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Hazel V. Carby PROLETARIAN OR REVOLUTIONARY LITERATURE

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Hazel V. Carby PROLETARIAN OR REVOLUTIONARY LITERATURE new formations NUMBER 10 SPRING 1990 Hazel V. Carby PROLETARIAN OR REVOLUTIONARY LITERATURE: C. L. R. JAMES AND THE POLITICS OF THE TRINIDADIAN RENAISSANCE1 This essay addresses the inadequacies of our current attempts to consider issues of cultural production across national boundaries: in particular, relations between literary movements in the 'third' and the 'first' world. Teaching about 'third' world culture in the context of 'first' world universities presents both students and teachers with some fundamental political dilemmas. Our teaching needs to make connections with, as well as provide a critique of, dominant ideologies and meanings of culture which, for example, structure the curricula of departments of English and American studies. Teaching 'third' world culture must involve a constant and consistent critique of the forms of knowledge production that maintain the European and American cultural hegemony in which our students are embedded: either that or we remain politically marginal. If we are not in a state of constant political confrontation with the imperialist discourse that structures 'first' world education systems, then we merely confirm our exoticism. Approaches to culture offered by programmes in comparative literature offer no satisfactory alternative to English or American studies, for historically they too are overwhelmingly Eurocentred. If we are to develop any sort of challenge to the ways in which educational institutions organize and structure forms of knowledge about the 'third' world, then we have to be able to offer a coherent alternative political vision: a way of thinking critically across relations of cultural production in the 'third', 'second', and 'first' worlds. In what follows I try to situate what has been called the 'Trinidadian renaissance' in an international context, but in a more general way I hope the essay is regarded as a contribution to and a criticism of contemporary debate about constructing a 'World Literature'. In Beyond a Boundary, a cultural history of cricket, C. L. R. James tells us that the two major political and social influences in his life have been literature and cricket; indeed, literature and cricket are the two recurring motifs that figure the emergence of his political consciousness.2 His scholastic career as a scholarship boy in Trinidad forced upon him the contradictions of the intellectual in the colonies. James's assiduous study and practice of the art of fiction resulted in two convictions: a recognition of his alienation, which he expressed as an awareness that 'intellectually [he] lived abroad, chiefly in England'; and a deep commitment to literature as an instrument of social reform.3 It was in the practice of cricket (what James calls 'the clash of race, caste and class') that the particular politics of colonization, of class and race 99 rivalries were confronted: 'the cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance.'4 When James left for England in 1932, he took with him two manuscripts that he describes as representative of the interrelation of cricket and politics in his life, a history of West Indian cricket and Learie Constantine, and a political history of the West Indies and Captain Cipriani.5 His work with Constantine established a partnership that had West Indian self-government as its goal and led James directly into socialist and Marxist politics. Both these projects are recognizably the initiation of James's career as a political and cultural theorist whose work for the past fifty-seven years has engaged African, North American, Caribbean, European, and Soviet politics. But besides these two manuscripts, James also carried with him a completed novel, Minty Alley, published in 1936, which provides important insights into the formation of James as a cultural and political theorist.6 Minty Alley can also be regarded, more generally, as an exploration of the contradictions of colonial intellectual practice and as a contribution to a world debate about proletarian and revolutionary literature. James had contributed short fiction to two Trinidadian journals, the Trinidad of which only two issues were published, Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930, and the Beacon which produced twenty-eight issues between March 1931 and November 1933.7 James edited the Trinidad with Alfred Mendes and was a regular contributor to the Beacon, edited by Albert Gomes, until 1932. He was part of a group of young intellectuals that used to meet and discuss each others' writings and who hoped that the Trinidad would be the first step in the establishment of an indigenous West Indian literary tradition. Alfred Mendes has stressed that two events 'drove us into writing about our islands': the first was 'the first world war where a large number of us who had not been abroad were influenced considerably by what was happening in the world, and the second event was the Russian Revolution'.8 Reinhard Sander, in his introduction to a collection of four volumes of the Beacon, has argued that the occupation of the group 'with the Russian experiment became an important ideological framework from which to criticize colonial society in Trinidad and to attack the Crown Colony system'.9 When Albert Gomes returned to Trinidad in 1930 he sought out the editors of the Trinidad, copies of which he had read while in the United States, but he found that no more issues of the Trinidad were planned because the group who produced it were on the point of disbanding.10 Gomes's decision to found and edit the Beacon is generally considered to be the moment of the integration of the political struggle to achieve independence and the creation of a national literature in Trinidad. Working for and writing in the Beacon shifted the concerns of a group of intellectuals from 'armchair discussion' to the production of a journal dedicated to the achievement of drastic change in the Trinidadian social structure.11 The Beacon was a forum for the creation of a West Indian literature, a literature which was regarded primarily as a vehicle for the representation of the poor and dispossessed. But this fictional concern with oppression could not 100 NEW FORMATIONS long be divorced from other more political modes of representation, and the Beacon group quickly retracted their initial apolitical stance and reluctance to write editorials and used the pages of the journal to attack Trinidadian politicians and political structure, to comment on world events, openly to support Soviet policies, to publish banned Soviet articles, and to develop a socialist and sometimes communist politics.12 It is an automatic reflex of literary and cultural criticism to consider literatures from the 'Third World' as marginal to European or North American culture. It is usually the recognition of such literature as a product of a national culture and nationalist theories and movements that structurally marginalizes it. Though a socialist theory and practice of the teaching of world literatures cannot be an apology for nationalism, neither can it be limited to national 'readings' of culture but should articulate the specificity of national cultural production. The moment of the Trinidadian intellectual 'renaissance' of the 1920s and 1930s is clearly of international significance, connected to both the Harlem renaissance and intercontinental movements to create a proletarian literature. Each and all of these groups of cultural producers - Caribbean intellectuals, the writers of the Harlem renaissance, and the writers of proletarian novels - have been treated as discrete entities with discrete histories, as literary movements that are marginal to the cultures from which they spring. As a contribution to thinking across these categories, I would like to suggest ways in which an international perspective can question and counter this cultural marginalization. The 'Resolution of the First Ail-Union Conference of Proletarian Writers' (1925) recognized the important ideological role of literature in Soviet society.13 The conference established many of the terms and conditions of proletarian literature that became influential in Europe, North America, and, I will argue, the Caribbean. Arguing strongly against the tendency to make proletarian literature marginal to literature in general, the conference urged the principle of the hegemony of that literature. Among the resolutions was an acknowledgement of artistic literature as a powerful weapon in the class war and as an arena of unassuaged class war. The culture and literature of the bourgeoisie were said to be in crisis, in a state of decomposition; proletarian culture, in Lenin's terms, should become the natural continuation and development of reserves of knowledge developed under a capitalist society. In other words, a proletarian literature could take everything of value and all that was progressive from classical and contemporary bourgeois culture but go beyond it and 'rework' it.14 The conference intensely debated Trotsky's notion of 'fellow travellers', writers who came from the intelligentsia, the lower- middle classes, and the peasantry, and questioned their possible contributions to the formation of a proletarian literature.15 Trotsky, on the other hand, argued that everyone needed to be freed from the 'metaphysical concept of proletarian culture . and regard the question from the point of view of what the proletariat reads, what it needs, what absorbs it, what impels it to action, what elevates its cultural level and so prepares the ground for a new art . [a] literature vitally needed by an awakened people'.16 Against the concept of a proletarian literature, Trotsky C.L.R. JAMES 101 posed the concept of a revolutionary literature: only literature that 'promotes the consolidation of the workers in their struggle against the exploiters is necessary and progressive'.17 He also described the interrelation between class, individual, and national characteristics of art 'as it expresses definite demands which have a class character . [which] also means individual because a class speaks through an individual.
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