Tag: Toussaint L’Ouverture

C. L. R. James: First Amazon Review of New Biography

The following of review of John L. Williams, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (Constable, 2022) was published on Amazon today. I’m preparing a libertarian Christian evaluation of James’s life and work, to be published, God willing, next year.—A.G.F.

The Boundaries of a Mind’s Quilt

In his biography of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), published the year before its subject died, James scholar Paul Buhle predicted that James’s story “will look different, more complete and more understandable, from the mid-twenty-first century than from” the late 1980s (C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 1). Before even this century’s quarter mark, John L. Williams has mined and elegantly refined much of that progress in completeness and intelligibility.

The subtitle, A Life Beyond the Boundaries, echoes James’s memoir 1963 Beyond a Boundary. That title in turn reflects his passion, as player and commentator, for cricket as well as his intellectual interest in perimeters, those of the game, of society, and of empire.

A glance at James’s literary accomplishments alone before he reached the age of 40 should move the most casual observer to take notice: Minty Alley (written in the 1920s, published in 1936), the first novel by a African-Caribbean author to be published in the United Kingdom; the translation of Boris Souvarine’s first of its kind and massive Stalin from the French (1936); the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (1934), in which James performed with Paul Robeson; the ground-breaking The Black Jacobins (1938). Each in itself was a tour de force; collectively (this list is not exhaustive) they almost beggar belief, yet those who knew the polymath came to expect that level of achievement from him.

Williams follows the pattern of his profiles of Shirley Bassey, Eartha Kitt, and Michael X; there as here, he is more investigative journalist than intellectual historian. Having enjoyed this book, however, this reviewer believes it’s about time that CLR (as Williams refers to him throughout) got a more personal treatment. In this respect, Williams has delivered. Continue reading “C. L. R. James: First Amazon Review of New Biography”

The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored

George Novack

In a previous post I disclosed my interest in George Novack, the Trotskyist philosopher who, but for the accident of geography, might have taken the place of ideological influencer that Stalinist historian Herbert Aptheker held when I began to study philosophy. Today I republish Novack’s review of The Black Jacobins, a magisterial study of modern history’s only successful slave revolt.

 

That its author, C. L. R. James (1901-1989), was a Fourth International Trotskyist explains not only Novack’s appreciation of this work, but also Aptheker’s lack thereof—even though slave revolts formed his area of scholarly specialization. In my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, I explore in detail the scotosis suffered not only by Aptheker but also, apparently, by many of James and Aptheker’s academic fans.

Herbert Aptheker, 1945 or 1946

In this review Novack also refers to A History of Negro Revolt, a booklet of James’s that Aptheker merely lists in the bibliography of American Negro Slave Revolts (his 1943 Columbia University dissertation) without mentioning Black Jacobins. As I showed in another post, the second page of that booklet sports a full page ad for Black Jacobins, virtually eliminating the possibility that Aptheker was unaware of the book.

C. L. R. James, 1946

I post this partly for its historical interest, partly as a personal reflection on my intellectual path. I trust no one thinks I do so to promote the “revolutionary internationalism” of Novack or James. Were they alive, I’m sure that Novack, James, and Aptheker, each in his own way (qualified, of course, by the strictures of “scientific socialism”), would side with the woke mob, which I abominate, and that the mobsters, at least the literate among them, are steeped in their writings. Novack, James, and Aptheker would, if they could, put down their pens and pick up a gun.—Anthony Flood

Revolution, Black and White

George E. Novack
New International, May 1939, Vol. 5, No. 5, p. 155

The Black Jacobins, 316 pp. Illus. New York, Dial Press. [1938] $3.75

A History of Negro Revolt, Fact Monograph, No.18. [UK, [1938] ] 6s[hillings]

The Black Jacobins tells the story of one of the major episodes in the great French Revolution: the struggles in the West Indian island of San Domingo which culminated in the only successful slave uprising in history and the establishment of the free Negro republic of Haiti.

Historians have done little to remove prevailing ignorance concerning these significant events. Even such authorities on the French revolution as Mathiez systematically belittle the importance of the colonies and slight their influence upon revolutionary developments in France. Historians of Haiti commit the opposite error of treating its early history without proper regard for its profound connections with Europe.

One of the singular merits of James’ work is that he avoids both forms of narrow-mindedness. Throughout his book he views the class struggles in San Domingo and France as two sides of a unified historical process unfolding in indissoluble interaction with each other. With a wealth of precise and picturesque detail he traces the parallel and inter-penetrating phases of the revolution in the colony and mother country. Continue reading “The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored”