Abstract
What is the nature and role of intellectual work in modern society? How is the role of the intellectual to be defined and discussed? What is the relation ship of the intellectual to popular culture, popular life, and the wish fulfill ment of the masses? These are critical questions that the postcolonial intel lectual, C.L.R. James, addressed in his theoretical writings. This article offers an assessment of James, focusing sharply on his discussion of the intellectual activism and the way in which the intellectual is represented in his work. The author attempts to draw out the insights of James in detail, pointing to their internal tensions and contradictions but also to their value and relevance to issues of intellectual work on the terrain of the contempo rary public sphere, where the discourse on intellectual activism has all but atrophied in recent years.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 86-107 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2001 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Cultural Studies
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
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In: Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2001, p. 86-107.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Mariners, renegades, and castaways
T2 - C.L.R. James and the radical postcolonial imagination
AU - McCarthy, Cameron
N1 - Funding Information: McCarthy Cameron University of Illinois at Urbana 02 2001 1 1 86 107 What is the nature and role of intellectual work in modern society? How is the role of the intellectual to be defined and discussed? What is the relation ship of the intellectual to popular culture, popular life, and the wish fulfill ment of the masses? These are critical questions that the postcolonial intel lectual, C.L.R. James, addressed in his theoretical writings. This article offers an assessment of James, focusing sharply on his discussion of the intellectual activism and the way in which the intellectual is represented in his work. The author attempts to draw out the insights of James in detail, pointing to their internal tensions and contradictions but also to their value and relevance to issues of intellectual work on the terrain of the contempo rary public sphere, where the discourse on intellectual activism has all but atrophied in recent years. sagemeta-type Journal Article search-text 86 Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: C.L.R. James and the Radical Postcolonial Imagination SAGE Publications, Inc.2001DOI: 10.1177/153270860100100111 Cameron McCarthy University of Illinois at Urbana What is the nature and role of intellectual work in modern society? How is the role of the intellectual to be defined and discussed? What is the relation ship of the intellectual to popular culture, popular life, and the wish fulfill ment of the masses? These are critical questions that the postcolonial intel lectual, C.L.R. James, addressed in his theoretical writings. This article offers an assessment of James, focusing sharply on his discussion of the intellectual activism and the way in which the intellectual is represented in his work. The author attempts to draw out the insights of James in detail, pointing to their internal tensions and contradictions but also to their value and relevance to issues of intellectual work on the terrain of the contempo rary public sphere, where the discourse on intellectual activism has all but atrophied in recent years. Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there. When one looks back over the last twenty years to those men who were the most far-sighted, who first began to tease out the muddle of ideology in our times, who were at the same time Marxists with a hard theoretical basis, and close students of society, humanists with a tremendous response to and an understanding of human culture, Comrade James is one of the first one thinks of. Author's Note: I would like to express special thanks to the following persons whose careful reading of various drafts of this article and suggestions for revision were of enormous help: Jack Bratich, Warren Crichlow, Gregory Dimitriadis, Norman Denzin, Lewis Gordon, Herman Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Paget Henry, Marie Leger, Jim Murray, and Craig Robertson. An early draftwas presented at the "C.L.R. James Scholarship: Old and New" Conference held at Brown University this past spring. I am grateful to conference participants who offered very constructive criticisms of that draft. Research for this article was supported by a grant offered by the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois. Cultural Studies H Critical Methodologies, Volume 1 Number 1, 2001 86-107 C 2001 Sage Publications, Inc. 8987 In this article, I pursue as a first objective the task of placing C.L.R. James's work within the broad movement and circulation of bodies, ideas, and material practices within the Black diaspora and the global theater of radicalism, resistance, and change. Second, I foreground three types of intellectual subjects that repeat themselves as tropes in his major texts: The BlackJacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (I 963b), Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in (1978), Beyonda Boundary (1963a), and American Civilization (1993). The article concludes with my brief observations concerning the implications of James's work for better understanding the role of the intellectual in our times. Underlying my exploration of James's treatment of intellectual activism in the texts mentioned above are two sets of theoretical assumptions that I would like to make explicit. The first set of theoretical assumptions concerns my own disposition on the matter of the embattled status of texts and textual analysis in cultural studies and cultural criticism. I write, like James, to affirm the vital, transformative potential of texts and their deep imbrication in the work of the imagination and practical modes of existence of modern subjects everywhere. My discussion of the prominence of textual interpretation in James's formulations concerning the intellectual is written against the grain of a contemporary indictment of textualism and textual analysis within cultural studies itself (e.g., see Bourdieu's critique of "immanent analysis" in the Field of Cultural Production [1993], and Nightingale's extensive critique of the dominance of textual analysis in cultural studies in Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real [1996]). My attempt at recuperating James's own ambivalent relationship to the intellectual and his use of this figure as a trope in his major works is deeply informed by the fact that for postcolonial writers like James, Derek Walcott, or Edward Said, texts-both canonical and popular-play critical roles in their intellectual development. A great example is James's encounter with the works of Thackeray and classical literature when he was a boy, a relationship that he discusses in Beyond a Boundary (1963a). These texts, James argued, connected him to a wider world beyond the island of Trinidad where he was born and grew up. They gave him a sense of the flow of history and the radical capacity of ordinary people to work on their own contexts for change. These are themes that James would later stress throughout the entire body of his written work. Indeed, in books like American Civilization (1993), James makes the point that texts, particularly popular texts (film, cartoons, soap operas), are coarticulated to the lives of the masses-and in these texts their own lived experiences become socially extended, and their democratic wish fulfillment kindled and propelled. The second set of ideas that inform this article is vitally related to the first. These ideas concern the issue of movement. Movement refers to a wide array of practices or tactics of existence-as related to the work of the imagination in the representational technologies of music, film, television, the Internet, and so forth; the redefinition of personal and social space in everyday life; and the 9088 constant rupturing of experience-that characterizes (though not exclusively) Black diasporic history and geography (Hall, 1992, 1996). These multiple dynamics existentially link the particular trajectories of African-descended people to the fate and fortunes of other groups in the modern world. Movement, therefore, is not only a matter of the transaction of distance, not just a matter of style, but it has profound epistemological value in its critical and reflexive role in the constitution of the modern subject and the constitution of the diasporic Black subject in particular. In James's writing, texts and movement (as in mobility, maneuverability, openness to others) play critical roles in the conditions of possibility and the reproduction of the intellectual, as we will see later. The Circulation of Activism In a document prepared for the 1948 convention of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, C.L.R. James made a striking prediction regarding the future of Black struggle in the United States and the nascent postwar Civil Rights movement just then coming into itself: "This independent Negro Movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily by the organized labor movement or the Marxist party" (1992, p. 183). For James, the Civil Rights movement had a vitality and autonomy of its own, and an organic intellectual and political perspective. James further linked Black struggle in the United States to the global reality, to liberation struggles on the continent of Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. He saw the new social movement of the Black masses, along with the struggle of women, as directly linked to the international workers struggle and to the very center of political and social developments in modern, Western industrialized societies. Despite C.L.R. James's pronouncements regarding the international status of the Black struggle-which, among other things, led to his disagreement with Leon Trotsky and his breaking with the Trotskyite movement-very little attention has been paid in the sociological, historical, educational, and emergent cultural studies literatures to the circulation of Black intellectual ideas and activism. Paul Gilroy's sociological and philosophical writings on Black diasporic intellectual culture represent a notable exception. In The BlackAtlantic ( 1993) and, more recently, in Two Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (2000), Gilroy provides a striking counterexample to the general tendency in radical scholarship to give the issue of Black intellectual culture short shrift. In his magisterial Two Camps (2000), Gilroy foregrounds the existential contradictions of the production of Black mentalities in the West, and links these processes to the vital dynamics of historical trajectory and movement within the diaspora. Gilroy's coupling of the topics of Black popular cosmopolitanism with the issue of diasporic intellectual formation brings into sharp view the 9189 remorseless process of cultural porosity and the consequential attrition of the nexus between Black identities and fixed geographies of place. Here, Gilroy, like James before him, writes against the grain of crass essentialism of both mainstream and radical Black thinking about such concepts as identity, culture, and race. For instance, Marcus Garvey and Zora Neale Hurston are two examples of intellectuals, Gilroy tells us, who were very much conceptually opposed to James, and whose nationalist thinking led them all the way to fascism. The concepts of identity, culture, and race, as James suggests in the first epigram to this article, are ineluctably susceptible to the movement and play of history-a dynamic process in which the modern Black intellectual assigned the task of cultural broker of symbolic capital can offer no ready guarantees of communal unity or singular coherence of purpose. It is these agonistic dilemmas that one finds imbricated in the work of James in his own varied and, at times, contradictory assessments of the central opposition of the intellectual versus the masses in modern life. These contradictions of existence were not abstract but were present in James's own life, characterized as it was by movement, frequency of rupture, and sustained forms of deracination. In the cultural studies literature, for example, very little attention has been paid to the ceaseless movement of Black bodies, style, music, popular culture, organizational capacities, and prerogatives across the boundaries of history, geography, and nation states within the African diaspora. When one looks at the propulsion of ideas coming out of the Civil Rights movement and their multiplier effects abroad in terms of the struggle for wider, more expansive democratic access to decision making in South Africa, the Caribbean, England, and elsewhere-or the circulation of Black intellectuals, such as Stokeley Carmichael or James himself, within the triangular political field of the Caribbean, England, and the United States- one begins to see a generative pattern of communication, conversation, and visionary and revisionary affiliation across the waters of the Atlantic as it were. The impact of movement, migration, heterogeneity, cultural appropriation and exchange, and circulation of radical energies between the United States and the Caribbean is a critical one for Caribbean people, because we are a migratory people. One only needs to point to the figures of Angela Davis, Malcolm X, or Marcus Garvey and the Garveyite movement to see this living trope of movement and critique at work as a sort of embodied symbolic. One cannot, for example, talk meaningfully about the Grenada revolution, the mutiny in Trinidad in 1972, the Black Muslim uprising in Trinidad in 1990, indeed the very rise of modern democracy in the islands without some appreciation of this movement and cross-pollination of ideas from Black America to the Caribbean and back again. For example, many of the rank-and-file members of the early labor movement in the Caribbean (the Barbados Workers Union being a very significant instance) participated in the Garveyite movement in the United States, were radicalized by it, and returned to launch labor politics in the region. (This is a 9290 history of cultural and political movement that is immortalized in George Lamming's In the Castle ofMy Skin [1953] in the fortunes of his protagonist, "G. ") It was the labor movement that provided the foundations of the modern party system in the Caribbean. And in the 1930s and 1940s, it was the labor movement that set off a chain of resistance and revolt throughout the archipelago of islands that would usher in Black national leadership and autonomous government from Jamaica in the north to Trinidad and Tobago in the south. The impact of Garvey's organizational practices exceeded the constraints of his ultranationalist thinking. And his ideas regarding the grassroots party and small newspapers dedicated to Pan Africanism, and the radical reconstruction of the identities of African people, can be identified in the socialist newspapers throughout the Caribbean region in political organs such as Abeng in Jamaica, Manjak in Barbados, Tapia in Trinidad, and Jewel in Grenada, and in the more academic New World journal produced by scholars at the University of the West Indies. These small newspapers were internationalist in orientation, and they launched withering critiques of British and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean, national government corruption, police brutality, ultimately offering an imaginary future of political alternatives linked to socialist change. In the case of the Grenada Revolution, one can think of African American radicals such as Howard Fuller, the artist Michelle Gibbs, Jan Carew (the Guyanese novelist and American citizen who shuttled between Chicago and Grenada), and others who were part of the body of international intellectual and cultural workers participating in the revolution in Grenada right up to the U.S. invasion launched by Ronald Reagan in October 1983. This cross-fertilization of ideas is also associated with the generative and symbolic force of Black Panther resistance, the notion of Black power, Black beauty, music, and meaning of style. These grounded cultural and political signifiers constituted an unceasing flow of revisionary theories and practices that continue to circulate within the diaspora, reverberating across a plurality of sites, as Manthia Diawara and Paul Gilroy argue. Of course, one must also talk about the metaphorical and concrete effects of the trope of movement within the United States itself: the movement of individual activists and intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis to Europe and back, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, the migratory waves of the daughters of the dust from the South to the North, the Civil Rights struggle, and the constant movement of blues and jazz musicians in search of work and new settings for performance. As James Baldwin argues in Nobody Knows My Name ( 1961 ), all of this movement brings clarification of critique and the production of revivified identities, as in the embodied tropes of Bird or Miles or Trane. Although sociologists and historians (and cultural studies scholars) have by and large marginalized these developments, one picks up these patterns of movement in the diasporic literature and popular culture that have poured out of the New World since before the Harlem Renaissance. It is this notion of movement and circulation of ideas that is present in Tricia Rose's book on rap, 9391 Black Noise ( 1994), in which she points to a radical hybridity, heterogeneity, intertextuality, transgression, and movement in the hip-hop culture; this is powerfully illustrated in the work of graffiti artists, break dancers, and rap musicians. Furthermore, she shows how this work gets registered in the flash of the spirit of the Haitian American painter, the late Jean-Michel Basquiat. One finds similar references and allusions in the writings of James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son ( 1955) and Nobody Knows My Name ( 1961 ), George Lamming in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Jamaica Kincaid in Lucy (1990), or in Toni Morrison's exquisite staging of a contemporary American version of Shake- speare's The Tempest in the French Caribbean in her novel Tar Baby (1981). Morrison also pursues these themes of movement, heterogeneity, and inter- textuality in her novel SongofSolomon (1977), where a milkman's quest for the bag of bones/bag of gold of his grandfather is a quest for a final identity that is always one step ahead of him-a tortuous journey into the Black soul taken off the ice. This flow of ideas, this movement of maps of meaning, this work of the imagination, is largely an accumulation of interpretive practices, a set of magic arts, in which the African intellectual turns his or her subaltern gaze on the eye of power itself, producing powerful revisionary effects on hegemonic, biological, and naturalized notions of nation, group identity, and so forth. One can think here of Baldwin in Nobody Knows My Name ( 1961 ) talking about the discovery or clarification of his identity as African and American occurring in his exile in France. One might recall, too, Morrison's (1992) powerful critique of the encrusted racism of the hallowed White authors of American litera- ture-Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Mark Twain-in her odyssey into the literature of White American writers and their hegemonic deflation of Black character and situation. At the center of this circulation and movement of diaspora peoples, ideas, and intellectual practices is a fundamental deconstructive project regarding the West that has not yet exhausted itself. This movement produces a state of vertigo that exposes the contradictions in the West, its capricious hierarchies, its differentiated experience and application of democracy, and so forth. Here, intellectual activism is not only embodied in the grand acts of mobilization of the public intellectuals such as WE.B. DuBois or, more contemporaneously, bell hooks, Cornel West, Michael Dyson, or Henry Louis Gates. Such intellectual activism is embodied in the popular acts of the masses in movement, in agency, of taking charge of one's own destiny, of seeking new grounds of survival and alternatives within the constricted choices offered in a capitalist racial order. There is no more powerful instantiation of the struggle and contradictory pursuit of the American 18th century ideals of happiness, liberty, and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence (what Condorcet, de Tocqueville, and others regarded as the struggle for the good life) than reflects itself in mass-based urban cultural and intellectual forms. Here, for example, I am calling attention to the powerful thematization of survival and resistance as 9492 embodied in the detective novels of Chester Himes, the antihegemonic critiques of Public Enemy or Tupac Shakur with their incisive refusals of progress, and the pastoral epiphanies of Black women writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston in her extraordinary novel Their Eyes Were Watching God ( 1978). All of these forms foreground an African working class and peasant subject, a postcolonial or counterhegemonic Caliban protagonist, engaged in the reordering of history. A major feature of these improvisatory acts of cultural production and analysis are the magic arts of interpretation. In James, we have one of the great 20th century exponents of these arts of deconstruction and interpretation. These magic arts are really skills, capacities, and practices developed in the context of his exile and return to the Caribbean, his involvement in socialist and labor politics in England and Europe, and-most profoundly of all, according to James-his 15-year sojourn in the United States between 1938 and 1953, a period in which he participated vigorously in socialist politics and feasted on the new modernist vistas percolating in American popular culture. For James, the United States was a country of paradoxes. On one hand, here was a country of great technological and democratic advancement, which marked the United States as the leading world capitalist power decisively driven by modernist cultural energies. James maintained that the United States was a very distinct civilization from that of Europe, especially in the sense that the United States had significantly broken with the rigidities of feudalism. On the other hand, here was country that had erected unimaginable atavistic constraints that stood in the way of African Americans. The United States maintained a perverse system of discrimination against Black people-a system that reproduced some of the most despicable forms of inhumanity and inequality, as Gunnar Myrdal would put it in An American Dilemma (1944). In addition, for James, the United States was a radical site ofhybridity in spite of itself. It was a country constantly transformed, energized, and reenergized by the flow of immigrants that constantly traversed it, as well as by the powerful cultural and moral forces unleashed by the Black masses in their ceaseless struggle against the brutal imposition of state power and symbolic violence in cultural institutions (such as television and school textbooks). Here, too, at the pinnacle of power in the modern world, was an America that was a highly rationalized and bureaucratic culture-a Leviathan in which the relationship of the state to the masses was problematically mediated by instrumental intellectuals and professional middle-class types who were the self-appointed gatekeepers of symbolic capital. Here dwelled the modern intellectual, exiled from communication with the masses of Black and White working-class people and driven forward by resentment. James's life followed this pattern of movement associated with the diaspora intellectual. Born in Tunapuna, Trinidad, in 1901, James moved to London in 1932. Six years later he left England for the United States and stayed for 15 years before his deportation in 1953. He would return to all three places before 9593 settling down to permanent exile in Brixton, London, where he died in 1989. James wrote widely and passionately about a range of issues regarding contemporary Marxist politics, the status of racial and gendered struggle within Left agendas, and the counterhegemonic possibilities in the popular arts of jazz, calypso, film, sports (particularly cricket), and the detective novel. He also wrote, of course, commonsensically and insightfully about high culture-the worlds of Thackeray and the public school codes of ethics and morality that still thrive in England and the Caribbean today. Always, James struggled to link the high and low-to link the aesthetic disposition to the anthropological and the quotidian-to connect the canonical to the popular. As he argues in American Civilization (1993), To put it more harshly still, it is in the serious study of, above all, Charles Chaplin, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, genuinely popular novels like those of Frank Yerby (~o~M o/VT~rroM~, 7~ Co~M ~M~, 7~ M~M, .Pr~*f GMf/f), men like Yerby (Foxes of Narrow, Tht Golden Hawk, The Vixen, Pride's Castle), men like David Selsnick, Cecil deMille, and Henry Luce, that you find the clearest ideological expression of the sentiments and deepest feelings of the American people and a great window into the future of the modern world. This insight is not to be found in the works of T. S. Eliot, of Hemingway, of Joyce, of famous directors like John Ford or Rene Clair. (p. 119) But perhaps the most consuming theoretical object of James's work was his effort to understand the relationship between the intellectual (as the professional middle-class mediator of symbolic capital and material power) and the masses, who struggled to overcome impositions of state de jure and de facto authority. James was ceaselessly preoccupied with the kind of disintegration, separation, and bifurcation of the individual and society and the intellectual and the masses that had occurred in modern society and that affected all modern peoples, particularly African people in the diaspora. For him, racial logics rode the undersides of the rapid rationalization of modern industrial society. Racial logics were the product of the colonization of the life world. These logics were articulated in the following: the consecration of efficiency and scientific management paradigms, the separation and bifurcation of society into high and low culture, the antithesis of private versus public life, and the opposition of the intellectual versus the masses. All of this served to unleash the mad totalitarian and fascist forces that now define modern reality in America and Europe today. This fascism was by and large-though not exclusively, as James noted regarding the ultranationalism and conspiracy theories of the Pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey-a White, popular fascism that prioritizes the mor- alistic agendas of the suburbs over the inner city and represents Black people as "the enemy within." In his anticipation of these developments, James was prophetic. James's intellectual work was a form of critical pedagogy, an applied scholarship produced in the context of struggle. James ceaselessly ruminated on the fate of the relationship between the intellectual and the popular in the modern world. It is this focus on the rela- 9694 tionship of the intellectual to the masses in James's work that I want to spend some time discussing in this article. For James (as it is for contemporary writers like Cornel West, Edward Said, Angela Davis, or bell hooks), the intellectual is not simply an academic or an expert ensconced in the safety of the ivory tower-the intellectual is a transformative social subject committed to a particular articulation of the differential classed, raced, and gendered interests, needs, desires, and aspirations of embattled social groups. He or she is a projection, even an "emanation," to use the language of Cedric Robinson (1983), of particular group interests and historical and cultural realities. The intellectual straddles the contradiction of the world of the private, solitary practice of scholarship and the public world of the embattled masses, their popular imagination, and their popular will. What James's work foregrounds is the constant movement between these poles of separation and affiliation. In what follows, I look at three motifs or paradigms of the intellectual/mass relationships foregrounded in James's writing. Intellectual Exemplars James's first intellectual exemplar is the organic or subaltern intellectual. This intellectual type can be found in his portrayal of human actors like Toussaint L'Ouverture in The Black Jacobins (1963b), or the polyglot, racially diverse crew members of the Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). These are intellectual types who emerge directly from the masses and seem inextricably bound to their fate. They rise and fall as they express a sense of community and operate within the broader projection of the transformation of the fetters of society that constrain their will to power and desire for the good life. With respect to this model, the historical figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture is the preeminent example. Yet, as we will see, this is not a monolithic or essentialist designation, and James challenges any easy or presumed a priori relationship between the charismatic leader and the people. James critiques this model as retaining elements of vanguardism, elements of what Archie Singham (1968) calls "messianism." In Toussaint, James allows us to see the complexity of the organic intellectual and the tensions between the will and expectations of the masses and revolutionary intellectual leadership. Counterposed to the figure of the organic intellectual is the authoritarian or resentment-type intellectual. The latter, as Paulo Freire warns in Pedagogy ofthe Oppressed (1970), is a vanguardist who leads by commands, edicts, and pronouncements without consultation with the will of the popular, and who ultimately cuts himself off from the humanizing processes associated with the masses. In the most extreme form, such an intellectual is what Friedrich Nietz- sche, in his Genealogy ofMorals (1967), calls a resentment type. That is to say, the resentment intellectual defines his identity through the negation of the other. Such an intellectual exists in real or imaginary exile from society's work- 9795 ing poor and is driven by a dangerously narrow-minded program of retributive morality. We live in the times of the ascendancy of this intellectual type in Washington. But the most vivid embodiment of this totalitarian type of intellectual is our White, professional, middle-class, suburban resident who rails against the government, taxes, and welfare programs for the poor, and who is hopelessly addicted to the idea of security systems and prison expansion. James points to this resentment intellectual type in the paranoid detective Sam Spade (played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon) and in Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). Third, there is the contextual intellectual, or what Henry Louis Gates describes in The Signifying Monkey (1988) as the revisionary intellectual. In James's work, this overdetermined figure is, in part, most complexly foregrounded in the author, autobiographically disclosed in the text of Beyond a Boundary (1963a)-James himself. The latter is, perhaps, James's most theoretically and methodologically integrated manuscript. The struggle here is to link the personal/autobiographical to the popular, the agonistic private to the turbulent public, the high and the low. To do this, the contextual intellectual must work across the road blocks and naturalized separations that capitalism and imperialism have fabricated to divide and conquer the masses, divide and conquer subaltern groups embattled in the project of change. The contextual intellectual is versed in the magic arts of interpretation, and his special prerogative is a deconstructive assault on the taken-for-granted and naturalized terrain of the West. Here the tools of the master will be used against his own house, a position that Audre Lorde advances in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). In Derek Walcott's Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1970), it is the peasant woodcutter, Ti-Jean, who brings down the planter-devil by building alliances with the rejected animals of the forests. Together they burn down the plantations and humiliate the planter class. Without this alliance across difference, the planter can continue to exploit the peasants and treat them as beasts of burden. In Beyond a Boundary (I 963a), James struggles with the class and color divides that reveal themselves in a borrowed and imposed British public school educational system and in the legacies of cricket operating in Trinidadian society in the early part of the 20th century. It is precisely these divides that inform the production of the postcolonial intellect. It is in the very heart of French literature, in the very heart of English literature, that James would launch a revisionary strike for the case for West Indian equality and self-government. James would graft these claims for political autonomy to the quest for a West Indian cultural autonomy founded in the popular arts of the masses and in critical interpretation of the contradictory themes and nuances within the cultural forms of the West. Moreover, James insists that the contextual intellectual must be ceaselessly vigilant about the excesses and pitfalls of nationalism. Ultimately, the contextual intellectual must be willing to engage in self-criticism. He or she must be open to suggestion, open to the voices of the masses, open to 9896 the historical variability and nuance of the struggle of the masses for a better life. The Organic/Subaltern Intellectual Of decisive importance in James's discussion of the intellectual is his methodological revision and challenge to the classical Marxist Leninist notion of the vanguard party and the top-down leadership role of the Marxist intellectual vis-~-vis the working masses in the struggle for social change. James felt that like the bureaucrats in advanced capitalist countries, the intellectual leadership in the former U.S.S.R. had become instrumental and impersonal. These Soviet intellectuals, much like Ahab's officers on board the Pequod in Moby Dick, had become the "organization men" of the constricted field of state capitalism practiced in the Soviet Union. By contrast, the working people were more revolutionary in spirit and practice than their intellectual and political leaders. Of related importance was James's acerbic critique of postcolonial intellectuals and middle-class leaders in Africa and the Caribbean, who exploited their relationship to the masses and installed themselves as charismatic rulers in a structural dynamic that Singham describes in The Hero and the Crowd in a Colonial Polity (1968). James was particularly interested in humanizing Marxism. Rather than foregrounding the economic as the primary causal force in social formations, James argued that it was human relationships that propelled history : "It was the dialectic between oppression and rebellion, the relations between exploiter and exploited, and not the scientific determination of mysterious commodity prices, which drew him to radical discourse. He pursued a 'sociology' on the 'relations between people,' not one centered on the 'relations between men and things' " (Robinson, 1983, p. 50). He maintained that radical intellectual work ought to be directly informed by an ongoing conversation and dialogue with the masses. The organic intellectual not only represented the interests of the masses, but he was in part committed to a model of genuine collective leadership. This was a project in which the ideas of the masses would inform strategy, organization, and political mobilization. What the masses bring to the table is a strong desire for collectivity and solidarity and a grounded knowledge of the limits and constraints of oppressive systems. These ideas are most powerfully articulated in James's The Black Jacobins ( 1963b), where James explores the tensions and contradictions in this model of intellectual leadership. The Black Jacobins is the story of the only successful slave revolution in world history, the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. At the center of the revolution are the illiterate slaves and their barely literate leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture. James's preoccupation with the issue of intellectual leadership is indicated in the fact that the characters of Toussaint and his successor Dessalines clearly echo those of Lenin, Stalin, and emergent third-world leaders in the Caribbean who were beginning to ride the prewar movements for 9997 independence and democracy-movements such as the trade union movement. At the closing of the 18th century, the Black slaves of Haiti, brutally exploited by their masters, rebelled and defeated their White and mulatto rulers, a number of French colonial interventionary forces, and large invading forces sent by the Spanish and the English to lay siege to the island. What James ably demonstrates in The BlackJacobins ( 1963b) is that the Haitian Revolution was the result of planning, calculation, organization, and strategy on the part of the slaves. These were not bumbling, simple-minded, preindustrial folk. After all, the Haitian sugar plantations foregrounded some of the most advanced technology to be found in any part of the industrial world in the 18th century. The Haitian revolution does not fit the mold of a spontaneous rebellion: In August 1791, after two years of the French Revolution and its repercussions in San Domingo, the slaves revolted. The struggle lasted for 12 years. The slaves defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under Bonaparte's brother-in-law. The defeat of Bonaparte's expedition in 1803 resulted in the establishment of the Negro state of Haiti which has lasted to this day. The revolt is the only successful slave revolt in history, and the odds it had to overcome is evidence of the magnitude of the interests that were involved. The transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement. (James, 1963b, p. ix) The revolution had its leaders who drew on and brilliantly fused democratic ideas unleashed in the French Revolution in the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Robespierre to their interests in overcoming their indigenous conditions of oppression. Chief among its organic intellectuals was Francois Dominique Toussaint of Breda. James would compare Toussaint to Napoleon and would argue that Toussaint was, along with Napoleon, one of the greatest military and political leaders of their historical epoch. But to the extent that the Haitian revolution was successful, Toussaint is shown to have relied very heavily on the method of collaboration with the illiterate slave masses. Toussaint's star ultimately falls when his growing unwillingness to communicate with the people breaks the bond of trust that had underwritten his mass support and extraordinary military success. His assumption of extreme autocratic powers and his deep, even excessive, investment in the French Enlightenment as the source of utopic promise and possibility for the Haitian society alienated the Haitian masses. He is eventually tricked into accepting an invitation to talks with a representative of the French general, LeClerc, and is captured and sent to France aboard the Frigate Creole. Napoleon promptly imprisons Toussaint at Fort Joux in the Jura Mountains where he dies in 1803, just a year before Jean Jacques Dessalines leads Haiti to independence and freedom from France. 10098 The story of Toussaint is the story of maroon intellectuals strewn across the diaspora: Nat Turner, Den Mark Vessey, and Gabriel Prosser of America; Gammay, Netta, and Julien Fedon (heroes and heroines of the 1763 slave revolt in Grenada that anticipated the Haitian Revolution by some 30 years); and the slaves of the liberated state of Palmares in Brazil. These organic, maroon intellectuals thrived on revisionary strategies that converted their slender resources and innumerable constraints into lighting rods of revolutionary justice. They deployed their intellectual resources in the interest of overturning oppression, and offered alternative visions of equality for the oppressed African slaves in New World plantation societies. James argues that the work of the organic intellectual is always linked to a larger dynamic than a particular place, locality, or moment in history. The work of the Haitian revolutionaries must therefore be seen in the light of a global reality that linked Haiti to the metropolis of France. France's revolution was, in part, fueled by material resources expropriated from Haiti; for instance, in 1789, Haiti accounted for two thirds of France's exports. But ultimately, for James, the story of the organic intellectuals of Haiti and their relationship to the masses is also an allegorical tale that confronts the contemporary excesses of bourgeois leadership in the diaspora and throughout the third world. Here, James warns of the dangers of vanguard intellectual leadership and its disconnection from the resourcefulness of the masses. When this type of vanguardism occurs, as Paulo Freire (1970) and Wilson Harris (1989) argue, we have intellectuals with "illiterate imaginations" enforcing the latest agricultural program or urban literacy project without the organic input of the masses. James argues that the Haitian slaves and their organic revolutionary leadership were able to appropriate, revise, and redeploy the political philosophies of the intellectuals of the French revolution-applying them with telling force against French imperial hegemony itself. The Authoritarian or Resentment Intellectual If the organic maroon intellectual is presented as a positive transformative force in world history, the authoritarian or resentment intellectual is seen as a negative presence. The distorted communicative practices of the resentment intellectual are not the consequence of an evil nature. Instead, they are rooted in the conditions of production of capitalism itself and its mode of organization. That is to say that capitalism's bureaucratic organization, efficiency planning, and its means-ends rationality radically reduce and subordinate human creativity and imagination to commodities for exchange production and profit making. The human will is corrupted-as is illustrated, for example, in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo-by instrumental goals. Intellectual work, particularly within the academy, is just part of an instrumental infrastructure colonized by capitalist interests. 10199 In his American Civilization ( 1993) and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in (1978), James anticipated the Frankfurt school critique of the overrationalized dimensions of modern life and its culture industry. But James's thinking moved in a different direction from the theories of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Instead of consigning popular culture to the cultural dump heap, he pointed to the complexity and sophistication of American mass culture. He argued that popular culture strove for democratic articulation of the needs and desires of the broad masses of American people. For James, the "Dick Tracy" comic strip, the detective novel, the music of jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, and the cinema of Charlie Chaplin were the true inheritors of the literary tradition of Melville. These popular cultural works pointed sharply to central human dilemmas in the modern world, not just in the United States. These works pointed to the great struggle in modern life to overcome the disruption, separations, and divisions between human actor and human actor, humankind and nature, the private and the public, and high culture and popular culture. Instead of assuming that the public sphere had disappeared (as Frankfurt School theorists and literary critics had suggested), James maintained that popular music and film were the 20th century's form of the public sphere and created avenues for democratic participation and therapeutic release. Of course, James was very mindful of the fact that these new social technologies were master instruments of cultural reproduction. It is in the popular and literary works of modern society that James identified the emergence of a new type of social subject craving intellectual leadership and a political role. This new subject that had emerged on the world stage was an authoritarian or totalitarian personality. This authoritarian personality was a product of an age in which contemporary human actors felt a sense of permanent exile, permanent displacement, and a radical inability to connect the various aspects of their lives into an integrated whole. It is important to note that this authoritarian populism was and is not race-specific. Authoritarian populism also had a Black face. Garveyism at its most ultranationalist extreme was, for James, articulated to a special form of alienated community and the remorseless banishment and expulsion of the Black subject from the modern socius. Though James himself would be drawn within the embrace of the utopic promise of Pan Africanism, he confronted in Garvey the totalitarian impulse and its petrifying imposition on and manipulation of popular democratic wish fulfillment. For instance, James argued that Garvey, in his mobilization of Black populism, was a precursor to Hitler: All the things that Hitler was to do well later, Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921. He organized storm troopers, who marched, uniformed in his parades, and kept order and gave color to his meetings. (quoted in Gilroy, 2000, p. 231)1 102100 James made a link between totalitarian actors operating on the world stage, such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and the anthropology of everyday life. These actors were not exceptional-they were projections of society that had been vastly transformed by late capital. The totalitarian personality emanated from the very heart of Western civilization: Out of the very heart of Western Civilization, there emerged in 1933 the Hitler regime.... And [Europeans] could not face Hitler yesterday with a clear mind and good conscience (as they cannot face Stalin today) because the madness of both was born and nourished in the very deepest soil of Western Civilization. (James, 1978, p. 10) In Mariners, Renegades and Castaways ( 1978), James argues that in Moby Dick ( 1851 ) Melville offered a character sketch of this resentment type of intellectual in the persona of Captain Ahab. For James, Ahab was a composite of an upwardly mobile, professional, middle-class agent and a frustrated bureaucrat fettered by an overregulated labor process. He was the embodiment of the excessively regimented industrial order. Ahab was the equivalent of today's embattled professional white-collar worker, a petty bourgeois subject who now finds himself surrounded by immigrant minorities and women in the workforce, and for whom the center of the world has fallen out as it is replaced by multiculturalism, plurality, and difference. He is also more generally indicative of today's suburban dweller who looks on the inner city with contempt, and who applies his moral principles as a ramrod on the political system to produce more jails and more incarceration of minority youth. This resentment type of intellectual remorselessly seeks to secure and defend the ideological environment of his own petty bourgeois interests. He is an individual who is overintegrated into modern society, as Sam Spade is in The Maltese Falcon. Ahab's rugged individualism is not so much a rejection of capitalist society. He is what Emile Durkheim sees as a special kind of anomic individual, overintegrated into society's norms. This leads to his self-destructive qualities. Ahab's obsession with revenge against the white whale, Moby Dick, reflects an irrational drive to put practical common sense aside in the pursuit of a final individual vanquishing of his nemesis. In this sense, Ahab displays a feverish embodiment of capitalism's most abstract and metaphysical value of individual risk taking-the perseverance of individual will, at all costs, over the collective. James updates his argument regarding the resentment intellectual type in American Civilization (1993) in his discussion of Sam Spade (the paranoid detective of The Maltese Falcon) and Dick Tracy of the "Dick Tracy" comic strip. These detectives were pseudonormative exemplars of resentment and purveyors of a retributive morality that emanated from society's frustrated professional middle class. The central targets of this resentment were the socially and culturally deviant. For example, James reports the following excerpt from a statement by Patterson (the editor of the New York Daily News) that was issued on the day of his acceptance of Charles Gould's comic strip "Dick Tracy": 103101 People call detectives "dicks." "Dick Tracy"-that sounds all right. But he is not a cop to start with. He's an ordinary guy. Have him going with a girl; call her Tess. Her old man runs a little store of some kind, and every night he takes the cash up stairs-they live over the store. There's a stick-up and the gunmen kill the old man. Show the bullets going right into him. Tracy chases the hold-up men but they slug him. He sees them escape in a black sedan. He clenches his hands, looks to heaven and says he'll avenge the old man. "To this I'll dedicate my life. "(quoted in James, 1993, pp. 121-122) James then isolates three very significant quotes from the text of the excerpt to illustrate his theme of the pseudonormativity of retributive morality that suffuses contemporary cultural form. These quotes point us toward a quotidian articulation of resentment: 1. "Show the bullets going right into him." 2. "But he is not a cop to start with. He's an ordinary guy." 3. "To this I'll dedicate my lire." James (1993) reinforces his theme of middle-American revenge and popular culture by putting Patterson's summary of the plot line of Dick Tracy in perspective: The bitterness, the violence, the brutality, the sadism simmering in the population, the desire to revenge themselves with their own hands, to get some release for what society had done to them. (p. 121) The bad guys kill. And the good guys kill, too. But the good guys kill more efficiently. Morality is on the side of the technologically efficient. Spade and Tracy are the eternal stand-ins or proxies for middle-American values. They are folk or volkish types that provide a therapeutic release for White middle-class hostility to difference. Their contemporaries-whether they be Dirty Harry, Rambo, or the Terminator-channel a retributive morality onto the society's poor and deviant. Spade, Tracy, and their new millennial counterparts also formulate a resentment intellectual attack on bureaucracy and government and their dependents. The private eye is really the professional middle-class subject masquerading in drag. The Sam Spades of this world are applied intellectuals whose expression of resentment derives from an abstract sense that the world in which we live may be coming apart or is threatened by forces within. Their apocalyptic vision has become normalized in the political language targeted on the society's disadvantaged and disenfranchised-a language of jails, orphanages for the children of the poor, and the expulsion of the illegal immigrant. Contextual/Revisionary Intellectual The third type of intellectual related to James's work that I want to discuss is the contextual or revisionary intellectual. This persona is revealed in James's own life, a life that was marked by an effort to integrate the deep chasms and divisions that separate elites from the masses in the postcolonial periphery and 104102 the metropolis alike. It was a life marked, too, by a grand effort to dissolve the punishing opposition of his public existence to his private life and personal wish fulfillment-an opposition played out to the fullest in James's personal correspondence with and efforts to woo Constance Webb, a young American woman almost half James's age (see Grimshaw, 1996). The contextual or revisionary intellectual draws on the peculiarities of specific historical situation and place, and works beyond the kind of stifling essentialism, philistin- ism, and absolutism that can too often damage a radical sense of vision and perception of interconnections and linkages among differently arraigned groups in human affairs. The contextual intellectual insists on the interdependent relations between human groups and the societies they create and inhabit. He or she insists on the deep trestles of association and affiliation between even the most antagonistic human groups. This intellectual exemplar resists, then, the blight of a politics driven by crass localism. Above all, he or she is skeptical of the vacuous motto "All politics is local." James linked his activism for Caribbean independence to Pan-Africanist struggle. He connected diaspora politics to contemporary developments in Africa, to labor politics in England, Europe, and the United States. He saw the African American struggle for civil rights and social equality in more dynamic terms than American Marxists like Eugene Debbs. For James, the early civil rights struggle was the exemplary struggle in the international movement for democratic change. As I indicated earlier, these struggles in the United States had powerful multiplier effects in countries around the world. These struggles had a particularly poignant impact on the postcolonial intellectuals in the Caribbean, overdetermined as they are by a plurality of variables of race, gender, nation, class, and empire. For example, the work of the poet Edward Brathwaite, particularly in his The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy ( 1973)- "And so it was Little / Rock, Dall / as, New Orleans, Santiago / De Cuba, the miles / of unfortunate islands: the / Saints and the Virgins" (p. 36)-literally dazzles with a recognition of the influences across the diaspora of protest inscribed in African American and New World popular forms of the blues and jazz. The defining dimension of James's life as a contextual intellectual is his striking negotiation of these differences of nation, race, and class through the magic arts of interpretation and deconstruction. It is these magic arts of interpretation that James puts to work in Beyond a Boundary (1963a) and The Black Jacobins (19636). In both of these texts, James rereads colonial master narratives that have traditionally served to inscribe imperial hegemony in the Caribbean. For instance, in Beyond a Boundary (1963a), James points out that the gentrified game of cricket in England becomes the cultural capital of the Caribbean masses. It is a game in which they excel. And it is a game in which the Caribbean players constantly overwhelm the English. But James also points to the other side of cricket-its role in the elaboration of class and color hierarchies in the peripheries of Trinidad and the other islands in the Caribbean. In 105103 Beyond a Boundary, James also straddles the high and low: a classical colonial education and the everyday world of the people of the periphery in the island of Trinidad. This attitude to life was significantly influenced by James's sojourn in the United States, where he saw popular film, popular music, and popular culture transgressing the lines of distinction between the mighty and meek, the private and public, and so forth. Indeed, postcolonial writers such as James benefited from this movement between the periphery and the metropole- their exile and return. In the 1930s, James migrated to England onboard a ship that transported him along with scores of the Caribbean masses-cooks, maids, transport workers, and so forth-people who sought out England for advancing material well-being, and who would become the backbone of an immigrant labor force integral to British transportation services and industry. It is through these practices that the empire struck back at the heart of the center, creating beach heads of heterogeneity and alterity. As James argues in Beyond a Boundary, "To establish his identity, Caliban, after three centuries must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew." Grant Farred (1994) points to the impact of the revisionary metaphors of the diaspora articulated in the beach head in Brixton, the postcolonial setting on the edge of London: Brixton is thus both metaphorically and literally an expression of the postcolonial settlement that James had helped achieve, a space where the metropolis could be slowly disarticulated from, and simultaneously reconstituted by, its colonial past. The colonized from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have ensured the racial, cultural, political and ideological recomposition of the center through a realignment compelled by "peripheral forces." Brixton, the place where James died, approximated the type of permanently unsettled social arrangement (with the ongoing process of sometimes equal, more often unequal, cultural exchange between Portsmouth and Port-of-Spain, London and Lahore) he had envisioned as inevitable in the course of his political campaigns against colonialism. (p. 22) Finally, in The Black Jacobins ( 19636), James offers a striking rereading of documents stored in the colonial libraries in the metropolis of France. From these works-which include items such as the letters of the colonial generals sent out by France to pacify revolutionary Haiti; letters and correspondences of Toussaint and his comrades in arms, Lamartiniere, Dessalines, Christophe, and others; and colonial reports of French bureaucrats in Haiti-James constructs a new postcolonial subject, one that challenges hegemony and beats it back into the metropole. Like the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, James puts a new peasant subject onto the historical stage-a new peasant subject who is assertive, self-motivated, and who exhibits a concentrated and fully elaborated interiority-no longer playing in the dark of the fictional or historico-mythological texts of British, French, or Euro-American novelists and historians. The remarkable achievement here is James's noncanonical reading of the canonical texts and master narratives of colonialism. To understand the dynamics of the Haitian or French Revolutions, James argues that 106104 you must read them in relation to each other. As a contextual or revisionary intellectual this was, after all, the extraordinary strategy of Toussaint, who redeployed French revolutionary ideas in a new philosophical, semiotic, and practical system of political mobilization against the planter/mercantile classes and the European imperialists in Haiti. Conclusion In presenting this tripartite staging of the relationship of the intellectual to the popular, James submits to intense scrutiny and reflexivity the modern tensions that are deeply embedded in the role of the intellectual in social life. These tensions remain submerged within much contemporary Left scholarship, including cultural studies, because too many radical scholars take the role of the intellectual as self-evident, subscribing unwittingly to a simplistic vanguardism and to forms of mandarin-like hypercriticism that lead to the paralysis of the will. These three dimensions of the intellectual relationship to the masses-an organic bonding in which the intellectual draws directly from the collective power of the embattled oppressed, the resentment impulse to separate from the masses and to pursue the moral domination of the public sphere, and the differential consciousness of the intellectual generated across a plurality of sites and contexts-dynamically overlap and define the complex career of the intellectual in modern society. To be a fully rounded figure who optimizes on this critical role in society, James argues that the intellectual must think beyond the particularity of his or her individual interests, needs, and desires. As his work demonstrates, the many-sided nature of diasporic intellectual identity formation is generatively linked to critical levels of reflexity precipitated by pivotal texts (e.g., the impact of French philosophical manuscripts on the production of Toussaint L'Ouverture as an organic intellectual) and the epistemologically destabilizing cognitive force of movement, as in the constant negotiation of the transplantation of meanings, styles, representations, and the transaction of social space across the naturalized divides of center and periphery. In this sense, James's intellectual projects were always linked to practical but variable intervention in an unequal world. Ultimately, James's radical projects and the example of his own extraordinarily multidimensional life challenge us to rethink the role and meaning of intellectual work in a time when long-held stabilities of nation, place, group affiliation, and identity are under siege. This rethinking of intellectual work must ground its associated practices of interpretation and action in the tactics of existence and the conditions of constraint and possibility of the teeming masses, now transforming the demographics of the West and the vital centers of the periphery. This involves, in part, an acute attention to the techniques and aesthetics of everyday living and the ethics and care of the self practiced by the 107105 masses themselves as they negotiate their integration into modern institutions and the modern world. By foregrounding texts and movement (migration, cosmopolitanism, and the work of the imagination), James offered a theory of the diasporic intellectual linked to the concept of globalization that contemporary anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai and James Clifford have more recently propounded. In this sense, James's work anticipated and presaged many of the dilemmas that would face the modern third-world intellectual-often now separated from a specific group, place, and nation. As we enter the new millennium, old lines of solidarity fragment and ever-new dynamic, hybrid, and combustible identities proliferate in the public spheres of the modern world. In such a time of particularly combustible global and local environments, there is a need for a more multivalent and contextual approach to intellectual work in the area of center-periphery relations and diasporic settings. There is a need to call on the plurality of traditions and cultural and political resistances launched and circulating within the intersections of the peripheries and metropoli of world history and geography. There is a need to think within the particular and to think beyond. We must reconnect the broken lines of association and affiliation between the local, national, and global. The reality of intellectual and cultural work in the diaspora, as Paul Gilroy usefully points out in the Black Atlantic (1993), is a global reality of multiplier effects, continuities and discontinuities, articulations and rearticulations. James grappled with these dilemmas of identity and the complexity of cultural modernization in the new world all of his intellectual life. Note 1. The documented facts of Garvey's dialogues and collaborations with White supremacists (such as the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan) and his genuine admiration of the racial purity philosophies of the Anglo-Saxon clubs only further bolsters James's assessment of Garvey's tendencies toward a Black popular fascism (see Gilroy, 2000, pp. 231-237). References Baldwin, J. (1955). Notes of a native son. New York: Bantam. Baldwin, J. (1961). Nobody knows my name. New York : Dell. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. New York : Columbia University Press. Brathwaite, E. (1973). The arrivants: A new world trilogy. London: Oxford University Press. Farred, G. (1994, Spring). "Victorian with the rebel seed": C.L.R. James, postcolonial intellectual. Social Text, 38, 21-38. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. 108106 Gates, H.L. (1988). The signifying monkey. New York: Oxford. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Gilroy, P. (2000). Two camps: Nations, cultures and the allure of race. London: Penguin. Grimshaw, A. (1996). Special delivery: The letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb 1939-1948. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Hall, S. (1992). Cultural identity and the diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity, community, culture, difference (pp. 222-237). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, S. (1996). When was the "postcolonial?" Thinking at the limit . In I. Chambers & L. Curti (Eds.), The postcolonial question: Common skies, divided horizons (pp. 242-260). London: Routledge. Harris, W. (1989). Literacy and the imagination. In M. Gilkes (Ed.), The literate imagination (pp. 13-30). London: Macmillan. Hurston, Z.N. (1978). Their eyes were watching God. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. James, C.L.R. (1963a). Beyond a boundary New York : Pantheon. James, C.L.R. (1963b). The Black Jacobins: ToussaintL'OuvertureandtheSanDomingoRevolution New York: Vintage. James, C.L.R. (1978). Mariners, renegades and castaways: The story of Herman Melville and the world we live in. Detroit, MI: Bewick. James, C.L.R. (1992). The revolutionary answer to the Negro problem . In A. Grimshaw (Ed.), The C.L.R. James reader (pp. 182-189). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. James, C.L.R. (1993). American civilization. Oxford , UK: Blackwell. Kincaid, J. (1990). Lucy. New York: Plume. Lamming, G. (1953). In the castle of my skin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lamming, G. (1960). The pleasures of exile. London : Allison & Busby. Lorde, A. (1982). Zami: A newspellingofmy name. Trumansberg, NY: The Crossing Press. Melville, H. (1851). Moby Dick. Or the white whale. New York: Harper. Morrison, T. (1977). Song of solomon. New York: Signet. Morrison, T. (1981). Tar baby. New York: Plume. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Myrdal, G. (1944). An American dilemma: The Negro problem and modern democracy. New York: Harper. Nietzsche, F. (1967). Genealogy of morals (W. Kaufman, Trans. New York: Vintage. Nightingale, V. (1996). Studying audiences: The shock of the real. London: Routledge. Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism. London: Zed Press. Rose, T. (1994). Black noise. London: Wesleyan University Press. Singham, A. (1968). The hero and the crowd in a colonialpolity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Walcott, D. (1970). Ti-Jean and his brothers. In D. Walcott (Ed.), Dream on monkey mountain and other plays (pp. 81-166). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Worcester, K. (1996). C.L.R. James: A political biography. Albany, NY: SUNY. 109107 Cameron McCarthy teaches Mass Communication Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He is the author and coauthor of The Uses of Culture: Education and the Limits of Ethnic Affiliation (Routlcdgc, 1998) and The Work of Art in the Post Colonial Imagination (TCP, University of Columbia, in press), and a coeditor of Sound Identities: Youth Music and the Cultural Politics of Education (Peter Lang, 1999). With Jack Bratich and Jeremy Packer, he is editing an anthology on Foucault and cultural studies titled, Governing the Present (SUNY, in press). 1. The documented facts of Garvey's dialogues and collaborations with White supremacists (such as the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan) and his genuine admiration of the racial purity philosophies of the Anglo-Saxon clubs only further bolsters James's assessment of Garvey's tendencies toward a Black popular fascism (see Gilroy, 2000, pp. 231-237). Baldwin, J. ( 1955 ). Notes of a native son . New York : Bantam . Baldwin, J. ( 1961 ). Nobody knows my name . New York : Dell . Bourdieu, P. ( 1993 ). The field of cultural production . New York : Columbia University Press . Brathwaite, E. ( 1973 ). The arrivants: A new world trilogy . London : Oxford University Press . Farred, G. ( 1994 , Spring). "
PY - 2001
Y1 - 2001
N2 - What is the nature and role of intellectual work in modern society? How is the role of the intellectual to be defined and discussed? What is the relation ship of the intellectual to popular culture, popular life, and the wish fulfill ment of the masses? These are critical questions that the postcolonial intel lectual, C.L.R. James, addressed in his theoretical writings. This article offers an assessment of James, focusing sharply on his discussion of the intellectual activism and the way in which the intellectual is represented in his work. The author attempts to draw out the insights of James in detail, pointing to their internal tensions and contradictions but also to their value and relevance to issues of intellectual work on the terrain of the contempo rary public sphere, where the discourse on intellectual activism has all but atrophied in recent years.
AB - What is the nature and role of intellectual work in modern society? How is the role of the intellectual to be defined and discussed? What is the relation ship of the intellectual to popular culture, popular life, and the wish fulfill ment of the masses? These are critical questions that the postcolonial intel lectual, C.L.R. James, addressed in his theoretical writings. This article offers an assessment of James, focusing sharply on his discussion of the intellectual activism and the way in which the intellectual is represented in his work. The author attempts to draw out the insights of James in detail, pointing to their internal tensions and contradictions but also to their value and relevance to issues of intellectual work on the terrain of the contempo rary public sphere, where the discourse on intellectual activism has all but atrophied in recent years.
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