Cyril Lionel Robert James Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989) was a major contributor to socialist and pan-African thought. He wrote on history, literature, philosophy, art, sports, and politics. His best known books include The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution (1938); Notes on Dialectics (1948); American Civilization (1950); Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953); and Beyond a Boundary (1963). Along with the Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci, James is one of a small number of twentieth-century Marxist intellectuals whose reputation has continued to rise after the collapse of Soviet-style communism.

James was born and raised in Trinidad, which at the time was part of the British Empire. He migrated to England in 1932 in hopes of pursuing a career as a novelist and literary critic, then became active on the far left and turned to political topics. He supported himself through cricket journalism and became a widely known figure on the English left. He also joined the International African Service Bureau, which was a nexus of interwar anticolonial activism. Toward the end of the 1930s, James took part in the founding convention of the Fourth International (FI), a communist organization. It was on behalf of the FI that James relocated to the United States in 1938 to take up a leadership position in the country’s fledgling Trotskyist movement. Within a few years, however, he had broken with the FI and developed his own ideas about civil rights, socialist democracy, art and politics, and the distinctive role of small socialist groupings. He developed these ideas with a small number of cothinkers in the so-called Johnson Forest tendency, whose circle included Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-humanism in the United States; Chinese American theoretician Grace Lee; and American Marxist Martin Glaberman.

James was deported from the United States in the early 1950s as an “undesirable alien.” After losing his appeal for citizenship, he reluctantly returned to Britain, where he continued to correspond with his U.S. collaborators but also began writing on cultural questions as well as the modern history of the Caribbean. He spent nearly four years in the West Indies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where he participated in the movement for national independence. His most important work for the nationalist cause was his role as editor of The Nation, a weekly newspaper that was part of the People’s National Movement, led by his childhood friend Eric Williams.

Inspired by his experiences in pro-independence Trinidad, James returned to pan-African issues and traveled throughout Africa and the Caribbean in the 1960s. He spoke on numerous campuses during this period and became well known for his advocacy of both black protest and his somewhat anarchistic version of democratic socialism. In his final years James settled in London. He was awarded the Trinidad Cross, the country’s highest public honor, in 1988. Since his death, a number of biographies and studies have been published on various aspects of his life and work.

Bibliography:

Gair, Christopher, ed. Beyond Boundaries: C. L. R. James and Post-national Studies. London: Pluto, 2006.
James, C. L. R. The C. L. R. James Reader. Edited by Anna Grimshaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Worcester, Kent. C. L. R. James: A Political Biography. Albany: State University of New York, 1996.

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