Customer Reviews

C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian historian, journalist, socialist theorist and essayist. He wrote many books, such as The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, You Don't Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, State Capitalism & World Revolution (Revolutionary Classics), etc.

Aldon Lynn Nielsen (born 1950) is an American poet, and literary critic. He writes in the Introduction to this 1997 book that his book "is not meant as a summary of James's life and books, but is intended to offer readers a critical study of his major writings illuminated by careful considerations of some of the more difficult to locate publications. James was an inveterate lover of the word, and this volume is intended as an extended investigation of the words he committed to print in the course of eight decades."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"As a professional historian and novelist himself, James had certain qualms about Alex Haley's work, but, as he told his students at Federal City College, nobody should underestimate the historical importance of the fact that millions of white Americans were attending, however shallow that attention, to an epic narrative of the lives of black Americans." (Pg. 36)
"James finds that Herbert Aptheker's works ... fail to recognize the extent to which the actions of free blacks and insurrectionary slaves were the driving force behind nineteenth-century abolitionism... Aptheker is unable, perhaps even unwilling, to analyze the revolutionary forces at work among the black people themselves." (Pg. 59)
"(Marcus) Garvey's great personal weakness, far more of a flaw than any reputed chicanery, was the lack of a rigorously thought-out political program, which drove him to a series of inconsistent positions that could only confuse his followers and strengthen his enemies' hand." (Pg. 77)
"His study of political history converges with his study of the history of cricket in his discovery that the public that so eagerly wanted sports and games and the public that so eagerly sought after popular democracy 'were stirred at the same time.'" (Pg. 177)