Cleffi, Rico. "Your Own James: . . . James Left a Rich Body of Thought; A Marxist Polymath Who Rejected Leninism." THE INDYPENDENT February 19, 2010

James, C. L. R. You Don't Play with Revolution: the Montreal Lectures of C. L. R. James. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009. Martin Glaberman, a longtime associate of C.L.R. James, once observed that the staggering scope of James’ writing often meant, “Everyone produces his/her own James. People have, over the years, taken from him what they found useful, and imputed to him what they found necessary. James as cultural critic, James as master of the classics, James as expert on cricket, James as historian, James as major figure in the pan-African movement….” A cursory glance at You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, mostly a collection of talks delivered to a group of West Indian students living in Montreal from 1966 to 1967, shows the breadth of James’ interests (the book is supplemented with interviews with James and letters from, to and about the scholar). Among the topics discussed are Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire as it relates to the Caribbean; the Haitian Revolution, Shakespeare’s King Lear, the making of the Caribbean people, and Lenin’s views on labor unions. James, a Marxist journalist, essayist and social theorist, is perhaps best known for his 1938 masterwork on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. He made it his life’s work to examine the movement of historical forces from below and the response of those in power to these efforts. Lectures “The Making of the Caribbean People” and “The Haitian Revolution and the Making of the Modern World,” both included in You Don’t Play with Revolution, revisit this theme, which, given the current tragedy in Haiti, is as important as ever. James ties together the ways slaves organized themselves in order to run the West Indian plantations, the amazing defeat of the British army at the hands of the Haitians in 1791, the Haitian revolution and its importance to the French Revolution. He extends the analysis to emphasize the role of the creative resistance of American slaves in inspiring the abolitionist movement. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.indypendent.org/2010/02/18/your-own-james/.

Cfp: "C. L. R. James in Focus: Crossing Boundaries," University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, April 21, 2010.

The work of the noted Caribbean scholar C. L. R. James will be the focus of the 6th Workshop on Caribbean theory and Criticism to be held by the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature of the Cave Hill Campus, University of the West Indies, Barbados on Wednesday April 21st, 2010. We hereby invite papers on any aspect of James’s career or work, ranging from his critical writings on Caribbean thought, politics and society, literature and popular culture to his creative writings. Some areas that this workshop seeks to discuss include (though are not limited to): James and Caribbean culture; James and Caribbean modernity; James and black nationalism; James the internationalist; James and West Indies cricket; James the philosopher; James and Marxism; James on history; James the literary theorist and critic; James’s fiction. Please send a 200 word abstract via email no later than March 19, 2010 to one of the following members of the Organising Committee: Richard Clarke (richard.clarke@cavehill.uwi.edu) or Andrew Armstrong (andrew.armstrong@cavehill.uwi.edu) or Nicola Hunte (nicola.hunte@cavehill.uwi.edu). (Please include your name, title and institutional affiliation.)

Pub: C. L. R. James, YOU DON'T PLAY WITH REVOLUTION.

James, C. L. R.  You Don't Play with Revolution: the Montreal Lectures of C. L. R. James. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009.

Revolution is a serious business, and C.L.R. James knew more than most. Our brand-new collection presents eight never-before-published lectures by the celebrated Marxist cultural critic, delivered during his stay in Montreal in 1967 and 1968. Ranging in topic from Marx and Lenin to Shakespeare and Rousseau to Caribbean history and the Haitian Revolution, these lectures demonstrate the staggering breadth and clarity of James' knowledge and interest.

Strikingly little information exists today about the period of time James spent working with West Indian intellectuals and students in Canada in the late 1960s, but the research of editor David Austin demonstrates the critical role these encounters played in the development of James' more mature critical theory. Readers just beginning to delve into James work will find this collection accessible and engaging, an ideal introduction to a complex and multi-faceted body of scholarship. Also included are two seminal interviews produced with James during his stay in Canada, selected correspondence from the time period, and an appendix of essays on James' work, which includes the seminal Marty Glaberman essay, "C.L.R. James: The Man and His Work.".

You Don't Play With Revolution also includes a preface by Robert A. Hill, co-founder of the C.L.R. James Study Circle and historical advisor to the new James archive at Columbia University, and a lengthy historical introduction by David Austin.
 
Further information is available here: http://www.akpress.org/2009/items/youdontplaywithrevolution.

Cfp: "C. L. R. James in Focus: Crossing Boundaries," 4th Workshop on Caribbean Theory, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, April 22, 2009.

The work of the noted Caribbean scholar C. L. R. James will be the focus of the 4th workshop on Caribbean theory to be held by the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature of the Cave Hill Campus, University of the West Indies, Barbados on Wednesday April 22nd, 2009. We hereby invite papers on any aspect of James’s career or work, ranging from his critical writings on Caribbean thought, politics and society, literature and popular culture to his creative writings. Some areas that this workshop seeks to discuss include (though are not limited to): James and Caribbean culture; James and Caribbean modernity; James and black nationalism; James the internationalist; James and West Indies cricket; James the philosopher; James and Marxism; James on history; James the literary theorist and critic; James's fiction. Please send a 200 word abstract via email no later than March 20, 2009 to one of the following members of the Organising Committee: Richard Clarke (richard.clarke@cavehill.uwi.edu) or Andrew Armstrong (ahpa44@hotmail.com) or Nicola Hunte (nicola.hunte@cavehill.uwi.edu). (Please include your name, title and institutional affiliation.)

Seymour, Benedict. "Blurred Boundaries: Sport, Art and Activity." MUTE 2.8 (2008).

In his autobiography Beyond A Boundary, C. L. R. James remarks the simultaneous birth of modern sport and modern politics in the mid to late nineteenth century: the Football Association was founded in 1863, the first all-professional US baseball team organised in 1869, in 1866 the first athletic association. Around the same time, Disraeli's Reform Bill (1865) introduced popular democracy in England, the slave states were defeated in the American Civil War, the first modern organisation of American labour appeared, and Marx and Engels founded the First Communist International (1864). As Loren Goldner [author of Melville] relates, James saw this historical conjuncture as not only a significant intersection of novel forms of sport and politics, but as a moment in which an intimately related mutation in the aesthetic was occurring. James, who grew up in Trinidad, was well placed to register this transfusion between art and sport, raised as he was on a steady stream of English novels and constant games of cricket. James became fascinated by what he called the "social aesthetic" of cricket: "men from the neighbourhood described by his aunts as 'ne'er-do-wells' were transformed into aristocrats of self-mastery and brilliance at bat in cricket matches." Goldner discerns in this vignette not simply the grace and cooperative activity celebrated in today's paeans to football but an intimation of the sovereignty of the working class, a new social relationship manifest in the "at once collective and highly individualized . . . tensions of men at bat." James was unusual among Marxists in that he attributed a positive value to the working class's passionate interest in 'organised sports and games'. Unlike his comrades, rather than seeing workers as deflected from politics by sport, or believing that workers needed "raising" up to some cultural level set down by the bourgeois radical intelligentsia or avant-garde, James recalled the "ne'er do well" sporting aristocrats of his youth, and refused to accept this one-sided evaluation. James differed from both Lukács "who saw the works of high bourgeois culture, up to the watershed of 1848, as bourgeois society's legacy to the working class" and currents such as the Frankfurt School, "which saw that legacy more in the modernist revolt against classical bourgeois culture", as Goldner succinctly sums it up. For James, not only was sport not a diversion from revolutionary politics but it contained within itself, "a new, higher rationality for the organization of society that superseded the capitalist antagonism between work and leisure," says Goldner. James, like Melville and Marx before him, see in working class labour and leisure a new form of activity which overcomes the very work/leisure, and individual/collective oppositions. James may not have known it at the time, argues Goldner, but in his meditations on working class sport and games as a new social "art" form:

he had reproduced Marx's own fundamental idea of the supersession of the work/labour split in the Grundrisse: "Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labor beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit] and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labor also therefore no longer appears as labor, but as the full development of activity itself..." (Grundrisse, p.325).

Here we should note that capital, rather than simply instrumentalising or subsuming creative activity, is seen as one of its preconditions. The emergence of this "rich individuality . . . as all-sided in its production as in its consumption" derives not from the development of "artistic" activity by isolated bourgeois individuals of genius but from "activity itself" – the identity-in-collectivity of the proletariat whether at work or at play, in the hold of the whaling ship described by Melville in Moby Dick or at the wicket on the patch of grass outside James' childhood home. . . . Read the rest here: http://eurozine.com/pdf/2008-08-07-seymour-en.pdf.