Well-crafted biography of a man once characterized as "the sharpest
and most interesting mind that the British Caribbean has produced
in three centuries of learning." Although the Trinidadian writer
and activist Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-89) was at the center
of many political and literary movements in his time, he is little
known today. "By the 1960s," Worcester observes, "he was an elder
radical statesperson on several continents, famous for his writing
and historical impact. Yet for many years he worked in obscurity,
adopting pseudonyms and struggling . . . to pay the rent."
Worcester's biography should do much to bring James his proper due.
The author, a program director for the Social Science Research
Council, is well versed in 20th-century political history, in which
he situates James as an independent revolutionary socialist; he is
also conversant with James's many other interests, among them
literature (James's 1935 novel Minty Alley influenced, among
others, fellow Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul), drama (Paul Robeson
staged his play Toussaint L'Ouverture in 1936), and American
popular culture (James was devoted to film noir, jazz, and
hardboiled detective stories). It is in politics, however, as a
self-taught follower of Marx and Trotsky, that James may have had
his most lasting influence, largely because of his groundbreaking
work in the Pan-African movement; "the road to West Indian national
identity," James argued, "lay through Africa," and his book The
Black Jacobins remains a touchstone of late Marxist thought. The
many important figures who appear in Worcester's pages, among them
James Baldwin, Leonard Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Irving Howe, Meyer
Schapiro, Maya Angelou, Mighty Sparrow, and Arthur Ashe, suggest
the range of his contributions. C.L.R. James emerges from this
engaging book as a man who lived his life fully and whose work is
worthy of further study, and Worcester has done much to rescue his
subject from oblivion. (Kirkus Reviews)
General
Imprint: |
State University of New York Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
SUNY Series, Interruptions: Border Testimony(ies) & Critical Discourse/s |
Release date: |
November 1995 |
First published: |
November 1995 |
Authors: |
Kent Worcester
|
Dimensions: |
230 x 169 x 20mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
311 |
Edition: |
annotated edition |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-7914-2751-4 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-7914-2751-X |
Barcode: |
9780791427514 |
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