C.L.R. James: The Artist As Revolutionary

by Paul Buhle

Overview

C.L.R. James is one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable individuals. As the author of the influential book The Black Jacobins, he is widely recognized as the premier scholar of slave revolt; the publication of his acute and sensitive volume Beyond a Boundary established an equal reputation as a historian of sport; and his tireless political and intellectual interventions have become the hallmark of a highly creative Marxist thinker, a brilliant dialectician and the last surviving pioneer of Pan-African liberation.

James’s work has never previously been studied in its entirety. Now Paul Buhle, a longtime editorial collaborator with James, has produced a rich and informed analysis of his accomplishments. Drawing upon extensive interviews with James, his critics and his erstwhile supporters, together with many previously unpublished documents, Buhle’s book offers an appreciative and enlightening portrait of the man and his times. The author also sheds new light on subjects ranging across Pan-Africanism, West Indian literature, British and American Marxism and the rise of third world nationalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780860919322
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	01/17/1989
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul Buhle,formerly a senior lecturer at Brown University, produces radical comics. He founded the SDS Journal Radical America and the archive Oral History of the American Left and, with Mari Jo Buhle, is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. He lives in Madison.

Table of Contents

Foreword Robin D.G. Kelley vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Trinidad Homeboy 7

Chapter 2 'The Absurdities of World Revolution' 38

Chapter 3 American Bolshevik, 1938-53 66

Chapter 4 Artist Again, in Spite of Himself 100

Chapter 5 Pan-African Eminence Grise 130

Chapter 6 Conclusion: The Old Man in His Study 162

Afterword Paul Buhle Lawrence Ware 174

C.L.R. James: A Brief Chronology 212

C.L.R. James: A Select Bibliography 215

Notes 217

Index 231

Editorial Reviews

Buhle’s path-breaking work—attentive and scrupulous—is a major contribution … A first-rate analysis of James’s central achievements.”
—Edward Said

“For Buhle, James was many things: artist, revolutionary, athlete, nationalist, internationalist, Anglophile, Graecophile, libertarian, Leninist, Black liberationist, Pan-Africanist, classicist and lover of popular culture. The central achievement of Buhle’s biography of James is that he shows that James did not connect his various roles with the word ‘nevertheless.’ Rather he saw himself as an artist and therefore a revolutionary; as a nationalist and therefore a Pan-Africanist.”
—David Roediger

“I thought it a good book, and a hard book to write, a biography. I haven’t killed anybody, but he made it interesting … A successful piece of work.”
—C.L.R. James

From the Publisher