The CLR James Reader.Pdf

'l‘he C.L.R. James Reader EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY ANNA GRIMSHAW @,Lr>,e'sYx§aa Copyright © The Estate of C.l..R. James; this arrangement and editorial matter © Anna Grimshaw First published l992 Blackwell Publishers 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1]F, UK Three Cambridge Center Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this boolt is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is pub1iShcd and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this boolt is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data James, C. L. R. (Cyril Lionel Robert), 1901- Thc C. L. R._Iames Reader / edited by Anna Gritnshaw. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-631-18179-2. -- ISBN 0-631-18495-3 (pblt.) l. Grimshaw, Anna. I1. Title. PR9272.9._]35A6 1992 B18--dc20 if 92-6628 ff Typeset by Jim Murray of Cultural Correspondence, New Yorlt Printed by T._]. Press, Padstow, Cornwall Contents l'| |‘|.||'\‘ .'\t Lnnwletlgcments xi l||l|mil|t‘li()l1 C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the Twentieth Century, by Anna Grimshaw 1 l'.'\|('l' I TRINIDAD 1901-1932 I |.a Divina Pastora 25 .' Triumph 29 1'/\R'l‘ II BRITAIN 1932-I938 I llloomsbury: An Encounter with Edith Sitwell 43 -I The Case for West Indian Self-Government 49 '5 Abyssinia and the Imperialists 63 la The Black jacobins 67 7 Stalin and Socialism I12 PART III AMERICA AND AFTER 1938-I956 H Letters to Constance Webb 127 ‘J Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity 153 HI The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA 182 ll The Class Struggle 12 Whitman and Melville 13 Letters to Literary Critics 14 Notes on Hamlet 15 Popular Art and the Cultural Tradition 16 Preface to Criticism PART IV THE AFRICAN DIASPOR.A 1957-1989 17 Letters on Politics I8 Lincoln, Carnival, George Padmore: Writings from The Nation 19 From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro Z0 ‘What is Art?’ Z1 Lenin and the Vanguard Party 22 Lenin and the Problem 23 The People of the Gold Coast 24 The Rise and Fall of Nkrumah 25 Black Power 26 Black People in the Urban Areas of the United States 27 Garfield Sobers 28 Black Studies and the Contemporary Student 29 Picasso and Jackson Pollock 30 Three Black Women Writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange Notes Notes on the Chapters C.l ..R. jnmesz llibliography lmlcx of Nztnnt-s Preface The C.L.R. ]ames Reader was begun in James’s lifetime. It was during the summer of 1983 that James and I started to discuss in detail the contents of a volume which would introduce his work to a new generation of readers. We planned to include a number of key writings from his published corpus and a selection of previously unpublished documents, essays and correspondence. What was important to us in planning the Reader was our sense of the whole. In seeking to escape from the mere chronological documentation of James’s life—one of the major problems James had encountered in his attempt to write an autobiography—we agreed that the principle governing the selection ofmaterial should be the organic connection between the different pieces. The introduction to the Reader reflects this approach. It is animated by the expansive and yet unifying theme ofJames’s remarkable life. And it is rooted in an understanding of his distinctive method. A fragment from James’s autobiography serves as a useful illustration: I had been reading from early Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thackeray, Dickens and later Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and a whole list of writers. And I got a conception of human character and the interesting aspects of human personality, and the plain fact of the matter is the middle class people to whom I belonged and among whom I lived were busy trying to shape their lives according to the British idea of behaviour and principles. They were not very interesting. I dare say in time I could have done something with them. But the people who had passion, human energy, anger, violence and generosity were the common people whom I saw around me. They shaped my political outlook and from that time to this day those are the people I have been most concerned with. That's why I was able to understand Marx very easily, and particularly Lenin who was concerned with them. I didn’t learn everything from Marxism. When I went to Marxism I was already well prepared. Even in my days of fiction I had the instinct which enabled me to grasp the fundamentals of Marxism so easily and then to work at Marxism having the basic elements of a Marxist view—-—my concern with the common people. J;uncs's mcthotl was e.sst'|iti;|lly empirical. l"rom boyhood he had meticulously viii Prqfizcc gathered information—through observation, reading, research and conversation. His mastery of the concrete details of particular forms of human activity gave him enormous confidence in his approach to the world. It formed the basis for his exploration of ideas; and throughout his life, moving with ease between the general current of world history and the concrete particulars of everyday life, James was able to capture both the complexity and unity of the modern world. For many years James’s work was poorly circulated. During the 1970s, however, books by James became much more easily available, largely as a result of Margaret Busby’s initiative in the London-based publishing house, Allison and Busby. In the last decade of James’s life most of his full-length works were reprinted; and three volumes of selected writings brought together his articles and essays which had long been buried in obscure publications. The C.L.R. james Reader, while drawing upon these materials, contains much that is new. In particular, it makes available previously unpublished writings from James’s personal archive. A good deal of the work for the Reader was built upon earlier projects associated with the James archive. The collection of papers, originally organised and catalogued by Jim Murray in the early 1980s, formed the basis of the exhibition, C.L.R. James: Man of the People, held in London in 1986. It also yielded many documents for James’s volume, Cricket, published later in the same year. The availability of new materials in the James archive has not just made it possible to fill out the picture of James’s remarkable life, to marvel at the sheer productivity of his eighty and more years or to add on a few more labels to the already long list—Pan-Africanist, Marxist, cricket commentator, critic and writer of fiction. What these documents make possible is a new conception of that life’s work itself. The Reader is such an attempt. Its primary purpose is not to offer a representative sample of writings; but to break some of the old categories which fragment and confine James. We now know more about the scope and precision of James’s project. It is, however, the integration of the parts, the weaving of disparate, scattered pieces into a whole, the creation, as James would say, of something new, which will secure and extend the legacy of one of our century's most outstanding figures. This was the basis of James’s approach to the work of the great figures—artists, writers and revolutionaries—of history. He knew, too, that it was the challenge of his own autobiography. The Reader, like the autobiography, was unfinished at the time of James’s death. In the difficult period since May 1989, I have received a great deal of support from many people. Their contributions, ranging from friendship to financial and editorial assistance, have been invaluable in making possible the completion of this book. Indeed, I like to think of the Reader as Jamesian to its core, for its production has grown out of the informal cooperation of individuals organised by the task itself. In particular, I would like to thank Margaret Grimshaw, Andrew Mcl.aughlin, and David Menzies for their very practical and generous cncouragements of my work. Alastair Niven of the Arts (lotmvil has offered sound advice and timely support. l would also like to nrkiiowlulgc the resotiru-s mztde ;tvail;thlt- to _|:|mt's all |h<' ('|ltI ol his Int hy lht" /\|ts ('.m|m"il and the Royal l.itt'|'.||'v l"u|ul, as these Prefizce ix enabled us to begin the Reader project. I much appreciate the tenacity and tact of Simon Prosser at Blackwell Publishers. He has persisted in backing the book, despite many obstacles and delays. I am grateful, too, to Silvana Dean for her rarcful and painstaking work, and to Michael Grimshaw for his help with the Limes bibliography. Thanks to Ralph Dumain, Casey Hill, David Polonoff, James .\‘m||iton, and Shoshana Vasheetz for their diligent editorial work. Associates of the (I.l..R. James Institute in New York, particularly Annie Chamberlin, Jerome I List-npflug, Roderick Thurton, and Kent Worcester have challenged and stimu- l.|u-1| the development of many of my ideas.

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