C. L. R. James

C. L. R. James (Tunapuna, Trinidad, 1901 – London, 1989) was a writer, historian and Marxist thinker born in a British colony in the Caribbean. He spent most of his life in Britain and, from 1938 to 1953, in the United States. Writing in English, he is a key figure both in Marxist historiography and in postcolonial literature, and much of his work still feels current.

He grew up in Trinidad and studied at Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, where he later taught English and history. In the 1920s he belonged to the anticolonial Beacon Group, centred on the magazine of the same name, and published short stories there. In 1932 he moved to England, invited by the cricketer Learie Constantine to help with his autobiography. The British years were his most productive period: he worked as a cricket correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, became involved with Trotskyist groups and the Pan-African movement, and wrote plays and the novel Minty Alley (1936), often considered the first novel by a black West Indian author published in Britain.

His best-known non-fiction appeared in 1937 and 1938. World Revolution traced the history of the Communist International, while The Black Jacobins told the Haitian Revolution from the standpoint of the enslaved people who carried it out. The book anticipated what would later be called history from below, and its central figure, Toussaint Louverture, inspired later anticolonial leaders. James described himself as a Trotskyist, though his Marxism was unorthodox and resistant to dogma, and he kept a deep faith in the political capacity of ordinary people.

In 1939 he toured the United States giving lectures and met Trotsky in Mexico. There he began to part ways with some positions of his movement, and with other militants he formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency. His legacy spans historiography, Marxist theory, literary criticism and the study of cricket, the subject of Beyond a Boundary (1963), a book that uses the sport to explore race, identity and culture.