The little group around James launched their own Detroit-based tabloid embracing popular culture, youth rebellion, and women\u2019s rising militance, along with wildcat strikes.<\/q><\/aside>\nWilliams navigates the details through an intimate reading of James\u2019s personal relations (here, too, romance plays no small role) over the decades, and the story could best be described, perhaps, as \u201cgroup dynamics.\u201d The author\u2019s sometimes distaff take on those dynamics has James freely writing and lecturing, traveling widely, and even taking vacations \u2014 with the indulgence, that is to say, financial support and admiration bordering upon the cultic, of his small entourage.<\/p>\n
It requires a certain credulity to accept the historical importance, to James and his followers, of the study of Marx\u2019s 1844 \u201cEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts,\u201d actually providing the first English translations of extended passages for the sake of Detroit autoworkers. Williams gamely goes along, but he stumbles a bit on the real value of the little group around James launching their own Detroit-based tabloid embracing popular culture, youth rebellion, and women\u2019s rising militance, along with wildcat strikes.<\/p>\n
The author regains his balance with James banished from the United States, living mainly in London and coming around to newer movements. These included the hopes raised briefly by the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the more sustained anti-colonialism of Ghana and of the civil rights movement in the United States.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Final Years<\/h2>\n \n Williams offers considerable space but less than adequate insight into the individuals who obviously helped make it possible. Consider among others Grace Lee Boggs, who Barack Obama honored posthumously on her passing in 2015. One of the very first Asian American women to receive a PhD in philosophy, a wartime factory militant, Boggs later became herself a larger-than-life figure within Detroit, joining and sometimes leading every emerging social movement for almost a half-century.<\/p>\n
Or take the Russian-born Raya Dunayevskaya, the erstwhile secretary to Trotsky in Mexico, destined to interpret Hegelian philosophy as a gateway to a higher feminism, and, like Boggs, the leader of her own small entity. They were strange by any political or personal definition and they both broke with James in the end. But they were also formidable women, a detail that demands, in itself, some further pondering.<\/p>\n
\u201cPersonal politics\u201d often prevail in these pages, understandably but sometimes overwhelmingly. Accounts of his marriages and separations, his incapacities as a father, or his renewed pressing upon followers for financial support threaten to overpower his role, for instance, as the editor of the Trinidadian independence movement\u2019s newspaper in the early moments of island self-government. In his utterly unique way, James was only continuing his peripatetic life\u2019s project.<\/p>\nLiving in Brixton, James seemed like a greying prophet of a revolution arising from the Global South but moving into the rest of the world.<\/q><\/aside>\nIn the end, living in Brixton, London, above the editorial and production office of his nephew Darcus Howe\u2019s magazine Race Today<\/i>, James continued to give forth his views to the press and anyone who would come to listen. He seemed like a greying prophet of a revolution arising from the Global South but moving into the rest of the world, a revolution stymied and, by the time of his death, widely regarded as inconceivable. Then again, for the far more numerous viewers of sports on BBC, James would always be \u201cthe cricket man,\u201d aged but astute, offering his opinions of play, usually in some kind of historical context.<\/p>\n
Williams is at his strongest describing the final years of the aged savant, and it is interesting that he finds here the most sympathetic, indeed historical \u201cC. L. R.\u201d If his greatest talent and most attractive talent may always have been \u201cthe natural flow of unscripted commentary,\u201d he offered it freely to a wide range of visitors, famous and obscure alike. Leading cricketers, both West Indian and British; television producers and mainstream journalists; left-wing intellectuals, both famous and unfamous, gathered at his bedside and listened to him with the rapt attention of his grouplets decades earlier.<\/p>\n
James, Williams says in the final pages, should be remembered not only as a major thinker but a major prose stylist. A teacher who could persuade almost any serious listener to take an interest in Aeschylus and Shakespeare but also W. M. Thackeray (whose Vanity Fair<\/i> he had enjoyed since childhood) and William Hazlitt, the master critic, he had continued to offer listeners extended excerpts while speaking, for instance, of Du Bois or Lenin. He wanted his captive audience to listen deeply.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n
This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We are now a third of a century or so since the passing of C. L. R. James (1901\u201389), and just as long since the appearance of the \u201cauthorized\u201d biography, hastily prepared to be published in his lifetime. In the decades since, many volumes and many, many more scholarly essays and contemplative commentaries on various [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447891"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1447891"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1452041,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447891\/revisions\/1452041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1447891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1447891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1447891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}