Fanon and the Caribbean

C.L.R. James speaking at a Special meeting of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, 3 November 1978,  Marxists.Org

When I was asked to speak, I was invited to submit a paper. I said that in 60 years of public speaking I had not done that and I was not prepared to start here, because I really did not know who was speaking with me and who would be listening. It is not possible to present a paper under those circumstances. As I look around, I notice that on the platform there are lots of heads of departments or members of Governments. Most of the other speakers are professors from universities. I find this combination a rather unusual one. I would have liked to hear from the platform a Portuguese voice. The voice would have been translated and we would have understood a little more about Fanon. I would have liked to hear from among the audience a man like Wole Soyinka from Africa and another man from the Caribbean called Walter Rodney. I am sure we would have immensely benefitted by what they would have had to say about Fanon. That was the reason why as a habit I do not present papers but I am going to say more or less what I have to say now and I will tell you the outline of it.

C.L.R. James Legacy Project-Annual Memorial Lecture with Tariq Ali

'So Much the Worse for the Whites': Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution

by George Ciccariello-Maher

This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms.

The Constantine Principle

Grant Farrred, The Con

Watching Ghana play Germany during the group stages of the 2014 World Cup put me in mind of a pivotal moment in CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary. After a slow first half, the game came alive. Germany’s Mario Götze gave his side the lead with a header that hit his knee on the way into the Ghanaian net; André Ayew, not a player renowned for his aerial power, replied for Ghana with a superbly directed header. Asamoah Gyan cruised past the static German defense to beat Manuel Neuer with a fierce strike to give Ghana the lead. And then Miroslav Klose did what Miroslav Klose does: he nicked a goal from close range. The ball was bobbing around in Ghana’s six yard box from a Bastian Schweinsteiger corner, and Klose was on hand to tuck the ball in. German coach Joachim Löw had played a hunch, bringing on Schweinsteiger and Klose for Sami Khedira and Götze, respectively, and it paid off as the Germans avoided defeat.

C.L.R. James in Conversation with Stuart Hall

Beyond a Boundry

CLR James: A Boundary that broke down barriers

C.L.R. James

by Selma James, The Mail & Guardian

Fifty years ago, after a March in the United Kingdom as cold as the one just gone, my husband CLR James's semiautobiographical Beyond a Boundary appeared as the cricket season opened. Reviews were favourable but none even approached the incomparable (and antiracist) John Arlott's in Wisden, "the cricketers' Bible".

This Thing on Dialectic

James - This Thing on Dialectic

Africana Critical Theory

by Reiland Rabaka

Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral.

Building on and going far beyond W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century and Du Bois's Dialectics, Reiland Rabaka's Africana Critical Theory innovatively identifies and analyzes continental and diasporan African contributions to classical and contemporary critical theory. This book represents a climatic critical theoretical clincher that cogently demonstrates how Du Bois's rarely discussed dialectical thought, interdisciplinarity, intellectual history-making radical political activism, and world-historical multiple liberation movement leadership helped to inaugurate a distinct Africana tradition of critical theory.

Silences on the Suppression of Workers Self-Emancipation: Historical Problems with CLR James's Interpretation of V.I. Lenin

by Mathew Quest, Insurgent Notes, 2012

CLR James (1901–1989), native of Trinidad, was perhaps the most libertarian revolutionary socialist intellectual of both the Pan African and international labor movements. Best known as the author of the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, he also became famous for mentoring anti-colonial intellectuals and post-colonial statesmen such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Trinidad's Eric Williams. Far less understood was James's creative advocacy of direct democracy and workers self-management as found in his analysis of the Age of the CIO, Classical Athens, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Yet undermining our understanding of the contours and absence of popular self-management as a framework for James's visions of the African World and Third World is the lack of a proper assessment of how he understood V.I. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This selection from a forthcoming larger work will attempt to examine this dilemma by uncovering silences and dilemmas for how James understood Lenin.

Facing Reality

Libcom

Writing in collaboration with Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee, C.L.R. James examines the practical process of social revolution in the modern world.

"Springing forth from the utopian flames of self-emancipation kindled by the workers councils of the Hungarian Revolution, this pivotal book offers a socialist indictment of the miserabilism of state capitalism and calls for the ongoing rejection of both vanguardism and the bureaucratic rationalism of state power." - Ron Sakolsky, author of Creating Anarchy

In this celebrated "underground classic," also known as "C. L. R. James's most anarchist book," the author of The Black Jacobins, History of Pan-African Revolt and Beyond a Boundary examines the practical process of social revolution in the modern world. Inspired by the October 1956 Hungarian workers' revolution against Stalinist oppression, as well as the U.S. workers' "wild-cat" strikes (against Capital and the union bureaucracies), James and his co-authors looked ahead to the rise of new mass emancipatory movements by African Americans as well as anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone among the radical texts of the time, Facing Reality also rejected modern society's mania for "conquering nature," and welcomed women's struggles "for new relations between the sexes."

Haiti's forgotten Revolution and C.L.R. James

by Ben Fogel, The Amandla Blog

The great Trindadian intellectual C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins is a decidedly partisan text, it has no pretensions of grandiose academic objectivity or liberal 'fairness'. It is a great Marxist text, not great in the sense of providing a new insight into the inner workings of capital or alienation in late capitalism, but great in the manner in which that demonstrates the fundamental unity between theory and praxis at the heart of the Marxist tradition. In contrast to some of the other great historical works located within in the Marxist tradition, it does not contain the grand historical range and vision of Hobsbawm or display the detailed social imagination, empathy and lyrcism of E.P. Thompson.

CLR James and the Black Jacobins

by Christian Høgsbjerg, International Socialism

Aimé Césaire, the late, great Martinican poet and activist, once noted that it was in Haiti that the “colonial problem” was first posed in all its complexity.¹ In 1492 the tropical Caribbean island was “discovered” for the Spanish Empire by Christopher Columbus, a discovery that resulted in the half a million strong existing indigenous Taino population being all but exterminated within a generation as a ruthless search for rivers of gold led only to rivers of blood. Columbus had described “Ayiti”, as the Taino had called it (“Land of mountains”), as a “paradise”, and promptly therefore renamed the island La Española—or Hispaniola—”coming from Spain”. But for the Taino, their hopes of finding paradise were irredeemably lost. In the words of the historian Laurent Dubois, Haiti was “the ground zero of European colonialism in the Americas”.² 

C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the 20th Century

by Anna Grimshaw, Marxists Internet Archive

C.L.R. James died in May 1989. His death coincided with the explosion of popular forces across China and eastern Europe which shook some of the most oppressive political regimes in human history. These momentous events, calling into question the structure of the modern world order, throw into sharp relief the life and work of one of this century’s most outstanding figures. For James was pre-eminently a man of the twentieth century. His legacy reflects the scope and diversity of his life’s work, the unique conditions of particular times and places; and yet at its core lies a vision of humanity which is universal and integrated, progressive and profound.

Two Days With the Spirit of C.L.R. James

The Humanities Graduate Centre Key Thinkers Series, in conjunction with
the Reading Group for African Critical Thought (RGFACT) and the Centre
for Indian Studies in Africa  (CISA) Presents:

TWO DAYS WITH THE SPIRIT OF C.L.R. JAMES

C.L.R James (1901-1989), originally from Trinidad, was among the most
original, wide-ranging and influential postcolonial thinkers and
activists of the 20th Century.  His work as a political theorist (e.g.
Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx and Lenin), historian (The Black
Jacobins), literary critic (Mariners, Renegades and Castaways), cricket
journalist (Beyond a Boundary) and writer of fiction (Minty Alley) is
too little known in South Africa.

C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (1939,1969)

Reviewed by Mathew Quest, Insurgent Notes

A small and dangerous volume, this republication of C.L.R. James’s A History of Pan-African Revolt is a concise survey of Black freedom struggles in the United States, the Caribbean, and on the African continent from 1739–1969. A product of two periods in his life and work, his first British years (1932–38) where he emerged as the author of The Black Jacobins, the classic history of the Haitian Revolution; and his second American sojourn (1969–79) where he was a mentor to Black Power activists who had been members of SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; this book documents famous and obscure race and class struggles in two parts written from the vantage of 1939 and 1969 respectively.

CLR James, Frantz Fanon & the Meaning of Liberation

by Kenan Malik, Pandaemonium

1776. 1789. 1917. The American. The French. The Russian. The three great revolutions of the modern world. The three revolutions with which everyone is familiar, each one telling a different story about modernity. Yet, as I argued in my previous post, the fourth great revolution that helped define modernity  – the Haitian Revolution of 1791 -  is one that barely anyone remembers these days. It was the first true successful revolt in history. But more than that, the Haitian Revolution was the first time that the emancipatory logic of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was seen through to its revolutionary conclusion. For that alone, it should find its place in history.

Umbutho we Industrial & Commercial Workers' Union (I.C.U.)

Umbhali ngu: C.L.R. James (1936)

Umtoliki ngu: Bulelwa Mafu (2010)

Abahlali baseMjondolo

uMzantsi Afrika uphawulwe ngodidi olutsha lwezopolitiko, aliphawulwanga ngodushe phakathi kwentlanga kwoda ngo qhanaqalazo lwabasebenzi. Ngaphezu kwe Sierra Leone ne Gambia, I South Africa ikwazile ukudibanisa intlanga ezahlukeneyo kwimizi yemveliso, emigodini nendlela abaqeshwe ngayo ibonakalisa ukuba ibasa kumbutho wabaphangeli. Kwaye kukho nefuthe lwe Russian Revolution. I African Communinsit Party yasekwa ngomnyaka ka 1924, kodwa yayisuka komnye umbutho owawusewusekiwe ngomnyaka ka1920. Yayisebenza ngokuxokisa uluntu olumnyama. Kodwa e Sierra leone nase Gambia abantu abafundileyo abamnyama bathetha kakhulu bengenzi nto ebonakalayo, kodwa uMzantsi Afrika wona uqhubela nezo zikhona zimbalwa kumlo. Iimfazwe ezidlulileyo nemeko zemali nopolitiko zango 1919 zaqalisa umbuthe we Industrial and Commercial Worker’s waseMzantsi Afrika.

Frantz Fanon and C.L.R James on Intellectualism and Enlightened Rationality

by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2. 2005

This essay explores critical accounts of modern rationality and efforts to articulate a conception of reason that is tied to the idea of decolonization as project. It focuses on the work of two of the most widely known and influential Caribbean theorists: the Martiniquean psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon and the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James.

The Black Jacobins

A review by Kenan Malik

The poet and statesman Aimé Césaire once wrote of Haiti that it was here that the colonial knot was first tied. It was also in Haiti, Césaire added, that the knot of colonialism began to unravel when ‘black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world.’

In 1791, almost exactly three hundred years after Columbus landed there, a mass insurrection broke out among Haiti’s slaves, upon whose labour France had transformed its colony into the richest island in the world. It was an insurrection that became a revolution, a revolution that today is almost forgotten, and yet was to shape history almost as deeply as the two eighteenth century revolutions with which we are far more familiar – those of 1776 and 1789.