C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain

“C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain” chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and cultural theorist C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James’s intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned to revolutionary socialism and militant Pan-Africanism Rejecting the ‘imperial Britishness’ he had absorbed growing up in a Crown Colony in the British West Indies, he emerged as a leading anticolonial activist. Christian Hogsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieu in which James wrote works including “The Black Jacobins,” his magisterial study of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti. First published in 1938, the book continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. During the Depression, James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora. Hogsbjerg suggests that by the time that C. L. R. James left Great Britain in 1938, he had become one of its most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists.