by Lawrence Ware (Afterword), Lawrence Ware (Afterword), Paul Buhle (Author), Lawrence Ware (Afterword)
C.L.R. James is one of the twentieth century's most remarkable individuals. As the author of the influential book The Black Jacobins, he is widely recognized as the premier scholar of slave revolt; the publication of his acute and sensitive volume Beyond a Boundary established an equal reputation as a historian of sport; and his tireless political and intellectual interventions have become the hallmark of a highly creative Marxist thinker, a brilliant dialectician and the last surviving pioneer of Pan-African liberation. James's work has never previously been studied in its entirety. Now Paul Buhle, a longtime editorial collaborator with James, has produced a rich and informed analysis of his accomplishments. Drawing upon extensive interviews with James, his critics and his erstwhile supporters, together with many previously unpublished documents, Buhle's book offers an appreciative and enlightening portrait of the man and his times. The author also sheds new light on subjects ranging across Pan-Africanism, West Indian literature, British and American Marxism and the rise of third world nationalism.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Edition: Expanded
Publisher: Verso
Published: 10 Oct 2017
ISBN 10: 1786634538
ISBN 13: 9781786634535
For Buhle, James was many things: artist, revolutionary, athlete, nationalist, internationalist, Anglophile, Graecophile, libertarian, Leninist, Black liberationist, Pan-Africanist, classicist and lover of popular culture. The central achievement of Buhle's biography of James is that he shows that James did not connect his various roles with the word 'nevertheless.' Rather he saw himself as an artist and therefore a revolutionary; as a nationalist and therefore a Pan-Africanist.
--David Roediger
I thought it a good book, and a hard book to write, a biography. I haven't killed anybody, but he made it interesting ... A successful piece of work.
--C.L.R. James