On the tenth anniversary of my old (but extant) site anthonyflood.com (NB: no middle initial), I celebrated the publication of my Aptheker-James article in the C. L. R. James Journal. (It forms chapter 2 of my 2019 book, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, a second, expanded edition of which I’m trying to finance.) Those familiar with this story may skip this “old news,” although I believe its historical “feel” sets it apart from accounts posted elsewhere on this site, as does my digression into metaphilosophy. (A search for <James Aptheker> will return all of them.) There are, of course, always those who are hearing about this for the first time. I’d be happy to hear from either class of visitors.
Marking a Decade (January 17, 2014)
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of this site, I am pleased to report the publication of my article “C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker’s Invisible Man,” in the Fall 2013 issue of the CLR James Journal. It arrived in the mail two days ago, and I purchased access to the online version of my essay this morning (sort of an anniversary present to myself). Hazily aware for four decades of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), author of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the umpteenth sighting of his name in my reading material (this time it was in a piece by Dwight Macdonald) over the course of a few months in 2012 triggered an odd reverie and query. (In the late thirties and early forties Macdonald and James’s circles partly overlapped.)
Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), once one of the leading intellectuals in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), was a ground-breaking Marxist historian of American slave revolts. So why hadn’t James’s work figured into his writings (virtually all of which I had read before I was twenty)? Why hadn’t James’s name ever crossed Aptheker’s lips during our many conversations about the early years while I served as one of his research assistants in the early seventies? After some research, I concluded that Aptheker’s neglect of James was deliberate. Continue reading “When Aptheker dissed James, revisited. (No April Fool’s joke.)”