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APA Newsletters APA Newsletters Volume 04, Number 2 Spring 2005 NEWSLETTER ON PHILOSOPHY AND THE BLACK EXPERIENCE FROM THE EDITORS, JOHN MCCLENDON AND GEORGE YANCY ARTICLES STEPHEN C. FERGUSON II “As Essay-Review of John H. McClendon’s C. L. R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left-Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism?” CLARENCE SHOLÉ JOHNSON “Author Meets Critics Sessions on Cornel West & Philosophy at the APA Eastern Division Meeting, December 27-30, 2003: Response to My Critics” BOOK REVIEWS Darryl Scriven: A Dealer of Old Clothes: Philosophical Conversations with David Walker REVIEWED BY LEONARD HARRIS Kwasi Wiredu: A Companion to African Philosophy REVIEWED BY CLARENCE SHOLÉ JOHNSON BOOK REVIEWS © 2005 by The American Philosophical Association ISSN: 1067-9464 APA NEWSLETTER ON Philosophy and the Black Experience John McClendon & George Yancy, Co-Editors Spring 2005 Volume 04, Number 2 FROM THE EDITORS ARTICLES In this issue of our Newsletter, Dr. Stephen C. Ferguson, Jr., An Essay-Review of John H. McClendon’s provides us with a comprehensive essay/review of John H. C. L. R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left- McClendon III’s C. L. R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? Ferguson points out that Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? McClendon’s book, the first complete text devoted to James’s magnum opus, is a seminal contribution to Marxist-Leninist Stephen C. Ferguson II philosophy as well as to the scholarship on the Trinidadian Auburn University revolutionary activist/intellectual C. L. R. James. Ferguson astutely surveys other secondary literature on James and offers While there has been a relative resurgence of James conclusions based on a fine analysis of McClendon’s method scholarship, many address James in an anachronistic of internal critique of James in contrast to those who seek to manner. By anachronistic manner I mean, imposing push James from his ideological/philosophical foundation in interpretations linking James to contemporary Marxism-Leninism. political and ideological fads and trends. Such readings Also in this issue, we are delighted to publish Dr. Clarence interpret James in the mode of an external Sholé Johnson’s responses to his critics vis-à-vis his important retrospective instead of from the standpoint of an book Cornel West & Philosophy. Dr. Johnson’s responses to his internal critique. This external retrospective in interlocutors were given at the “Author Meets Critics Session tandem with an anachronistic reading infiltrates and on Cornel West & Philosophy” at the APA Eastern Division distorts the integrity of James’s corpus; it is in a word Meeting, December 27-30, 2003. So as to capture the flavor of ‘imperialist’, disrupting the actual course of changes Dr. Johnson’s “speakerly” voice, the Editors decided not to and development in his actual ideological formation. edit his original responses. This anachronistic reading misses the mark because it is arrogantly presentist in orientation and it abjectly Dr. Leonard Harris provides us with an insightful review of fails to understand James within his own ideological Darryl Scriven’s A Dealer of Old Clothes: Philosophical milieu. Conversations with David Walker. Both the review and the Scrivens text explore interrelated issues concerning racism, —John H. McClendon III, C. L. R. James’s Notes on philosophical anthropology, and theodicy. Dialectics: Left-Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism?1 Dr. Clarence Sholé Johnson also provides a review of Kwasi Wiredu’s new edited volume entitled A Companion to African Philosophy. Johnson makes it clear that although Wiredu’s James was one of the first Marxist-Leninists to text is described as “a ‘companion’ text, deriving its appreciate the symptomatic value of mass media nomenclature from the Blackwell Companion series to which culture. But his dialectical brand of cultural criticism it belongs, the book is anything but a secondary text.” can be reappropriated by the fashionable trend in Cultural Studies only at the risk of positivist vulgarization. —E. San Juan, Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory2 Introduction In an earlier article, I stated that there existed no published works whose central focus of inquiry was C. L. R. James’s philosophical magnum opus Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx- Lenin (1948).3 James considered this work to be one of his lasting contributions to the Marxist theory.4 Now that has all changed with the publication of John McClendon’s book C. L. R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left-Hegelianism or Marxism- Leninism? — APA Newsletter, Spring 2005, Volume 04, Number 2 — McClendon has produced a truly remarkable book and critical orientations and approaches. Poststructuralism is certainly one of the most intellectually stimulating treatments representative of several developments within the broader of James I have read. In the first chapter, “Reminiscences of movement of postmodernism. As an intellectual tendency the James Legacy,” McClendon informs us that he received a primarily within philosophy and literary criticism, it is personal copy of Notes from James (after being on a panel characterized by antirealism, radical skepticism, and with him addressing the issue of Pan-Africanism) in 1972. antifoundationalism.8 This book—without a doubt—will be the definitive book According to poststructuralist thought, there is no stability on James’s legacy as a Marxist-Leninist philosopher. One of of meaning or, in Derrida’s terminology, no “metaphysics of the central claims that McClendon makes is that—though presence” in language. Derrida’s deconstructive method (for James broke from the views of Leon Trotsky and always held example, through a reading of texts by thinkers as diverse as great disdain for Joseph Stalin—he did not conceive of his Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, and Saussure) uncovers the theory and practice to be anything other than Marxist-Leninist. contingency of meaning embedded in all texts, rather than Prima facie, this would appear to be a rather trivial point to strives to reveal a unified meaning. Consequently, we are left make given James’s many assertions concerning his with the view that no text can possess a determinate meaning. ideological, political, and philosophical commitments. This may mean two things. Instead of one unitary and However, a vast number of recent studies on James have unambiguous meaning, there can be multiple meanings. Or a found it convenient to interpret him as anything but a Marxist- text can take any interpretation whatsoever. (As we will see, Leninist. These days, it seems as if everyone and his uncle this is the approach taken by poststructuralist readings of possesses his own, private C. L. R. James, as Kent Worcester James’s work.9) Moreover, Derrida’s deconstructive method has poignantly noted. So, the net result of the explosion of has as its object the pointing out the “blind spots or ellipses” books on James has been a substantially distorted picture of within the dominant interpretation of a text.10 one of the great radical intellectuals of the twentieth century. Sylvia Wynter’s article, “Beyond the Categories of the As McClendon remarks, Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” focuses on the “deconstructive thrust” in James’s The decided proclivity [of recent studies on James] work, which she argues subverts “the labor-centric categories to judge his work from a presentist standpoint and by of orthodox Marxism.” By subjecting James to a means of an anachronistic reading has substantially poststructuralist reading, Wynter intends to “deconstruct” distorted the real picture of James’s personal James and thereby substitute a poststructuralist semiotics for motivation and political actions within the Marxist James’s Marxist-Leninist world outlook. She proclaims, tradition. Such interpretations attempt to dislodge James from his place within the Marxist-Leninist The Jamesian poiesis, taken as system, the theoretics tradition.5 providing a reference for the esthetics and vice-versa, provides the condition of possibility for the This trend began with the publication of Cedric Robinson’s emergence of a Jamesian doctrine, one that subverts Black Marxism in 1983. Since that time, there has been an its own center—the labor conceptual framework. ideological and philosophical debate concerning James’s This doctrine—pointing as it does toward a global legacy as a Marxist-Leninist theorist and activist. From model of multiple modes of accumulation and of Robinson’s ideological lenses, James was a critical theorist multiple concomitant modes of coercion—begins the and member of a Black Marxist trend not only unique to the relativization of the Marxian factory model of Black intellectual tradition but standing apart from a supposed exploitation; it projects the future through “White Marxism.” Robinson, in his now classic tome, puts conceptions of the past and representations of the forward the view that James belongs to an ideological now, which lends coherence to all the Jamesian formation and intellectual history, which Robinson coins as writings.11 “The Black Radical Tradition.” Robinson asserts that the Black Radical Tradition is historically distinct from and substantially Wynter aims to give a systematic character to James’s antithetical to Marxism-Leninism.6 In a similar fashion, the writings. She further argues, African American philosopher Lucius Outlaw claims that James One result of this extended critical analysis has been is a critical Black nationalist (or what he terms a “left- a methodology that employs a pluri-conceptual
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