C. L. R. James'sAmerican Civilization (2005)

Abstract Here I locate the intellectual positions which underwrote C. L. R. James's mammoth American Civilization, arguing that it is the close conceptual precursor of James's more well-known and celebrated study of English civilization, Beyond a Boundary. To understand these Atlantic, or black Atlantic, locations which inform Beyond a Boundary we can begin to discern the degree that this latter text, putatively James's most "English" of books, carries unseen within it the larger imprint of America and the wider Atlantic world. Keywords: Americablack AtlanticC. L. R. JamesFrankfurt schoolMarxismMelvillemodernityPan-Africanismtotalitarianism Notes 1Thompson, "C. L. R. James at 80," 249. 2James to Lyman and Freddie Paine, and to Grace Lee and James Boggs, 24 February 1976, cited in McLemee, "Introduction," xiv. 3Worcester, James, 50–1. 4Worcester, James, 50–1. 5James, Beyond a Boundary, 128. 6James, "Return of a Wanderer," 71. 7James, Beyond a Boundary, 29 and 48. 8Constance Webb, of whom more below, gives a different impression, suggesting that the book was to be "our own," rather than having the imprimatur of James's political groupuscule, the Johnson-Forest Tendency, and was to have been published commercially: Not Without Love, 238. 9James, American Civilization, 26 and 38. It should be noted that there appears to be an alternative version of James's great text, although it remains as yet unpublished. In the meantime, discussion inevitably turns on the published text we have. 10See Grimshaw and Hart, "American Civilization. An Introduction", and Hill, "Afterword", both in James, American Civilization. 11Webb, Not Without Love, 252. 12Though for contrary views, with which I concur, see Hill, "Afterword," 325 and 293; Grimshaw and Hart, "Introduction," 16–19; and Farred, "The Maple Man," 205. 13James, Beyond a Boundary, 149. 14Adorno, "Scientific experiences of a European scholar," 347. 15Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary, 106. 16James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 10. All subsequent quotes, except that referenced in note 22, come from this edition. 17See the opening chapters of James, Modern Politics, which is a transcription of the lectures delivered at the Port of Spain public library in August 1960; James, "Every Cook Can Govern"; letter from James to Webb, undated (1944): James, Special Delivery, 191; and Schwarz, "Breaking Bread with History". 18James, "Revolution and the Negro," 77. 19Letter from James to Arlott, 29 December 1962: James, Cricket, 110. 20James, Party Politics in the West Indies, 110. 21This is discussed in the chapter on Padmore in Schwarz, West Indian Intellectuals in Britain. 22James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. (First edition, privately published, 1953), 193. 23James's life in America is wonderfully documented in his love-letters to Constance Webb: James, Special Delivery; and in her riveting memoir, Not Without Love. I have commented on the letters in "Becoming Postcolonial." 24Webb, Not Without Love, 72; during his return from Mexico a few weeks later James wrote to Webb outlining the same position. Webb's reconstruction of the talk is no doubt influenced by the later correspondence. 25See especially Webb, "What Next for Richard Wright?", and her Richard Wright. 26Undated letter from James to Webb; letter from James to Webb, 8 April 1944; undated letter from James to Webb (February/March 1946); letter from James to Webb, 21 April 1946: James, Special Delivery, 46, 103, 259 and 268; and Webb, Not Without Love, 72. 27The transcripts of these discussions, and other related documents, are published in Trotsky, Black Nationalism and Self-Determination. 29Letter from James to Webb, 7 July 1944: James, Special Delivery, 133. 28Webb, Not Without Love, 195. 30Letter from James to Webb, 24 April 1939: James, Special Delivery, 52. 31Letter from James to Webb, 1 September 1939: James, Special Delivery, 57. 32Letter from James to Webb, April 1944: James, Special Delivery, 111. 33James, American Civilization, 27. 34James, American Civilization, 28 and 48. 35James, American Civilization, 203. 36Letter from James to Webb, 4 January 1940: James, Special Delivery, 64. 37See James, "With the Sharecroppers"; and James et al., Fighting Racism in World War II contains four early articles by James on the black struggle. 38James, American Civilization, 200. 41Cited in James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 91–2; the passage can be found in Melville, Redburn, 169. 39Letter from James to Webb, 28 July 1944: James, Special Delivery, 167. 40James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 139, 81 and 99. 42James, American Civilization, 83; the passage James refers to comes from Melville, Moby Dick, 401–5. 43These points are made by Cain, "The Triumph of the Will." 44Melville, Moby Dick, 404. 46James, American Civilization, 76. 45Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, 94 and 181; and Lukács, The Historical Novel, 32 and 41. At one time Marx planned to write a study of Balzac's Human Comedy. 47James, American Civilization, 82. 48Letters from James to Webb, 15 December 1943, 4 February 1944, and March or April 1944: James, Special Delivery, 82–4, 95–100 and 100–101. 49The most concise political expressions of these theorizations can be found in James et al., The Invading Socialist Society; and James et al., State Capitalism and World Revolution. I cannot address here James's important critique of the official Communist movement which, fundamentally, equated the totalitarianism of the US system with that of Stalinism. 50James, American Civilization, 171. 51James, American Civilization, 106. 52James, American Civilization, 27. 53James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 2. 54James, American Civilization, 106. 55James, American Civilization, 104 and 105. 56James, American Civilization, 132–135 and 136–137. 57Letter from James to Webb, 14 June 1944: James, Special Delivery, 123. 58James, American Civilization, 141. 59James, Beyond a Boundary, 151–152, and 43. 60James, American Civilization, 118. 61James, American Civilization, 119. 62For a clear indication of the overarching argument see James's "Neurosis and the Intellectuals," Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, ch. 5. 63There are many instances, but for an encapsulation of the greatest economy, James, "To and From the Finland Station." 64James, American Civilization, 266–267. 65See especially James, American Civilization, 261. 66Gramsci, "Americanism and Fordism." 67James, American Civilization, 226. 70Letter from James to Webb, 1 September 1943: James, Special Delivery, 73. 74James, American Civilization, 150–151. 68Walcott, "Tribute to James." 38; James et al., Facing Reality, 65; and James, American Civilization, 265–266. 69Letter from James to Webb, undated (April 1939): James, Special Delivery, 45–47. 71James, American Civilization, 122 and 123. 72Thus he began his 1954 Paris lecture: "I propose to show that artistic creation in the great tradition of Aeschylus and Shakespeare finds its continuation today in films by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Eisenstein" James, "Popular Arts," 249; and James, American Civilization, 35. 73James, "Popular Arts," 250. 75See especially letter from James to Webb, undated (1944): James, Special Delivery, 192. 79James, "Africans and Afro-Caribbeans" 54; and for a comparable recollection of him, Buhle, Artist as Revolutionary, 74. 76James, "Africans and Afro-Caribbeans," 54. 77Letter from James to Webb, 1944: James, Special Delivery, 182. 78Letter from James to Webb, undated (April 1939): James, Special Delivery, 45. 81Cited in Cudjoe, "As Ever Darling," 232. See also James's letter to Webb, 2 August 1948: James, Special Delivery, 313. 80Webb, Not Without Love, 133. 82Conversation with George Lamming, Atlantis Hotel, Bathsheba, Barbados, 28 August 2001. 83James, American Civilization, 248. 85James, American Civilization, 209. 84Letter from James to Webb, February 1945: James, Special Delivery, 203. 86Letter from James to Webb, July 1944: James, Special Delivery, 165. The previous year he had argued that the Civil War needed to be understood as the US bourgeois revolution: James, Education, Propaganda, Agitation, 33. 87Contrast this to Du Bois's Black Reconstruction. It cannot be that James was unaware of this, though he makes no reference to it. By 1971, he was claiming that the argument that DuBois made for blacks in the Civil War was exactly comparable to the argument that James himself made about blacks in the making of Haiti: "The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction." 88See for example James, "Negroes in the Civil War." 89In the 1940s, the issue to explore in this regard would have been black popular music. James commented a little on jazz (which he believed weakened after 1929), but rather more on the classical European traditions: American Civilization, 137. There is no anticipation of the kind of arguments that, a decade later, would discuss the transition from slavery to citizenship in terms of black vernacular musics: Jones, Blues People. 90Wright, Pagan Spain, 164. 91There are a number of instances: see for example Bracey, "Nello," 52. 92For a discussion of this tradition, which unaccountably excludes James, see Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism. 93James, Notes on the Dialectic. 94James, Dialectic, 148. 96James, Marines, Renegades and Castaways, 12. 95James et al., State Capitalism, 7. 97Letter from James to Webb, undated (1944): James, Special Delivery, 138. 98In what follows, I have been much influenced by the analysis of Hill, "Afterword," 312–319. 99Glaberman, "Review," 97. 100For the correspondence with Marcuse, see Nielsen, James, 104. The decisive text here was Marcuse, Reason and Revolution. 101For Marx's conceptualizations of association, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 109. 102James, "Marx's Essays from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts," 71. 103James to Webb, undated [1944]: James, Special Delivery, 191. 104Cited by Scott McLemee, "Afterword," 225. 105James to Webb, 11 October 1947: James, Special Delivery, 304.