Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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

Really good book, I heard a host discussing on one of the PICIFICA stations here in my area. Interesting woman and life.

Very delivered timely