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The widely held view that the Caribbean is an area characterized by continual, though repeatedly frustrated, revolutions owes much to the theorizing of two Trinidadians: the Trotskyite C.L.R. James and Marxist-Leninist George Padmore. Neither developed their ideological schemes in Trinidad but in the United States, England, and, in Padmore’s case, with the Soviet-run Comintern. Both ended up in Kwame Nkrumah’s independent Ghana. James left disillusioned; Padmore stayed until his premature death from cancer. James returned to Trinidad, worked unsuccessfully with the independent movement and even less successfully once he decided to enter electoral politics. Both men were prolific authors but mistaken in their interpretations of the supposed Marxist and reloutionary nature of the Caribbean and Africa.

This chapter examines the influence of the colonial educational curriculum in the British West Indies on the invention of a distinctive mode of Caribbean Classics. The first half of the chapter describes the culture of elite education in the British West Indies, centred on the Cambridge Certificate examinations and the competitive grail of the island scholarships. The second half of the chapter argues that accounts of Classics in the colonial curriculum broadly correspond to three tropes: ‘Contesting the Curriculum’, ‘Afro‐Romans and Imperial Redistribution’, and ‘Finding one's Own Way in Classics’. Each trope is illustrated with reference to a range of anglophone Caribbean works, including V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street (1959), C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary (1963), Eric Williams's autobiography Inward Hunger (1969), Austin Clarke's Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980), and selected poems by Howard Fergus and E. A. Markham.

This chapter complicates the idea of any easy balance sheet of appropriation in which misappropriation always falls on the side of empire and colonialism and appropriation on the side of the anti‐ and postcolonial. The argument examines the different ways in which C. L. R. James and Eric Williams attempted to harness Athens as an empowering model for Trinidadian national identity. Although James and Williams approached Athens in different ways, they shared the determination to take back Classics from the colonial archive via which it had been transmitted. In the case of James, the discussion concentrates on his repeated analogies between the culture and society of Trinidad and the culture and society of classical Athens. In the case of Williams, the discussion focuses on his ability to make political capital out of his classical education in his early political career, focusing on his lectures and speeches for the PEM and PNM in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Trinidadian radical C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins. Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) was one of the foundation texts of the Civil Rights movement in the USA and subsequently of Panafricanism. This chapter analyses his portrayal of Toussaint L'Ouverture, revealing how James' view of history was informed by his studies of slave revolts and his love of heroic drama. His presentation of the Haitian rebel hero is compared with the representations of two slave rebels from antiquity: Pausanias’ depiction of the mythical hero Aristomenes of Messene in the Periegesis, and Athenaeus’ use of the story of Drimakos, who leads a successful revolt against the Chians and founds a maroon community. Traditional narrative tropes in James' shaping of history are revealed, and the reading is further inflected by James' stated views on the nature of the Aeschylean and Shakespearean tragic hero.

This chapter reconstructs the more fragmentary but important things C. L. R. James did say about Britain, Britishness and their relations to Caribbean histories and identities. The nature of James' writings means that discussion of their influence in Britain must explore not only a ‘bilateral’ British-Caribbean relationship, but a triangular one. He insisted that the Britishness was part of a rich, complex, internationally open and distinctively modern cultural mix. His views on the character of racism in Britain were distinctive. In addition, his views of British colonialism were built around a stark contrast between imperial Britain and what he thought of as the truer, better values of Britishness ‘at home’. In his most influential works, James set out to assail and demolish views of Britain's history which he regarded as myths.

This chapter describes how Grace Lee Boggs engaged with radical politics upon her arrival in Chicago. After joining the Workers Party, she became a Trotskyist. She used her connections to the radical left to work with Chicago’s black community, wrote articles in the Trotskyite press in support of the March on Washington Movement, and eventually met C.L.R. James and joined the Johnson-Forest Tendency in splitting from the Socialist Workers Party. She ultimately helps form and publish Correspondence.

This chapter looks at questions of mediation in C.L.R. James’s Haitian revolutionary history The Black Jacobins. It contains a large excursus on problems of expansion and contraction and embodiment in Rodin’s sculpture as well as C.L.R. James’s and Rilke’s encounters with Rodin’s work, in particular St. John the Baptist. I engage the scholarship of Hazel Carby on Paul Robeson as well as David Scott’s work on C.L.R. James, including James’s encounter with Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire.

This chapter examines the concept of hamartia in C.L.R. James’s revision of his play Toussaint Louverture (1936)—renamed The Black Jacobins—and Edouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint: A Play (1961) as case studies to explore the use of the tragic to talk about the problems of revolutionary leadership. I discuss Mozart and Bertolt Brecht in relationship to C.L.R. James’s Haitian revolutionary dramas. I focus on a critical and theoretical discussion of the friendship between Paul Robeson and C.L.R. James and questions of Black masculinity and performance as it relates to their collaboration.

This chapter undertakes a reading of the classical allusions in V. S. Naipaul's novel The Mimic Men (1967), a novel which is often interpreted as Naipaul's verdict on the mimic dependency of (post‐)colonial societies. Emily Greenwood argues that Naipaul uses classical allusions to show that not only were the British in the Caribbean themselves mimics of the cultures of Greece and Rome, but also that the presence of mimicry in these very cultures reveals the absurdity of the appropriation of the civilizations of Greece and Rome in the service of colonial mythmaking. As a specific example, the chapter examines Naipaul's ironizing use of a famous phrase from Virgil's Aeneid.

Many of the theoretical assumptions and tactical approaches of the Grenada revolution were rooted in the experiences of early twentieth century Russia. The internal debates within the Grenada Revolution largely ignored the pre-and post-Stalin theoretical debates within Communism, and showed little awareness of original Caribbean Marxist thought. This was reflected in the limited impact of the Caribbean’s foremost Marxist theoretician, C.L.R. James, on the revolutionary process in Grenada, despite the fact that James’ theoretical contributions addressed concerns which bore direct relevance to the later implosion of the Grenada Revolution, and to a post-Stalinist global Marxism. This chapter therefore seeks to apply the theoretical insights of C.L.R. James to understanding the lessons of the collapse of the Grenada Revolution and in pointing the way towards the possibilities of a future anti-systemic project in the Caribbean.

This chapter examines Marxist C.L.R. James’s writings on Melville with a focus on the book he composed while detained on Ellis Island under the McCarran-Walter Act’s classification of alien subversives. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways is James’s unorthodox petition for citizenship: a demonstration of his U.S. cultural literary through an expert rendering of American literature that also conveys his critique of the anticommunist ethos of American nationalism during the Cold War. The chapter addresses the controversy surrounding the conclusion of Mariners, in which James shifts from literary criticism to an autobiography of his detention. New insight into the debate over whether the prison memoir lapses into Red-baiting follows from interpretations of an overlooked letter James wrote to George Padmore in defense of Mariners, the autobiographical conclusion’s unexpectedly positive representation of classic liberalism, and the quite different reading of Moby-Dick in James’s earlier, unfinished manuscript “Notes on American Civilization.”

This chapter examines the relationship between Ras Bupe Karudi and C.L.R. James. In 1964, James highlighted the “absurdities” of Rastafari. Additionally, in contrast to all that Rastafari represented, he remained ambivalent about Af- rican heritage and identity. By 1986, however, he was corresponding with Karudi frequently and sending money to him in support of the mission. This collaboration is critical to my exploration of how Rastafari inserted itself into the intellectual history of pan-Africanism, and to the relationship between Rastafari and the radical left. The chapter also brings James into conversation with Rastafari through the prism of colonial education and engages important questions concerning the debates over identity construction in Africa and the African diaspora.

This chapter looks at the way in which David Nicholls’s vocabulary about the ‘mulatto legend’ was almost entirely derived from that of nineteenth-century transatlantic abolitionist writing about Haiti, where the idea was first proffered that history itself could have a “color” or a “race.” Beginning with John Beard’s biography of Louverture and its representative status in the transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution, the author examines the influence of this text on the American abolitionists William Wells Brown and James Redpath. The author then undertakes what is the first systematic examination of Beard’s, and later C.L.R. James’s, claims that the Haitian historian Joseph Saint-Rémy was a biased “mulatto” historian whose account of Louverture’s life should be entirely dismissed

This chapter discusses and outlines the path of philosophical and political thought moving from the Caribbean to the United States, Africa, Latin America, and back. It follows the interplay between the intellectual growth of C. L. R. James and his radical fieldwork as he transited through various social spheres. This shows how his analyses of African American social and political circumstances belonged to a discursive, diasporic continuum that linked the history of slavery in the United States to the Caribbean experience of colonialism and the plantation.

This chapter looks at the separation between the IBW and the Martin Luther King Center. The King Center leadership was frustrated at the IBW's consultations with Black intellectuals who held a variety of ideological perspectives. In the IBW's first months in existence, Harding and other leaders began an ambitious publishing plan and met with Black Nationalists, such as Stokely Carmichael, and Caribbean radicals, such as Robert Hill and C.L.R. James. The IBW's refusal to abide by the King Center's narrow civil-rights framework led the organization to choose independence. Its new perspective meant reorganizing itself into an activist think tank.

Chapter 3 begins with the reported demise of still another genre, tragedy. It argues that tragedy is still flourishing in modernity, but in a weaker form, less invested in catastrophe as a necessary end, and becoming user-friendly and user-amended as a result. Featuring Moby-Dick as a case of tragedy at maximum strength, the chapter traces some non-tragic sequels emerging at a tangent from Melville's novel, linking C. L. R. James, Frank Stella, and Amitav Ghosh in an ongoing search for less-than-tragic forms. Especially important to these three is genre-switching, a reversal of background and foreground that allows James to alternate between his hands-on dedication to cricket and his archive-researched faith in the black Jacobins; Stella, between the high-concept abstraction of his painting and the artisan routine of his printmaking; and Ghosh, between the devastations of the opium trade and the vibrant pidgin tongues spoken by the migrant labor of the Indian Ocean. These authors and artists keep alive the idea of catastrophe, but also keep it at bay by taking a second look. Finding a flip-side more habitable, they bring to light a dimension of the world not paralyzed by tragedy and only sometimes under its jurisdiction.

The fifth chapter starts by describing the Marxist vision of the West as world’s destiny, according to a Eurocentric conception of history inherited from Hegel. Then, it analyzes the missed dialogue between two major twentieth century Marxist thinkers: C. L. R. James and Theodor W. Adorno. Breaking away from this Eurocentric world vision, C. L. R. James looked at the signals of a growing revolt against colonialism, whereas Adorno stoically contemplated the ruins produced by the “self-destruction of reason.”

This chapter introduces the theoretical stakes of the book, juxtaposing C.L.R. James’s work on the Haitian Revolution with Bertolt Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues: It argues that Haitian Revolution performances should be thought by way of Brecht’s category “Imitations I Can Use.” This chapter concludes with a long theoretical excursus on the problem of self-determination in the thought of Hegel, Amiri Baraka, and C.L.R. James.

Classics of revisionist historiography published only three years apart, W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) and C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins (1938) court what Benedict Anderson call the “spectres of comparison” that overshadow their fields of history. Susan Gillman discusses how both titles signal their aim to produce a corrective historical narrative, named as “black.” Just a few years later, in the 1940s, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier coined his “New World Mediterranean,” another implicitly comparative formula that was key to his work on Haiti as a historical object, locating the Haitian Revolution in the context of pre-revolutionary Cuba and an Americas legacy of slave revolt. As three models of comparative studies by prominent New World/American intellectuals, how do they manage both to raise and exorcise the spectres of comparison± The chapter focuses on the textual history of Black Jacobins, both a single celebrated work by James, a cluster of different editions, prefaces and appendices, a play and set of lectures, as well as a wider circle, a text-network that takes in Du Bois and Carpentier, among others. The chapter concludes by speculating on the uses of adaptation for comparative studies.