C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain by Christian Hogsbjerg, and: Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History by C.L.R. James (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain by Christian Hogsbjerg, and: Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History by C.L.R. James Leslie James C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain By Christian Hogsbjerg. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History By C.L.R. James. Edited and Introduced by Christian Hogsbjerg. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013 Great individuals, C.L.R. James tells us in his Preface to the First Edition of the Black Jacobins (1938), make history—“but only such history as it is possible for them to make.” Unearthing the “possibilities” of a person’s environment is the “business of the historian.” James’ stress upon the encounter between the individual and the whole demanded an attentive historical methodology aimed at appreciating extraordinary leaders, without canonizing them. Indeed it is this tension, between the hero and the masses, which stands as a key feature of James’ entire corpus. Beginning with The Life and Times of A.A. Cipriani onward, James exhibited a profound fascination for exploring the historical personality of political leaders; in other words, with the “training” of the mind and how this informed political ideas and action. In two new resources on C.L.R. James—one a previously unpublished playscript by James—those interested in James’ work are given the opportunity to revisit his political and intellectual ripening, encountering the individual in the world that shaped him. In Toussaint Louverture: The story of the only successful slave revolt in history, James’ earliest efforts to commemorate the great revolutionary leader who “made” the Haitian slave revolt are enlivened by reviews of the original 1936 production, as well as selected essays and correspondence from the time. And in C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain, Christian Hogsbjerg relocates the radicalization of C.L.R. James in Britain, rather than the United States, showing how James’ time in Britain, and particularly in the mining town of “Red Nelson,” developed his career not just as a writer, but as a political being. Hogsbjerg’s ultimate aim is twofold: to situate the roots of James’ future work in the political world of interwar Britain and, in doing so, to demonstrate that of all the many facets of James’ work—black nationalism, Marxism, West Indian history and culture—only the Marxist method fundamentally explains the totality of his work. Hogsbjerg’s study begins by examining how James identified with imperial Britain while growing up in Trinidad, acknowledging the improvisational tradition of creative realism characteristic of Caribbean cultural and philosophical thought that allowed James to see British culture and politics with such insight. The first chapter, which focuses on James’ reimagining and reinventing of Victorian imperial culture while still in Trinidad, sets the stage for subsequent chapters that richly mine the archive of James’ short stay in Bloomsbury in early 1932, his ten-month stay with cricket legend Learie Constantine in the working-class town of Nelson (a key turning point in James’ radicalization), his political role in British socialist parties like the Independent Labour Party and, perhaps most fruitfully, James’ largely unexamined cricket journalism with the Manchester Guardian. As Hogsbjerg shows, James’ early cricket reports displayed many of the key features of his future work, Beyond a Boundary. When the Guardian’s sports editor dispatched James to report on a cricket match, his summaries described not just the match itself, but the crowd who assembled in the stands. For James, the spaces where cricket was played in England, and the way it was played, served as historical allusions imbued with the history of the place itself and the character of the people. James’ reports evidenced his “dialectical interaction between the individual and the collective” whereby the athlete is extraordinary, but the extraordinary individual is never possible without the collective. James himself claimed that cricket taught him about “the character of the English people”; and it was “the people” who became the key aspect of James’ political formulation. For as James travelled throughout England as a sports reporter, he continued to develop his ideological training and political skill. Rather than...