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C. L. R. James and Creolization

Author: Nicole King

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1604736011

C. L. R. James (1901–1989), one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, expressed his postcolonial and socialist philosophies in fiction, speeches, essays, and book-length scholarly discourses. However, the majority of academic attention given to James keeps the diverse mediums of James's writing separate, focuses on his work as a political theorist, and subordinates his role as a fiction writer. This book, however, seeks to change such an approach to studying James. Defining creolization as a process by which European, African, Amerindian, Asian, and American cultures are amalgamated to form new hybrid identities and cultures, Nicole King uses this process as a means to understanding James's work and life. She argues that, throughout his career, whether writing a short story or a political history, James articulated his attempt to produce revolutionary, radical discourses with a consistent methodology. James, a Trinidad-born scholar who migrated to England and then to the United States and who described himself both as a black radical and a Victorian intellectual, serves as a definitive model of creolization. King argues that James's writings also fit the model of creolization, for each is influenced by diverse types of discourses. James rarely wrote from within the confines of a single discipline, instead choosing to make the layers of history, literature, philosophy, and political theory coalesce in order to make his point. As his West Indian and Western European influences converge in his work and life, he creates texts that are difficult to confine to a specific category or discipline. No matter which writerly medium he uses, James was preoccupied with how to represent the individual personality and at the same time represent the community. The C. L. R. James that emerges from King's study is a man made more compelling and more human because of his complicated, multilayered, and sometimes contradictory allegiances.

Creolizing Rousseau

Author: Jane Anna Gordon

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-12-17

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1783482826

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In 1967, C.L.R. James, the much-celebrated Afro-Trinidadian Marxist, stated that he knew of no figure in history who had “such tremendous influence on such widely separated spheres of humanity” within a few years of his death as the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While this impact was most pronounced in revolutionary politics inspired by political theories that rejected basing political authority in monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church, it extended to European literature, to philosophies of education, and the articulation of the social sciences. But what particularly struck James about Rousseau was the strong resonance of his work in Caribbean thought and politics. This volume illuminates these resonances by advancing a creolizing method of reading Rousseau that couples figures not typically engaged together, to create conversations among people of seemingly divided worlds in fact entangled by colonizing projects and histories. Doing this enables us to grapple with the meaning of creolization and the full range of Rousseau’s legacies not only in contemporary Western Europe and the United States, but in the Francophone colonies, territories, and larger Global South.

Creolizing Political Theory

Author: Jane Anna Gordon

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2014-02-03

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0823254836

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Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call “home.” Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.

Black Empire

Author: Michelle Ann Stephens

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2005-07-18

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0822386895

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In Black Empire, Michelle Ann Stephens examines the ideal of “transnational blackness” that emerged in the work of radical black intellectuals from the British West Indies in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the writings of Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and C. L. R. James, Stephens shows how these thinkers developed ideas of a worldwide racial movement and federated global black political community that transcended the boundaries of nation-states. Stephens highlights key geopolitical and historical events that gave rise to these writers’ intellectual investment in new modes of black political self-determination. She describes their engagement with the fate of African Americans within the burgeoning U.S. empire, their disillusionment with the potential of post–World War I international organizations such as the League of Nations to acknowledge, let alone improve, the material conditions of people of color around the world, and the inspiration they took from the Bolshevik Revolution, which offered models of revolution and community not based on nationality. Stephens argues that the global black political consciousness she identifies was constituted by both radical and reactionary impulses. On the one hand, Garvey, McKay, and James saw freedom of movement as the basis of black transnationalism. The Caribbean archipelago—a geographic space ideally suited to the free movement of black subjects across national boundaries—became the metaphoric heart of their vision. On the other hand, these three writers were deeply influenced by the ideas of militarism, empire, and male sovereignty that shaped global political discourse in the early twentieth century. As such, their vision of transnational blackness excluded women’s political subjectivities. Drawing together insights from American, African American, Caribbean, and gender studies, Black Empire is a major contribution to ongoing conversations about nation and diaspora.

Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses

Author: Betsy Erkkila

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0812238443

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In this series of essays Betsy Erkkila considers the historical and psychological dramas of blood—as marker of violence, race, sex, kinship—that have stood near the center of American literature, culture, and politics since the eighteenth century.

Caliban's Reason

Author: Paget Henry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-05-03

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1135958807

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Paget introduces the general reader to Afro-Caribbean philosophy in this ground-breaking work. Since Afro-Caribbean thought is inherently hybrid in nature, he traces the roots of this discourse in traditional African thought and in the Christian and Enlightenment traditions of Western Europe.

Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature

Author: Mary Lou Emery

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-02-15

Total Pages: 16

ISBN-13: 0521872138

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This ambitious study offers a comprehensive analysis of the visual in authors from the Anglophone Caribbean. Mary Lou Emery analyses works by George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid and David Dabydeen. This study is an original and important contribution to both transatlantic and postcolonial studies.

Urbane Revolutionary

Author: Frank Rosengarten

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1604733063

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In Urbane Revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for a New Society, Frank Rosengarten traces the intellectual and political development of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), one of the most significant Caribbean intellectuals of the twentieth century. In his political and philo-sophical commentary, his histories, drama, letters, memoir, and fiction, James broke new ground dealing with the fundamental issues of his age-colonialism and postcolo-nialism, Soviet socialism and wes-tern neo-liberal capitalism, and the uses of race, class, and gender as tools for analysis. The author examines in depth three facets of James\'s work: his interpretation and use of Marxist, Trotskyist, and Leninist concepts; his approach to Caribbean and African struggles for independence in the 1950s and 1960s; and his branching into prose fiction, dra-ma, and literary criticism. Rosen-garten analyzes James\'s previously underexplored relationships with women and with the women\'s liberation movement. The study also scrutinizes James\'s methods of research and writing. Rosengarten explores James\'s provocative and influential concepts regarding black liberation in the Caribbean, Africa, the United States, and Great Britain and James\'s varying responses to revolutionary movements. With its extensive use of unpublished letters, private correspondence, papers, books, and other documents, Urbane Revolutionary provides fresh insights into the work of one of the twentieth century\'s most important intellectuals and activists. Frank Rosengarten is professor emeritus of Italian and compa-rative literature at the City University of New York. He is the author of The Writings of the Young Marcel Proust (1885-1900): An Ideological Critique and The Italian Anti-Fascist Press, 1919-1945.