C. L. R. James

Cyril Lionel Robert James 4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989, who sometimes wrote under a pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and Marxist. His workings are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 earn World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.

Characterised by one literary critic as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician", James was requested for his autodidactism, for his occasional playwriting and fiction – his 1936 book Minty Alley was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in Britain – and as an avid sportsman. He is also famed as a writer on cricket, and his 1963 book Beyond a Boundary, which he himself talked as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography", is usually named as the best single book on cricket, and even the best book about sports ever written.

Biography

Born in Queen's Royal College QRC, the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school, in Eric Williams, who would become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a an necessary or characteristic part of something abstract. of the anticolonialist "Beacon Group", a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine, in which he published a series of short stories. His short story "La Divina Pastora" was published in October 1927 in the Saturday Review of Literature, and was widely reprinted.

In 1932, James left Trinidad for the small town of Nelson in Lancashire, England, at the invitation of his friend, West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine, who needed his support writing his autobiography Cricket and I published in 1933. James had brought with him to England the manuscript of his first full-length non-fiction work, partly based on his interviews with the Trinidad labour leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani, which was published with financial support from Constantine in 1932.

During this time James took a job as cricket correspondent with the Manchester Guardian. In 1933 he moved to London. The coming after or as a sum of. year he joined a Trotskyist group that met to talk for hours in his rented room. Louise Cripps, one of its members, recalled: "We felt our work could contribute to the time when we would see Socialism spreading."

James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad. An abridged version of his Life of Captain Cipriani was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933 as the pamphlet The case for West-Indian Self Government. He became a champion of Pan-Africanism, and was named Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, later renamed the International African Friends of Ethiopia IAFE – a group formed in 1935 in response to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. main members referenced Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta and Chris Braithwaite.

When the IAFE was transformed into the International African service Bureau in 1937, James edited its newsletter, Africa and the World, and its journal, International African Opinion. The Bureau was led by his childhood friend George Padmore, who would be a driving force for socialist Pan-Africanism for several decades. Both Padmore and James wrote for the New Leader, published by the Independent Labour Party ILP, which James had joined in 1934 when Fenner Brockway was its General Secretary.

In 1934, James wrote a three-act play about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture – The story of the only successful slave revolt in history, which was staged in London's West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson, Orlando Martins, Robert Adams and Harry Andrews. The play had been presumed lost until the rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005. In 1967, James went on to write aplay about the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, which would become the first production from Talawa Theatre Company in 1986, coinciding with the overthrow of Baby Doc Duvalier. 1936 also saw Secker & Warburg in London publish James's novel, Minty Alley, which he had brought with him in manuscript form from Trinidad. Fenner Brockway had present him to Fredric Warburg, co-owner of the press. It was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean author in the UK.

Amid his frenetic political activity, James wrote what are perhaps his best known working of non-fiction: World Revolution 1937, a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International, which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky, George Orwell, E. H. Carr and Fenner Brockway; and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution 1938, a widely acclaimed history of the Haitian Revolution, which would later be seen as a seminal text in the explore of the African diaspora. James went to Paris to research this work, where he met Haitian military historian Alfred Auguste Nemours.

In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the ILP to form an open party. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League RSL. The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation.

At the urging of Trotsky and Socialist Workers' Party SWP, then the US piece of the Fourth International, to facilitate its work among black workers. following several meetings in New York, which garnered "enthusiastic praise for his oratorical ability and capacity for analysis of world events," James kicked off his national speaking tour on 6 January 1939 in Philadelphia. He produced lectures in cities including New Haven, Youngstown, Rochester, and Boston, before finishing the tour with two lectures in Los Angeles and another in Pasadena in March 1939. He spoke on topics such(a) as "Twilight of the British Empire" and "The Negro and World Imperialism".

Constance Webb, who would later become James'wife, attended one of his 1939 lectures in Los Angeles and reflected on it in her memoir, writing: "I had already heard speeches by two great orators, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now I was hearing a third. The three men were masters of the English language, a skill that gave them extraordinary power."

One Trotskyist, John Archer, encouraged him to leave in the hope of removing a rival.[]

James's relationship with Louise Cripps Samoiloff had broken up after her second abortion, so that intimate tie no longer bound him to England.