Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: peace work, black communist women, black female subject, Claudia Jones, United States, Communist Party (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Carole Boyce Davies has rendered a unique service in restoring to proper recognition the life and achievements of the Trinidad-born political activist and feminist, Claudia Jones. From the turbulent struggles of Harlem, U.S.A. in the 1930s and 1940s to London in the 1950s and 1960s, Claudia Jones became a symbol of resistance and the standard by which others would measure their own integrity of commitment. Left of Karl Marx is the biography of an era of the most intense ideological combat--where reputations were assassinated and careers erased by a single rumor of incorrect political affiliation. Here is the story of a singular triumph whose legacy has nourished the lives of another generation."--George Lamming, author of In the Castle of My Skin and The Pleasures of Exile "This book fills a lacuna in the historical understanding of black left radicalism and socialist-oriented feminism in the United States and the Caribbean. In this era of twenty-first-century corporate globalization, it reunites us with a transnational radical and anti-capitalist past through the examination of the extraordinary life, work, and political philosophy of Claudia Jones. This work reminds us that the U.S. and British radical traditions had diverse memberships, which included black, communist, and feminist women of whom Trinidad-born Claudia Jones was a remarkable example. Carole Boyce Davies has given us a well researched, detailed analysis of this communist, feminist, intellectual, activist, and artistic woman of Caribbean origin. This is a long-awaited treasure for which many will be eternally grateful."--Rhoda E. Reddock, author of Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities "Carole Boyce Davies has vividly brought to life the work and struggles of Claudia Jones in the U.S.A. and Great Britain in her new book, Left of Karl Marx. Boyce Davies possesses that unique combination of being both a scholarly researcher and a writer capable of clear and persuasive language. The reader is presented with a remarkably readable and informative study of a woman who was equally adept in her writing and public speaking on feminism, and as a social pioneer, a political analyst, and an avowed adversary of racism. This book removes Claudia Jones from the shadow of the great bust of Marx to the front row of the black activists and thinkers of the twentieth century, and that is where she belongs."--Donald Hinds, author of Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain

Product Description

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (November 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822341166
• ISBN-13: 978-0822341161
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #225,154 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Story of a Courageous Woman, January 8, 2009

By	Daniel Raphael - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is the story of the person whose London grave is located immediately to the left of Karl Marx's. She was, as the authors point out, "left of Marx" in another, more important, way; although she was a loyal member of the Communist Party, she "pushed the envelope" with regard to consideration of women's special oppression as well as that directed towards people of color. Thus, she was ahead of Marx, who did not address either of these major issues.

I would have liked this book a lot more, were the authors not wholly infatuated with the current postmodernist cant. Rather than reading about "locations" and "voices" and "geographies," it would have been nice to read a straightforward biography written in normal English. This is why the four stars; insofar as the information in the book is concerned, it merits five stars for telling the story of this interesting woman, ahead of her time in understanding, articulating, and promoting the concerns of the multiply oppressed--people of color, and women.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars carole boyce davies--the radical black subject rocking intellectual life, May 13, 2008

By	Katherine McKittrick - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is what intellectual life is all about...Carole Boyce Davies *rocks* our understanding of the left, black feminism, transnationalism, and more. Boyce Davies carefully re-narrates the life of black communist, activist-intellectual Claudia Jones--identifying Jones' political and creative struggles as a black woman who *radically* hopes for, strategizes, thinks through, a *just* future and was thus consequently rendered a punishable, deportable, subject...

These women, these ideas--Carole Boyce Davies, Claudia Jones, Left of Karl Marx--are what intellectual life is all about. Inspiring and challenging...

katherine mckittrick

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable, May 27, 2008

By	G. Thomas "PROUD FLESH" (Underground in Babylon) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Carole Boyce Davies delivers a stunner in Left of Karl Marx, a deft and thorough analytical treatment of the political life of Claudia Jones, "Black Woman Communist of West Indian Descent." Neither Pan-Africanism nor Black Women's Studies can begin to do without this book, not to mention a host of other fields and constituencies. It brilliantly performs the task of resurrection made intellectually necessary when the status-quo takes such important figures away from us and then tries to erase their memory, to boot.

We should not be forced to think and struggle in ignorance of Claudia Jones, and now we certainly don't have to with such a powerful and impressive study.

Critically, Boyce Davies treats not just the politics of diaspora, but deportation as well; not just "political" activism, but cultural activism (such as Carnival) as well; not just bookish intellectual production, only, but polemics, speeches and journalism (in the spirit of Ida B. Wells) as well; not just "women's rights" or "worker's rights" or the rights of colonized peoples, but all of the aforementioned and then some. Perhaps most crucially, she recovers the "radical Black female subject" in a fashion that immediately calls for pretenders to the titles of "radical," "Black," etc.," to walk the walk talked and walked by Claudia Vera Cumberbatch Jones.