C. L. R. James and the Trinidad & Tobago Intellectual Tradition, Or, Not Learning Shakespeare under a Mango Tree

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 223, 1997, Pages 114-125

  Cudjoe, Selwyn R ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0031496923     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. This essay is based on a lecture prepared for the Caribbean Conference on Culture (Jamaica, March 1996) and delivered at 'Works in Process: African-American Studies Program, Colloquium Series 1995-96', Princeton University, 3 April 1996, and at the Afro-American Colloquium, Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, April 1996.
2. See J.R. Hooker, Henry Sylvester Williams, London 1975.
3. In 1918, at the urging of Sun Yat-sen, Eugene Chen organized and edited the Shanghai Gazette, a newspaper devoted to 'the revolutionary and republican cause in Shanghai.' In 1918 he also accompanied Sun Yat-sen to the Versailles Peace Conference and, in 1920, was a representative on the Chinese delegation to the first meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva. Chen became so important in Chinese history that Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai erected a memorial to his memory in the Papasohan cemetery in Peking. See Percy Chen, China Called Me, Boston 1979, pp. 45, 362.
4. Hooker, Henry Sylvester Williams, p. 3.
5. C.L.R. James, 'George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary, A Memoir', in At the Rendezvous of Victory, London 1984, p. 251.
6. In a recent political biography, Kent Worcester says that James was born 'in the village of Caroni', not an important distinction but one that James never affirmed in his lifetime. C.L.R. James: A Political Biography, Albany, NY 1996. In his three volumes of selected writings (The Future in the Present, Spheres of Existence and At the Rendezvous of Victory), James said that he was born in Tunapuna, Trinidad. In other words, he never contradicted Margaret Busby's informative biographical sketch that appeared at the beginning of each of these volumes.
7. James noted that Padmore's father, James Hubert Alfonso Nurse, left the Christian church, became a Mohammaden, and consciously began to study Edward Blyden's Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1888). See James, 'George Padmore', p. 252.
8. C.L.R. James, 'Michel Maxwell Philip: 1829-1888', Beacon, no. 16, September 1931; reprinted in Reinhard W. Sander, From Trinidad, New York 1978, p. 268.
9. C.L.R. James, 'Michel Maxwell Philip: 1829-1888', Beacon, no. 16, September 1931; reprinted in Reinhard W. Sander, From Trinidad, New York 1978, p. 268.
10. C.L.R. James, 'Discovering Literature in Trinidad: The Nineteen-Thirties', in Spheres of Existence, London 1980, pp. 237-8. In his haste to demonstrate his intellectual affinity with the Western intellectual tradition, either unconsciously or unintentionally, James silenced the African dimension of his intellectual heritage, which, to a large degree, marked his investment in Pan Africanism and his concerns for black people in the New World. However, his studied attempt in The Black Jacobins to theorize the relative importance of race and class within the context of the struggle of black people spoke to these concerns.
11. Published originally as An Address to the Right Honourable Earl Bathurst, Relative to the Claims which the Coloured Population of Trinidad have to the Same Civil and Political Privileges with their White Fellow-Subjects by a Free Mulatto in 1824, this text was republished in 1882, and later in 1987 by Paria Publishers in Trinidad and in 1996 by Calaloux Publications in Wellesley, Massachusetts. It is referred to commonly as Free Mulatto.
12. Geoffery Brereton, A Short History of French Literature, Harmondsworth 1976, pp. 51, 92.
13. Francis DeRidder, another coloured priest who was rebelling 'against the social and political attitudes of the Church hierarchy towards the coloureds' in Trinidad, also used the pamphlet as a weapon of attack against the Roman Catholic Church. As he noted in his polemic with Dr. Daniel Macdonnell, the Roman Catholic Bishop of London, in January 1830, 'publicity is the strong weapon that supports the bulwark of liberty of a British subject; and in this country it is the only one I have, and which I can, with safety and all confidence, meet your Lordship in defending my character.' Cited in Carl Campbell, 'The Rebel Priest: Francis DeRidder and the Fight for Free Coloureds' Rights in Trinidad, 1825-32', Journal of Caribbean History, no. 5, 1981, pp. 38, 35.
14. An article by James on cricket in London's Daily Telegraph brought him to the attention of Neville Cardus. This encounter led to James being employed as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. 14 C.L.R. James, The Life of Captain Cipriani, Nelson, Lancs. 1932, p. 10.
15. Maxwell Philip, Emmanuel Appadocca, or Blighted Life, Port of Spain 1893, preface. This text will be republished by the University of Massachusetts Press in Spring 1997.
16. Although the lex talionis has been interpreted variously as the law of vengeance or the law of compensation and retaliation, it certainly has its origins in what constitutes the correct relationship between a master and his slave. Nahum M. Sarna writes that initially 'the lex talionis strove to achieve exact justice: only one life for one life, only one eye for one eye, and so forth. In pursuit of this goal, however, the laws allowed physical retaliation and vicarious punishment and did not accept the principle of equal justice for all but, rather, adjusted penalties according to social class.' The JPS Torah Commentary Exodus, commentary by Nahum M. Sarna, Philadelphia 1991, p. 126. In Roman jurisprudence, the lex talionis came to be interpreted as the law of just tetribution.
17. Philip, Emmanuel Appadocca, p. 200.
18. Ibid., p. 203.
19. This notion of European (Greek) borrowings from Egypt is still with us and raises all kinds of important ideological questions. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena, New Brunswick, NJ 1987; Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, New York 1996; Selwyn R. Cudjoe, 'Afrocentrism: Not a Racist Polemic', Boston Globe, 28 April 1996.
20. This notion of European (Greek) borrowings from Egypt is still with us and raises all kinds of important ideological questions. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena, New Brunswick, NJ 1987; Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, New York 1996; Selwyn R. Cudjoe, 'Afrocentrism: Not a Racist Polemic', Boston Globe, 28 April 1996.
21. This notion of European (Greek) borrowings from Egypt is still with us and raises all kinds of important ideological questions. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena, New Brunswick, NJ 1987; Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, New York 1996; Selwyn R. Cudjoe, 'Afrocentrism: Not a Racist Polemic', Boston Globe, 28 April 1996.
22. Philip, Emmanuel Appadocca, p. 105.
23. Ibid., p. 217.
24. Ibid.
25. James, 'Michel Maxwell Philip', pp. 254-5.
26. See L.B. Tronchin, 'The Great West Indian Orator', Public Opinion, 18 December 1888.
27. Ibid., p. 266.
28. 26 See Donald Woods's introduction to J.J. Thomas's Froudacity, Port of Spain 1969, from which this information is taken.
29. See Thomas's preface to the introduction of The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar, Port of Spain 1969.
30. Ibid., p. iv.
31. See my forthcoming book Literary Trinidad and Tobago.
32. Gonzalez Echevarria defines hegemonic discourse as one that is 'backed up by a discipline, or embodying a system, that offers the most commonly accepted description of humanity and accounts for the most widely held beliefs of the intelligentsia. Within such a discourse, the individual finds stories about himself and the world that he or she finds acceptable and in some ways obeys. Prestige and socio-political power give these forms of discourse currency.' Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Myth and Archive, Cambridge 1990, p. 41.
33. New Era, 6 September 1889.
34. Quoted in New Era, 23 August 1889.
35. Apart from disparaging the achievements of Caribbean people, Froude saw them as being 'nigger warrens' who were in danger of relapsing into barbarism. Cited in Woods's introduction to Thomas, Froudacity.
36. Ibid., pp. 90-1.
37. Ibid., p. 32.
38. Ibid., p. 39.
39. Wilson Harris, a Guyanese novelist, took exception to this way of interpreting Caribbean history and did not share James's sense of triumph over Froude. He noted: 'Thomas's wrestle with the Law would seem to consolidate a fortuitous destiny or ornament of history.' Noting that both Thomas and Froude 'were children of the nineteenth century and neither possessed the genius to penetrate intuitively or otherwise the ironic trap of the ornament, of the prison of the wasteland', he continues: 'In my view therefore Thomas does not really overwhelm Froude. The duel which they fought is nevertheless a very instructive one in pointing out the historical stasis which afflicts the West Indian sensibility and which may only be breached in complex creative processes for which the historical convention would appear to possess no criteria . . . In this connection we must note that both Thomas and Froude shared a common suspicion of Haitian vodoo and other primitive manifestations which signified for them a 'relapse into obeahism, devil worship and children-eating'. Therefore they consolidated an intellectual censorship of significant vestiges of the subconscious imagination which they needed to explore if they were to begin to apprehend a figurative meaning beyond the real or apparently real world.' History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas, Wellesley 1995, pp. 16-18.
40. Ibid., pp. 26-7.
41. See Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, New York 1992.
42. See for example L.A.A. De Verteuil, Trinidad: Its Geography, London 1858, and A. Leotaud, Oiseaux de L'Ile de la Trinidad, Port of Spain 1866.
43. See for example L.A.A. De Verteuil, Trinidad: Its Geography, London 1858, and A. Leotaud, Oiseaux de L'Ile de la Trinidad, Port of Spain 1866.