Getting ready for Trinidad

On Sunday, we head for Port of Spain where the Caribbean Studies Association will be meeting next week. I'll be delivering a paper entitled "C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist: Reconsidering The Case for West-Indian Self-Government" and feel rather as if I've gone off my head. After all, I'll be delivering a paper on C.L.R. James in Trinidad. And it will be about his earliest political ideas, which differ considerably from his later ones. I asked Tony Bogues for his comments, and he gave me some. Quite helpful for a later iteration, but mostly not immediately useful -- since they'd require additional reading and then, probably, adding another two or three pages. Anyway, I reproduce here the opening of the paper, which should give the reader (assuming I have one) an idea of what it's about.

The usual description of C.L.R. James’s political theory locates him at the intersection of Marxism and pan-Africanism, generally more towards the former than the latter. The bulk of James’s work bears this out. For example, in The Black Jacobins he defines the rebels of Saint Domingue as proletarian without forgetting their blackness. James unambiguously defined himself as in the tradition of Marx and Lenin.[1]

Nonetheless, James’s earliest political monograph aligns him more with Creole nationalists such as J.J. Thomas, Eric Williams, or Norman Manley, than with Walter Rodney or the New World Group. In this paper I analyze that work and delineate the ways that the ideas he expressed at that time connect to a West Indian Creole nationalism that stressed the need for an end to colonial trusteeship and that saw West Indians as peoples (or a people) shaped by the colonial experience and ready and able to govern themselves.

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government, originally part of the Life of Captain Cipriani, published in 1933 not long after James moved to England, provides at first glance no indication of James’s later radicalism. It critiques British rule very much in the tradition of Thomas’s Froudacity, with a Millian, not a Marxist, assertion that the West Indian people (projecting from James’s own experience and knowledge of Trinidad but with references to other colonies) had been sufficiently prepared by British rule to take control of their own destinies.[2]

James argues for West Indian autonomy, as we shall see, in terms little different from those of the Creole nationalists who were to dominate the politics of the region from the 1940s until the 1970s; but he is not normally considered among their number. His thoughts on the subject of political autonomy nevertheless make him a forerunner of the Creole nationalism that became normative at the end of the colonial period; they contain both seeds of a more radical political future, and signs of James’s own limitations in seeing the colonial Caribbean as a Creole region.

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government is, not altogether surprisingly, a work often mentioned but rarely cited; largely, one suspects, because it does not fit well into the categories in which James is normally placed.

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[1] Anthony Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James; London: Pluto Press, 1997, 1.

[2] Glen Richards, “C.L.R. James on Black Self-Determination in the United States and the Caribbean” in Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain (eds.) C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, 318.