Summary
Trinidadian writer whose The Black Jacobins (1938) is one of the four texts of the Voyage in discussed in Chapter Three, IV of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, and who recurs throughout the book as an inheritor and exemplar of oppositional, exiled Third World intellectual work (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.272-273 / printed p.245-246).
Details
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As C. L. R. James used to say, Beethoven belongs as much to West Indians as he does to Germans, since his music is now part of the human heritage (PDF p.25 / printed p.xxvi).
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With Eric Williams, James is among the revisionary Caribbean historians who succeeded the declining planter class’s historians (PDF p.122 / printed p.95).
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Long a champion of Black nationalism, James always tempered his advocacy with disclaimers and reminders that assertions of ethnic particularity were not enough, just as solidarity without criticism was not enough (PDF p.246 / printed p.219).
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The Black Jacobins, about a late-eighteenth-century Black Caribbean insurrection, and George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening were intended as serious works of scholarship and advocacy addressed from within a national movement for independence to a general audience; both now seem remarkably prescient (PDF p.272 / printed p.245).
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James shows Toussaint L’Ouverture internalizing the literal truth of the Enlightenment’s universalist sentiments — in the hour of danger he could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau and Raynal — and also his latent flaw, his willingness to trust European declarations as literal intentions rather than class- and history-determined remarks (PDF p.273 / printed p.246).
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James belonged to the lower middle class in Trinidad; he was an autodidact and athlete, and Said visited him, then aged eighty-six, in Brixton in June 1987 (PDF p.274 / printed p.247).
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The Black Jacobins was first presented not as a book but as an acting vehicle in London for Paul Robeson; during the performances, Robeson and James alternated the parts of Toussaint and Dessalines (PDF p.275 / printed p.248).
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James is quoted from an interview: “And fundamentally we are a people whose literacy and aesthetic past is rooted in Western European civilisation.” (PDF p.275 / printed p.248).
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In his 1961 appendix “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro”, James sets Césaire next to T. S. Eliot: Césaire discovers that the defensive assertion of one’s identity, négritude, is not enough, négritude being just one contribution to “the rendezvous of victory” (PDF p.307-308 / printed p.280-281).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, George Antonius, Voyage in, Eric Williams