw, James appreciated the extended organised protest of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, against the siting of Cruise-guided nuclear missiles, as politically significant. Even though their protest lacked the structural support traditionally enjoyed by the industrial proletariat, such as institutionalised productive relations and trades unions, the protesters avoided some of the shortcomings of institutional organisation. For James, the everyday familiarity of factory workers presents an unstated organic bond that often militated against the conscious negotiation of political positions and the work of forging alliances and building coalitions that contributes to the problematic state and dissolution of the labour movement in the late twentieth century. Conversely, the conscious mental bond forged by female protesters constitutes a valuable dialogic basis for negotiated political positions emerging through debate, developed by consensus, and adhered to voluntarily. See Grimshaw, interview. 79. Grimshaw, interview. 80. Dalla Costa and James, Power of Women, 33, emphasis added. 81. See bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000); Michael A. Messner, Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997), 49–62; and Tom Digby, ed., Men Doing Feminism (London: Routledge, 1998). 82. Angela Y. Davis, “Coalition Building Among People of Color: A Discussion with Angela Y. Davis and Elizabeth Martinez,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 304. 83. In an assessment that may also be applicable to James, Michèle Barrett argues that Marx’s underdeveloped analysis of gender is conspicuous, given his penetrative analysis of the superficial appearance of exploitative social relations. “Marxist-Feminism,” 44. 84. Robert A. Hill, afterword to in American Civilization, 332. 85. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1997). 86. Donald Hines notes that Jones and James were committee members for a 1963 benefit concert to provide relief for the victims of Hurricane Flora. Donald Hines, “The West Indian Gazette,” in Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 140. 87. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Woman!,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverley Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 114. 88. Ibid., 120. 89. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2nd ed. (Boston: South End Press, 2000). 90. Although James presents his theory of spontaneity in general terms, his practical examples of its emergent and prospective processes, groups, and sites are all specific to the United States. This begs the question of whether America is the vanguard of spontaneist radicalism as the predicted locale of its initial emergence or if it just provides an expedient reference point. The contradiction between capital, state capitalism, and the unrealised promise of individual and collective freedom draws a parallel with the classical Marxist understanding that industrially advanced societies are the most likely sites for the origination of socialist revolution, given the maturation of the capitalist productive

Notes

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

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process there. This parallel may be entirely coincidental; the potential existence of a national location as the vanguard of spontaneous political organisation and revolutionary activity possibly raises an ethnocentric exceptionalism to replace the didactic paternalism of the party. While this discussion is worth further consideration, the limit on space prevents it. Buhle, Marxism in the United States, 205. Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre—Philosophy in the World (London: Verso, 1980), 245; and Mark Poster, Sartre’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1979). See Aronson, Sartre, 246–50; and Mary Warnock, The Philosophy of Sartre (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 135–81 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Theory of Practical Ensembles, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976). Ibid., 256. A key ambiguity in James’s position lies in the “pure” spontaneity presented in Notes on Dialectics, differing from the more pragmatic adoption of a Leninist stance on the strategic function of organisation in “The Balance Sheet Completed.” The constitutive force of groups is perhaps clearest where Sartre states: “Yet neither common need, nor common praxis, nor common objectives can define a community unless it makes itself into a community by feeling individual need as common need, and by projecting itself, in the internal unification of a common integration, towards objectives which it produces as common.” Critique, 350, emphasis added. C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 451–52. Margaret A. Majumdar, Althusser and the End of Leninism? (London: Pluto, 1995), 61–66. See George Lamming, “C. L. R. James: West Indian.” interview by Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James’s Caribbean; and Aronson, Sartre 214–15. James, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” in C. L. R. James Reader, 163–64. Warnock, Philosophy of Sartre, 171. It is also not clear how the group, once formed, may not alternately lapse into a regressive or counterrevolutionary form of social consciousness. This possibility is suggested in the example of James’s split from Eric Williams, principally over the settlement with the United States over the continued use of the Chaguaramas naval base, as a signal of the degeneration of a radical nationalist movement into a Liberal nationalist government. See Worcester, Political Biography, 147–171. Sartre, Critique, 428–44. Jean-Paul Sartre, “France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: William Morrow, 1976), 119–20. Ibid., 120. Ibid. Ibid., 123. It is also worth considering the contention that the choice and responsibility central to the Sartrean will to existence are not indicative of untrammelled freedom. Human freedom is incomplete and contingent, and also reflects an “analogic” human nature bounded by the sociable constraints imposed by the spiritual, reflective, and introspective aspects of human consciousness. René Lafarge, Jean-Paul Sartre: His Philosophy, trans. Marina Smyth-Kok (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970), 177–79. Majumdar, Althusser and the End of Leninism? Sartre, “France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party,” 132. Joseph L. Walsh, “Sartre and the Marxist Ethics of Revolution,” Sartre Studies International 6, no. 1 (2000): 117.

232 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126. 127.

Notes Johnson-Forest Tendency, “Balance Sheet,” 26. Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom. Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom, 114. James, American Civilization, 136, italics in the original. Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979); and Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1969). James, American Civilization. John Solomos, “Beyond Racism and Multiculturalism,” Patterns of Prejudice 32, no. 4 (1998): 53. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trades Unions,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder, 1970). V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, trans. Joe Fineber (New York: International Publishers, 1969). Ernest Mandel, “The Leninist Theory of Organisation,” in Revolution and Class Struggle: A Reader in Marxist Politics ed. Robin Blackburn (London: Fontana, 1977). Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony. Althusser, For Marx, 235. Ibid., 244. Fanon’s ambivalence towards humanism is discernible in Black Skin, White Masks where he at once derides the pernicious racial exclusions typical to the dominant Western humanist tradition and awaits an enlightened moment— yet to come—where the true history of humanity can finally emerge. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). James, Notes on Dialectics, 175, italics in the original. James, Modern Politics, 21.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. C. L. R. James to Grace Lee, 30 September 1954, Frances D. Paine Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit. 2. Ibid. 3. James, Modern Politics. 4. C. L. R. James to Grace Lee, 1 January 1957, Martin Glaberman Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 191–92. 6. James, Beyond a Boundary, 202. 7. William J. Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport: A Critique and Reconstruction (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 8. The main writers Morgan identifies within this paradigm include Rob Beamish, Jean-Marie Brohm, and Bero Rigauer. 9. Morgan’s category of hegemony theorists includes writers such as John Hargreaves, Alan Tomlinson, and David Whitson. 10. For Morgan, the transcendental path aims to establish an objective framework for a non-parochial understanding of the “natural” condition of sporting practices, or to develop new, disinterested principles for evaluating these practices; an immanent approach links sport to local contexts as historically and socially rooted practices that cannot be fully understood through the application of abstract external ideas and values.

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11. Criticisms of James’s commitment to a cricketing aesthetic that ignore its concrete social and historical context are numerous, while Derek Walcott values the transcendental aspects of James’s link between West Indian cricket and Greek antiquity, in avoiding the “safe” insularity of racial particularism that is likely within immanent explanations. See Derek Walcott, “C. L. R. James,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). 12. James, Beyond a Boundary, xxi. 13. Ibid., 36. 14. Ibid., 91. 15. See Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art For Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism 1790– 1990 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). 16. Interestingly, the same might be said of James’s American Civilization. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart explain this approach as one motivated by two factors: first, James wanted to engage with the specificity of American society without reference to a general (Marxist) analytical framework that might have invited comparison with, for example, Britain or the Soviet Union; second, given the newly founded and heated context of the Cold War, James wished to find a language in which he could communicate with a wider American instead of a minority (leftist) audience. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, C. L. R. James and The Struggle for Happiness (New York: C. L. R. James Institute/Cultural Correspondence, 1991), 21. 17. See Aldrie Henry, “On Cricket: A Review of Beyond a Boundary,” in Tribute to a Scholar; and Helen Tiffin, “Cricket.” 18. Kenneth Surin, “C. L. R. James’ Material Aesthetic of Cricket,” in Liberation Cricket. 19. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). 20. Tiffin, “Cricket,” 367. 21. James, Beyond a Boundary, 211. 22. See David Best, “Sport is Not Art,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport XII (1985): 25–40; and Spencer K. Wertz, “Representation and Expression in Sport and Art,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport XII (1985): 8–24. 23. James, Beyond a Boundary, 209. 24. Path-breaking examples of the emergent culturalist position include Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) and The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1990). 25. C. L. R. James, “The 1963 West Indians,” in Cricket. 26. See Jervis Anderson’s discussion of local skepticism about the code of cricket borne of their “social experience” of patent inequality. “Cricket and Beyond: The Career of C. L. R. James,” The American Scholar 54, no. 3 (1985): 345–59. 27. James, Beyond a Boundary, 153. 28. Surin, “C. L. R. James’ Material Aesthetic,” 332. 29. See Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960) and Class and Art: Problems of Culture Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, trans. Brian Pearce (London, New Park Publications, 1968). 30. Mikhail Lifshitz, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, trans. Ralph B. Winn (London: Pluto, 1973). 31. Ibid., 58.

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32. C. L. R. James, “Popular Art and the Cultural Tradition,” lecture delivered at the offices of the French Review, Paris, France, 9 March 1954, trans. C. L. R. James. C. L. R. James Institute, New York. 33. See Andrew Blake, The Body Language: The Meaning of Modern Sport (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996); and Allen Guttmann, “The Sociological Imagination and the Imaginative Sociologist,” in Sport and the Sociological Imagination: Refereed Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 1982, ed. Nancy Theberge and Peter Donnelly (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1984). 34. Chris Shilling and Philip A. Mellor, “Embodiment, Structuration Theory and Modernity: Mind/Body Dualism and the Repression of Sensuality,” Body and Society 2, no.4 (1996): 1–15. 35. See Brian S. Turner, The Body and Society, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 1996); and Pamela L. Moore, “Knowing Bodies,” introduction to Building Bodies, ed. Pamela L. Moore (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 36. Pheng Cheah, “Mattering,” diacritics 26, no. 1, (spring 1996): 108–39. 37. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 144. 38. Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 155; italics in the original. 39. On this separation, see Alan Swingewood, Sociological Poetics and Aesthetic Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). 40. Allen Guttmann argues that modern sports share seven characteristic principles: secularity, equality, specialisation, rationalisation, bureaucratisation, quantification, and records. From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 13–55. 41. Zangwill draws a distinction between the aesthetic and the pure aesthetic, as well as Kant’s acceptance of context in aesthetic meaning through the concept of “dependent” beauty, that rejects the pure aesthetic paradigm and a tenuous Kantian position. See Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 59–61 and “Against the Sociology of the Aesthetic,” Cultural Values 6, no. 4 (2002): 443–452. 42. James, Beyond a Boundary, 34. 43. Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport, 44–45. 44. John Arlott, How to Watch Cricket (London: Willow Books, 1983), 62. 45. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981). 46. For examples of this critique of sporting competition, see Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport, A Prison of Measured Time: Essays (London: Ink Links, 1979); and bell hooks, “Neo-colonial Fantasies of Conquest: Hoop Dreams,” in Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996). 47. David Inglis and John Hughson, “The Beautiful Game and the Proto-Aesthetics of the Everyday,” Cultural Values 4, no. 3 (2000): 279–97. 48. James, Beyond a Boundary, 205; emphasis added. 49. Ibid., 105. 50. Blake, Body Language; Michael Eric Dyson, “Be Like Mike?: Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire,” in Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 51. Adorno, “Perennial Fashion.” 52. This is not to say that a sport like basketball is reducible to its competitive ends. Moments of expressive athleticism within the game are indeed significant, as Dyson remarks of Jordan’s elevation to cultural icon. However, it is worth also noting that one of the most notable of such forms, the “slam dunk,”

Notes

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

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has been appropriated as “a signature of the league” by the National Basketball Association in the U.S. See Laurel R. Davis and Othello Harris, “Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Sports Media,” in MediaSport, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner (London: Routledge, 1998). James’s point regarding cricket is that techniques are somewhat like simulacra—copies without originals—that remain compelling outside of the competitive context of the game and are, perhaps, even more important. James, “1963 West Indians,” 144–45; emphasis added. James, Beyond a Boundary, 197. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001). Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zorn, in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 234. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1995). Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1980). Norbert Elias, “An Essay on Sport and Violence,” in Quest For Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, ed. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). David L. Fairchild, “Prolegomena to an Expressive Function of Sport,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, XIV, 1987: 21–33. See John Bale, Imagined Olympians: Body Culture and Colonial Representation in Rwanda (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 25–57. However, Elias does recognise that the perception of the civilising process, as the proliferation of “restraint” and “repression” seemingly at the expense of “pleasurable excitement and enjoying life” is at least partially due to the “fact that people’s pleasurable satisfactions have attracted less attention as a worthy and interesting object of scientific research than the restricting rules—than social constraints and their instruments such as laws, norms and values.” Elias then accepts that this imbalance ought to be redressed. Elias, “Essay on Sport and Violence,” 163. Blake, Body Language, 189. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36. Ibid. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 110–111. Ibid., 111. Brohm, Sport. See for example Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Toby Miller, Sportsex (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); and Allen Guttmann, The Erotic in Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Derek Birley, The Willow Wand: Some Cricket Myths Explored (London: Simon and Schuster/Sportspages, 1989), 7. Mike Marqusee, Anyone But England: Cricket, Race and Class (London: Two Heads, 1998), 91; emphasis added.

236

Notes

73. Mark Kingwell, “Keeping a Straight Bat: Cricket, Civility, and Postcolonialism,” in James: His Intellectual Legacies. 74. Harold Perkin, “Teaching the Nations How to Play: Sport and Society in the British Empire and Commonwealth,” in The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, ed. J. A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 1992). 75. Pierre Bourdieu, “Programme for a sociology of sport,” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 166. 76. David Whitson, “Structure, Agency and the Sociology of Sport Debates,” Theory, Culture and Society 3, no. 1, (1986): 106. 77. James, Beyond a Boundary, 3–4. 78. Ibid., 3 79. Ibid., 4, emphasis added. 80. Sylvia Wynter, “In Quest of Matthew Bondsman: Some Cultural Notes on the Jamesian Journey,” Urgent Tasks 12 (1977): 59. 81. Surin suggests that Wynter’s usage of “Bondsman” is intended to “connect up Bondman with ‘Knecht’ (“Bondman”) of Hegel’s ‘master-bondsman’ dialectic.” “‘The Future Anterior’: C. L. R. James and Going Beyond a Boundary,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James, 204. 82. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 136–37. 83. Frank Birbalsingh, The Rise of Westindian Cricket: From Colony to Nation (St John’s, Antigua: Hansib, 1996), 239. 84. Blake, Body Language, 201–04. 85. James, Beyond a Boundary, 4, emphasis added. 86. Ibid. 87. As Paul Gilroy has argued, a range of historical associations from slavery to low-paid menial employment has informed black people’s critique of work and productivism as the direct manifestation of extreme alienation. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 88. James, Beyond a Boundary, 233. 89. C. L. R. James, “The Departure of the West Indians,” in Cricket, 127. 90. C. L. R. James, to V. S. Naipaul, 1963, Cricket, 117; emphasis added. 91. Ibid. 92. See Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); and Stuart Hall, “When was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996). 93. Hall, “When was ‘the Post-Colonial’?,” 246. 94. James, Nkrumah, 34. 95. C. L. R. James, “Dexter and Sobers,” in Cricket, 128. 96. James, Modern Politics, 13–16. 97. C. L. R. James, “Kanhai: A Study in Confidence,” in Cricket, 166. 98. Ibid., 170. 99. James’s notes that Bradman’s demeanour reflects a larger social constraint instead of a personal predilection. Ironically, James draws attention to Bradman’s autobiographical account of the completion of his one hundredth century as the one moment when he felt able to bat in an unencumbered way. Beyond a Boundary, 189. 100. James, “Kanhai,” 170–71; italics in the original. 101. C. L. R. James, “A New View of West Indian History,” 3 June 1965, Martin Glaberman Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit. 102. James, Black Jacobins, 417.

Notes 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

237

Ibid. James, Beyond a Boundary, 222. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 52. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 175. James, Beyond a Boundary, 261.

NOTES TO EPILOGUE 1. See Michèle Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Norman Geras, Discourses of Extremity: Radical Ethics and Post-Marxist Extravagances (London: Verso, 1990); and A. Sivanandan, “All That Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of New Times,” in Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism (London: Verso, 1990). 2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). 3. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism:The Breakdown, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 487–94. 4. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 1, emphasis added. 5. Norman Geras,”‘Post-Marxism?,” New Left Review 163, (May/June 1987): 40–82. 6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 49–75. 7. Stuart Sim, “Spectres and Nostalgia: Post-Marxism/Post-Marxism,” introduction to Post-Marxism: A Reader, 2. 8. I take and develop this term from Robert K. Merton’s formulation that distinguishes between the normative psychological conceptualisation of ambivalence, concentrating on individual psychic states and conflicts, and a sociological understanding of competing expectations in relation to social structures and statuses. Merton finds that, sociologically speaking, ambivalence is in part “located in the social definition of roles and statuses,” which is practically amplified by the disjuncture between “culturally prescribed aspirations and socially structured avenues for realizing these aspirations.” Robert K. Merton with Elinor Barber, “Sociological Ambivalence,” in Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays, ed. Robert K. Merton (New York: The Free Press, 1976), 7 and 11. 9. Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine and Elliott Sober, Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History (London: Verso, 1992), 11. 10. C. L. R. James, “Dialectical Materialism,” 154–55. 11. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” 404. 12. Fanon’s devastating critique of the paternalistic ethnocentrism of Sartre in Black Skin, White Masks has provided potent fuel for many contemporary objections to humanism. 13. Althusser, For Marx, 228. 14. See Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995); Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America (New York: Doubleday, 1994); and Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 15. Donald N. Wood, Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy: The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Westport: Praeger, 1996).

238 Notes 16. See Barrett, Politics of Truth; Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial Future (London: Routledge, 2001); Gilroy, Between Camps; Karen Green, The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan; Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 17. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. 18. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/AntiHumanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 2. 19. For example, Althusser refers to the truism that “Every Humanist is a Liberal; Fromm is a Humanist; therefore, Fromm is a Liberal” as an “impeccable syllogism.” “The Humanist Controversy,” in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 223. 20. Ibid., 251–53. 21. Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 22. Norman Geras, “Marxism and Moral Advocacy,’ in Socialism and Morality, ed. David McLellan and Sean Sayers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). 23. Halliwell and Mousley, Critical Humanisms, 10. 24. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 14. 25. Ibid., 31–32. 26. C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, April 1944, in Special Delivery: The Letters of C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, 1939–1948, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell), 111–12. 27. Halliwell and Mousley, Critical Humanisms, 30–32. 28. Sartre, Black Orpheus, 12. 29. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” trans. Gregor Benton, in Karl Marx: Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 322–27. 30. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, introduction to American Civilization, 14. 31. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 32. C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, 14 June 1944, in Special Delivery, 123. 33. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” in C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, 69. 34. Ibid. 35. Nielsen, Critical Introduction; Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, “Caliban as Deconstructionist,” in C. L. R. James’s Caribbean; Grant Farred, “‘Victorian with the Rebel Seed’: C. L. R. James, Postcolonial Intellectual,” Social Text 38 (spring 1994): 22–38 and “Maple Man”; Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, “Inhabiting the Metropole: C. L. R. James and the Postcolonial Intellectual of the African Diaspora,” Diaspora 2, no. 3 (1993): 281–03; Nielsen, Critical Introduction; Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom. 36. Of course, this may be part of the tendency to situate black intellectuals alongside “Euroamerican philosophical luminaries” as a means of validation. See Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 37. C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, 1944, in Special Delivery, 176–77. 38. John Brown Childs, Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 10–11. 39. Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

Notes

239

40. C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, 1 September 1943, in Special Delivery, 74. 41. Tzvetan Todorov, Life in Common: An Essay in General Anthropology, trans. Katherine Golsan and Lucy Golsan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 139–50. 42. Ibid., 149. 43. James, to Constance Webb, 1 September 1943, 76. 44. James, to Constance Webb, 1944, 182. 45. C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, 1944, Special Delivery, 190. 46. Sartre, Black Orpheus, 60.

Index

Adorno, T. 5, 7, 77, 127, 128, 155–6, 175 aesthetics 168 cricket and 162, 165–7, 171, 172–3, 174, 175–6, 179–81, 187, 189 social life of 176–82 Africa 26, 58 ‘African human self’ 57, 58, 62 see also slaves African Blood Brotherhood 61 agency 183, 184, 194, 195, 196–7, 208 individual 15, 29, 31, 34, 37, 170–1, 190 mass 153, 155 see also self-activity Ahmad, A. 109 alienation 5, 53, 108, 111, 114, 115, 150 of slaves 25–6, 46 Althusser, Louis 200 American Civilization (James) 8, 11, 30, 72, 76, 130, 141, 201, 233n Anderson, Benedict 14 Anderson, P. 127 anticolonialism 65, 68, 73, 94 anti-essentialism 84, 107, 110, 199 anti-humanism 127, 155–6, 196, 199–200, 201 anti-Semitism, black 217–18n anti-vanguardism 104, 122, 132, 136–8, 140, 149 Arlott, John 172–3 art 56, 165–6 sport as 165–6, 167, 179–80 Arnold, Matthew 51 authenticity 47 cricket and 173 avoidance 99

bad faith 85, 93–4, 99, 103, 104, 105, 111, 113 ‘The Balance Sheet Completed’ (James) 125, 132, 134, 136, 139, 231n Bandung Conference 66 barbarism 77, 122, 128, 201 barrack yard fiction 71–2, 95 Baucom, I. 183 Baudrillard, Jacques 173 Beacon 69, 95 Beauvoir, Simone de 145 Benedict, Ruth 215n Benjamin, Walter 177 Berman, M. 13, 47 Beyond a Boundary (James) 3, 8, 10, 96, 108–9, 110, 161, 172–6, 182–92 British influences 115, 162, 165, 187–8 as cultural criticism 165, 166–8 quasi-autobiographical 3, 48, 50, 51, 98, 108 racism in 98–9, 106, 113 Bhabha, H. 191 Bhatt, C. 2 biography 84, 111, 112, 113 bio-power 17–22 Birley, D. 180 black Americans 59–60, 61, 67, 97, 104 right of self-determination 80 black diaspora 14, 26–7, 27–8 see also intellectuals, diasporic black intellectuals 63–9, 79, 118 black Jacobins see slaves Black Jacobins (James) 3, 10, 26–7, 28–9, 31–2, 33–8, 56–8, 64, 70, 106, 117, 188 and race 39, 40–4 and slave management 16–22

242

Index

Black Reconstruction (Du Bois) 57, 58, 64 black sexual performance 90–1 black struggle 125, 138, 139, 140, 207–8 party and 104 Black Studies 41–2 black subjectivity 55, 56, 59–60, 62 ‘blackness’ 66–7 Blake, A. 175, 179 Bloch, Ernst 126 body 170, 177 Boggs, Grace Lee 118–19 Bogues, A. 57, 58, 104, 153 Bondman, Matthew 182–6 Bourdieu, Pierre 112, 165, 166, 182 Bracey, J. 5, 62 Bradman, Don 190 Brathwaite, E.K. 25 Brennan, T. 126 Briggs, Cyril 61 Buhle, P. 5, 41, 148 bureaucracy 129 Burke, Edmund 179 The C.L.R. James Reader 122 Callinicos, A. 137 Caribbean 24–5, 61–2, 65–6, 95–6 feudalism of slave plantations 33 see also West Indies ‘The Caribbean Rejection’ (James) 65 Carby, H. 140 The Case for West Indian SelfGovernment (James) 38, 56, 94 Castoriadis, Cornelius 122 Césaire, Aimé 15, 55, 66, 79 Cahier 64–5, 67 Discourse on Colonialism 56, 68–9, 191, 201 Cha-Jua, S.K. 41 Chaulieu, Pierre 122 childbirth 142–3 class cricket and 50, 181, 182 race and 39–44, 79–80, 92, 94, 96–8, 100, 104–5, 196, 198, 207–8 class struggle 40, 155, 195, 197, 207 black people and 138–9 consciousness and 152 Cleaver, H. 125 Cobham, R. 228–9n

collective, individual and 103, 123, 124, 128, 134–5, 154, 155 colonialism 188 colonial domination 73, 113, 116 and colonial management 17–18, 21 cricket and 164, 167, 181–2, 184 Englishness and 183–4, 186 inverted 91 see also anticolonialism Communist Party (USA) 60, 61, 102, 125, 126 black women and 146 racism within 105 tension with workers 132–3 Comte, Auguste 203 conquest 64 consciousness 103, 152 diasporic 27–8 revolutionary 33 Constantine, Learie 39, 94 control 21, 128–9 non-violent 20 in slave societies 17–21 creativity 54, 167, 174, 202 cricket and 164, 174, 185, 187, 189 creolisation 24–5, 61 cricket 48, 49, 51–2, 115, 162–8, 178, 188 aesthetics of 162, 165–7, 171, 172–3, 174, 175–6, 179, 180–1, 187, 189 class and 50, 181, 182 as cultural politics 53–4, 167–8, 178–9, 187 and domination 184 postcolonialism and 169, 178–9, 187, 189–90, 191 and ‘Romantic figure’ 54, 191 sociopoetics of 171–6, 179 symbolic value of 172, 173–4, 181 West Indian 54, 109–10, 186–7, 188–91 Cripps, Louise 88, 90, 91, 101 criticism 52, 70 cultural 69–70, 70–1, 76–8, 86, 165, 166–7 cultural nationalism 65 cultural politics 72–3, 74–5, 166, 202 cricket as 53–4, 167–8, 178–9, 187 culturalism 95, 96, 123, 129 culture 30, 53–4, 72–4, 85, 166, 167 Arnold and 51, 52 class and 169

Index 243 Marxism and 168 masses and 162 see also popular culture Cunard, Nancy 91 Dalla Costa, M. 144, 145 Davey, K. 91 Davis, A. 145 Davis, F.J. 66, 67 dehumanization 201 democracy 161, 193, 206 Denning, M. 127 Denzin, N. 7–8 Derrida, Jacques 196 Dessalines, Jean Jacques 62, 63 Le Deuxième Sexe (Beauvoir) 145 Dexter, Ted 189 dialectical materialism 34, 76, 78, 197–8 displacement 116 ‘La Divina Pastora’ (James) 70, 72 Domanski, O. 29–30 domination 169 colonial 73, 113, 116 patriarchal 141, 142–3, 146 sport as 163, 169, 178, 180, 184 Du Bois, W. 57, 58, 64 Dunayevskaya, Raya 29, 30, 122 Durkheim, Émile 130, 203 Dyson, M.E. 175 Eighteenth Brumaire 36, 75 elective affinities 46, 47, 54–5, 61, 62, 75–6, 124 Elias, N. 178, 179 Ellison, R. 67 Engels, Friedrich 128, 130 England 33 James in 85–90 myth of colonial supremacy of 68 Enlightenment 7 epiphanies 7–8 Europe, multicultural 68 ‘Every Cook Can Govern’ (James) 160 exile 101, 112, 116, 118–19 James in 85–6, 96–7, 107, 110 existentialism 148, 152 exoticization 90 experience 59, 60, 79–80, 81 Facing Reality (James) 31 Fanon, Frantz 66, 86, 156, 207 Farred, G. 72, 108, 116–17

feminism 144–5 folk 71, 72 Foucault, Michel 9, 19, 21–2 Fourth International 102, 105, 136–7 Frankfurt School 126 freedom 27, 46, 151 racial justice and 80–1 for women 141, 142 French Revolution 33, 40, 96 Freud, Sigmund 99, 114, 170, 223n, 225n Fromm, Erich 5, 6, 129 Fukuyama, F. 195 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 10 Gandhi, M.K. 29 gangster films 77–8 Garvey, Marcus 67 gender inequality 141–4 Geras, N. 196, 200 Giddens, A. 13, 16 Gilroy, P. 67 Glaberman, M. 9, 122 Glissant, E. 24–5, 27–8, 61–2, 113–14 Gobineau, Joseph 66–7 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 52 Elective Affinities 45–6, 47, 75–6 Gomes, Albert 69 Grace, W.G. 29, 164 Gramsci, A. 73, 131, 153 Greece, ancient, nostalgia for 160, 161, 162, 178, 206 Greenham Common Peace Camp 230n Guttman, A. 171, 180 Habermas, Jurgen 13 habitus 112 Haitian Revolution 15, 29, 33, 36, 40, 58, 96 Hall, S. 9, 14, 36–7, 66, 188 Halliwell, M. 200 happiness 72, 151, 190, 202–3, 204 Harland, S. 53 Harlem Renaissance 55, 56 Harris, W. 32, 190 Headley, George 164 Hegel, G.W.F. 29, 30–1 hegemony theory of sport 163 Hill, R. 95. 145 Hirson, B. 32 ‘The Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society’ (James) 104

244

Index

historical materialism 35–6, 129, 149, 151, 197 cricket and 171 history 28, 30–1 de-centred 24–5 of black people 57 Hobsbawm, Eric 33 home 87, 101 Horkheimer, Max 7 Hughson, J. 174 humanism 8, 54, 69, 187, 196, 199–200 critical 127, 155–6, 200, 201, 202 James and 5–6, 52, 62, 65, 196, 199, 201 see also Marxist humanism Hungarian Revolution 132 Hurston, Z.N. 55–6 ideology 154 imagination 164, 167, 174, 189, 202 individual 7–8, 137 collective and 103, 123, 124, 128, 134–5, 151, 155 society and 1, 148–50, 161, 164, 201, 204 World Historical 30–1, 32, 92 see also agency, individual Industrial Revolution 33 Inglis, D. 174 intellectuals 150, 160 diasporic 63–9, 79, 83–4, 91–2, 118 political engagement of 131, 137 International African Friends of Abyssinia 56 International African Opinion 56 International African Service Bureau 56 The Invading Socialist Society (James) 125, 128 James, Cyril Lionel Robert 2–3 adoption of Marxism 95 as an Anglophile 166, 184 attempt to join army 98 as black European 62–9 as British intellectual 87–8, 89, 100 choice of cricket club 50–1, 92 in England 85–90 intellectual development 48–50, 84–5, 92 marginality of 116–17 moral code 51 personality 58 political engagement 3–4, 122–4

Puritan ethic of 51, 93 as quasi-metropolitan 89 at Queen’s Royal College 48, 49, 50, 51, 98 racialisation of 49–51, 62, 87, 89–90 and Trinidadian Renaissance 69–71 understanding of cricket 51–2, 163–5 upbringing of 48–9 in USA 97, 100, 105–7 writings of 3, 9–10, 70–3 see also under titles of individual works James, Selma (formerly Weinstein) 144, 145 James, Winston 97 jazz 74, 175 JFT (Johnson Forest Tendency) 102, 104, 132, 133, 136–7, 153 authorship of State Capitalism 122 reading of Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 126–9, 130, 131 and state capitalism 123, 125 struggle for primacy in 29 John, George 108 Jones, Claudia 145–6 Jung, Carl 99 Kanhai, Rohan 189–90, 191 Kant, Immanuel 179 Kelley, R. 68, 69 King, N. 65 King, R.H. 80 Kingwell, M. 181 knowledge 112, 160–1, 201 Kolakowski, L. 5, 129 Kracauer, S. 177 Ku Klux Klan 67 LaCapra, D. 89 Laclau, E. 196 Lamming, George 86–7 Lazarus, N. 171 leadership 10, 29, 30, 32, 57–8, 124 mass and 29, 31–2, 58 League of Coloured Peoples 61 Leavis, F.R. 77 Lenin, V.I. 29, 129, 155 Levi, Primo 9 The Life of Captain Cipriani (James) 94 see also ‘The Case for West Indian Self-Government’

Index 245 Lifshitz, M. 168 Lloyd, Clive 109 Locke, A. 55 London, literary life 88–9 Lukács, Georg 128, 131 Lukes, S. 200 Luxemburg, Rosa 154 MacIntyre, A. 203 McLemee, S. 105 Mandel, E. 80, 155 Manley, Norman 108 Mao Tse-Tung 29 Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (James) 3, 8, 78, 160 Marqusee, M. 181 Martin, B. 131 Marx, Karl 34–5, 125, 134, 202 and art 168 The Civil War in France 134 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 25, 126–8, 129, 130 James’s debt to 36 and modernity 47 and spontaneity 135–6 Marxism 6, 7, 47, 68–9, 202, 203 and aesthetics 171 and black radicalism 137–8 and culture 59, 168 James and 4–6, 9, 10, 62, 70, 73, 94–5, 102, 149 and morality 5, 200 neglect of Africa 58 and post-marxism 194–5, 196–7, 198–9, 200 and race 96, 97 Marxist humanism 5–6, 15, 80–1, 126–32, 138, 208 masses 131, 134, 215n culture and 74–5, 77, 162, 167, 186 leadership and 29, 31–2, 58 and party 151 revolutionary capacity of 123, 125, 132, 154 Maynard, P.C. 69 Melville, Herman 29, 78, 201 Mendes, Alfred 69 Merleau-Ponty, M. 170 Merton, R.K. 196 Mills, C.W. 1, 2, 150 mind 30, 31 Minty Alley (James) 3, 70, 71, 115, 117 Moby Dick (Melville) 29, 78

Modern Politics (James) 22, 189 modernity 1, 2, 6–8, 16, 161, 203–4 European 13, 14, 22, 23, 27, 34, 43 Goethe and 46 Marxism and 6, 7, 47 multidirectional flow 14, 22–8, 106 New World 23–4, 27–8, 43 slavery and 14–15, 16, 18, 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 37–8, 43 spatial-temporal structure 23–4, 27, 160 in totality 160 Moody, H. 61 morality 5, 6, 200 Morgan, W.J. Leftist Theories of Sport 162–3, 172 Mostern, K. 226n Mouffe, C. 196 Mousley, A. 200 mulattoes 39–40 Murray, J. 48 myth 32 Naipaul, V.S. 86, 87, 98, 187 Nation 107 Negritude movement 55, 65, 67 Negro question 38, 39, 138, 207 Nelson (Lancashire), James in 94 neurosis 114–15 New Left 195–6 attitude to sport 162–3 New World culture 14, 21, 24–5 News and Letters Group 30 Nielsen, A.L. 30, 41, 49, 78, 85, 143 Nixon, R. 116 Nkrumah, Kwame 29, 32 Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (James) 221n Notes on Dialectics (James) 3, 10, 29, 30, 131, 133, 203 Nyerere, Julius 32 Olympia (film) 177–8 Olympic Games 160, 178 organisation 133–4, 135–6, 156 intellectualism and 136 marginalization of black women 145–6, 146–7 radicalism in 132–3 social and political 123, 125, 128–9, 193, 203 Othello (Shakespeare) 80

246

Index

Padmore, George 102, 103 The Palace of the Peacock (Harris) 190 Pan-Africanism 96–7 Paris Commune 1871 31, 134–5 party 138 masses and 132–3, 136–7, 151–2 Patterson, O. 26 Pedersen, C. 67 People’s National Movement (Trinidad) 107 Perkin, H. 182 personality 29, 30, 34, 54, 57 integrated 204 modern 35–6, 43, 62 Phillips, C. 118 poetics 8–9, 75–6 politics and 205–6, 207 poiesis 200, 205–6 politics 8–9, 11, 28, 75–6, 129 poetics and 205–6, 207 popular culture 74–5, 76, 77, 78–9, 130, 132 postcolonial intellectualism 83–4, 103, 114, 116, 118 postcolonialism, cricket and 169, 178–9, 187, 189–90, 191 post-marxism 194–5, 196–7, 198–9, 200 power 73, 78 of slave owners 19–20 praxis 2, 94, 125, 150–2 progress 7, 43, 46, 102–3, 130, 132 proletariat see masses quasi-metropolitans 86–7, 89, 91, 97, 99, 100, 101–2 Queen’s Royal College, James at 48, 49, 50, 51, 98 race 8–9, 66–7, 75–6, 79–80 class and 39–44, 79–80, 92, 94, 96–8, 100, 104–5, 196, 198, 207–8 racial identity 38–40 racialization 49–51, 62, 87, 89–90, 207 of slaves 42 and totalisation of modernity 160 racism 104, 207–8, 220n in Communist Party 105 experienced by black Americans 100 James’s experiences of 98–9, 106, 113 scientific 53, 66–7

radicalism 129, 153, 197, 198, 202 spontaneity and 133–9, 148, 155, 156 see also self-activity, radical rejection 65–6 Renaissance 160 resistance 7, 15, 21, 22, 169 popular culture and 74 revolution 78, 79, 129, 130, 132, 134 ‘The Revolutionary Answer’ (James) 104 Riefenstahl, Leni 177, 178 Romantic figure 54, 191 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 157 Said, E. 83–4, 87, 118, 200 San Domingo 16 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 89, 100–1, 206 Black Orpheus 202 and class struggle 152–3 concept of bad faith 85, 93–4, 105 Critique of Dialectical Reason 148–9 and Freud 99, 223n individuals and collectives 149–52 progressive-regressive method 102–3, 113 Words 48 Satterwhite, J.H. 126 Schwarz, B. 68, 92, 97 Scott, D. 63 secularity 5, 6, 203–4 self-activity 190, 193, 194 radical 34, 36–7, 41–3, 47, 75, 125, 129–30, 148, 153–4, 188 self-determination 59–60, 61, 80, 97, 164, 187–8 Senghor, Léopold 55, 56, 66–7 Shakespeare, William 29 Sim, S. 196 Simmel, G., ‘The Stranger’ 101–2, 109 Simpson, L. 65 Sitwell, Edith 88 slave trade 14, 16–17, 33 slavery 160 Marxism and 34–5 modernity and 14–15, 16, 18, 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 37–8, 43, 160 slaves 15, 57, 193 control of 17–21 as proto-proletarians 33–8, 43, 62, 215n

Index 247 racialization of 42 radical self-activity of 36–7, 41–3, 46–7, 188 revolt of 96 right of life 20 skills of 35 torture of 18–19 Small, R. 92 Sobers, Garfield 108–9 social change 29, 78, 134–5, 199–200, 204–5 gender inequality and 143 socialism 60, 68–9, 95, 102, 137, 153 Pan-Africanism and 96–7 Socialist Workers’ Party (USA) 60, 97, 132, 134 recruitment of black members 59 sociological imagination 1, 2, 5, 32 sociology 2, 130–1 sociopoetics 171–6, 179–80, 184–5, 186 Sontag, S. 177, 178 spontaneity 78, 147–52, 153–6, 195, 203, 206 Greek city-states and 161 and organic organisation 133–9 sport and 174, 175, 176 ‘Woman Question’ and 139–47 sport 172, 178 as art 165–6, 167, 179–80 civilizing aspects of 178–9 as domination 163, 169, 178, 180 Trotsky and 167 see also cricket Stalinism 102, 125, 126 ‘The Star That Would Not Shine’ (James) 70, 72 state capitalism 123, 125 critique of 122, 123, 125, 128–32 State Capitalism and World Revolution (James) 122, 125 style 172, 180, 184–5 sublime 179–80 suicide, of slaves 20 Surin, K. 168 surveillance 16, 18, 20–1 terror, control of slaves through 16, 18–19, 26 Thomaso, C.A. 69 Tiffin, H. 115, 165–6 Todorov, T. 206 torture, of slaves 18–19

totalitarianism 125, 128, 201 Toussaint l’Ouverture 10, 29, 31, 57 as modern personality 62–3 transcendental idealism 51, 52–3, 54 Trinidad 48–9, 107–8, 113 Trinidad 69 Trinidadian Renaissance 69–71 ‘Triumph’ (James) 70 Trotsky, Leon 59, 61, 80, 97, 124–5 Trotskyism 102, 104, 122, 124, 128 in America 100 James’s repudiation of 11, 125 schism with Communist Party 105, 127 ‘Turner’s Prosperity’ (James) 70, 72 understanding 204, 205, 206 United States of America 97, 100, 105 black church in 138–9 black women in 145–7 James’s deportation from 107 utopianism 130 vanguardism 47, 59, 125, 137–8 see also anti-vanguardism Vanity Fair (Thackeray) 48, 51 vindicationism 57–8, 65 voluntarism 74, 103, 124, 151 Walcott, Derek 54, 233n Walker, A. 139 Warburg, Frederic 88–9 Webb, Constance 100, 206–7 Weber, Max 130 Weinstein, Selma (later James) 144 ‘welfare state of mind’ 53–4, 189 West Indian Federal Labour Party 107 West Indians acceptance by British 187, 191 attitude to Africans 86 and cricket 54, 109–10, 186–7, 188–91 and literature 69–70, 70–1, 86 as quasi-metropolitans 86–7 self-understanding of 187–8 and slavery 34, 35 see also Caribbean Widick, B.J. 105 Williams, Eric 17, 107, 108 ‘Woman Question’ 144–5, 146 women 141–2 in American society 141, 145–7 middle class 141–2

248

Index

Worcester, K. 56 workers 132–3, 136–7, 151–2 slaves and 34–5 see also masses Workers’ and Farmers’ Party 107–8 World Historical individuals 30–1, 32, 92 West Indian cricketers 109, 164 male 141

World Revolution 1917–1936 (James) 124, 125 Worrell, Frank 10, 99, 108–9, 124, 187, 191–2 Wright, R. 55–6, 66, 100, 103, 105, 110 Native Son 99 Wynter, S. 183, 204 Zangwill, N. 171