C. L. R. James: Asking Questions of the Past

See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: hidden transcripts ( New Haven, CT, Yale University Press , 1990), p. 127.

2 Sylvia Wynter, `Talk about a little culture', in J. Hearne (ed.), Carifesta Forum: an anthology of twenty Caribbean voices ( Kingston, Institute of Jamaica , 1976), p. 137.

3 As Wilson Harris points out, the historical connections were not necessarily retraced in a linear manner, but through cultural activities that activated common memories among the dominated. Being able to reassemble the representations so that they were recognisable by the different cultures that co-existed in the Caribbean was what distinguished the popular from the colonial empire. See History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas ( Georgetown, History and Arts Council/Ministry of Information and Culture , 1970), pp. 8-9.

4 Jesús Ibáñez, Mas Alla de la Sociologia. El grupo de sicusion: tecnica y critica ( Madrid, Siglo XXI , 1986), p. 46.

Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 ( Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press , 1981) about indentureship.

Chester J. Fontenot, Jr, Frantz Fanon - Language as the God Gone Astray in the Flesh ( Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press , 1979), pp. 23-33. For Martín Barbero, the value of an explanation of communication processes lies not in its logic but in its capacity to make sense of social transformations.

A. Mattelart and J. M. Piemme, `23 notas para un debate político sobre la comunicación', in M. de Moragas (ed.), Sociología de la Comunicación de Masas, Vol 4: nuevos problemas y transformación tecnológica ( Barcelona, Gustavo Gili , 1986), p. 93.

René Louise, `Le marronisme moderne' , Antilla (No. 51, 28 April-5 May), p. 37 .

Robert A. Hill, `In England 1932-1938', in Paul Buhle (ed.), C. L. R. James, His Life and Work ( London and New York, Allison and Busby , 1986), p. 75.

10 Wynter, op. cit., pp. 638, 642-4.

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: the `invisible institution' in the antebellum South ( New York, Oxford University Press , 1978), pp. 40-90, discusses Maroon communities as models of syncretic hybridity that also created a way of perceiving through their spiritual perspective. Raboteau also explains why blacks and whites had less cultural contact in the Caribbean than in the US and Canada; Gerard Pierre-Charles, introduction to `Présènce de Jacques Roumain', Rencontre (Port-au-Prince, Vol. 4, 1993), p. 6.

See also Ineke Phaf, `Caribbean imagination and nation-building in Antillean and Surinamese literature' , Callaloo (Vol. 11, no. 1, Winter 1988), p. 157 . Phaf speculates about the possibility of information exchanges between the Maroons in Surinam and the Haitians at the time of the French revolution. In my judgement, the best description of information networks is in James's The Black Jacobins, when the slogans to mobilise the peasants in the north are negotiated (1791-2, 1801-3).

G. Pierre-Charles, El Pensamiento Social-politico Moderno en el Caribe ( Mexico, DF, UNAM/Fondo Cultura Economica , 1985), p. 24.

14 One of the reasons why the cultural practices of the Maroon communities survived in the collective memory of the popular, as a model of transgression sustained through co-operation, is that there were also examples of Maroon confederations to expel the colonialists altogether (the Guianas, 1768-91), and alliances between Maroon republics and rebel slaves to overthrow the central government (Demerara, 1772-75; Haiti, 1791-1804; Venezuela, 1795).

Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines ( New York, Swerve , 1991), pp. 20, 84. The historical centres of this activity had been Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Surinam. See Genovese, op. cit., p. 77; Albert J. Raboteau, op. cit., p. 90, explains the ratio of whites to blacks and work conditions in the five regions noted above.

16 See, e.g., Stuart Hall, `A conversation with C. L. R. James', in Grant Farred (ed.), Rethinking C. L. R. James ( Cambridge, MA and Oxford, Blackwell , 1996), pp. 25-26.

17 C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present: selected writings, volume 1 ( London, Allison and Busby , 1977), pp. 65-68.

18 Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I ( New York, Vintage/Random House , 1977), pp. 166-170, 173. Mediations are about getting behind the secret of merchandise to understand the social relations between the workers and the investors as ones of interdependence which characterise this mode of production. See Luis Martín Santos, `Mediación', Terminologia Cientifico - Social Aproximación Crítica (Barcelona, Anthropos, 1988), pp. 595-600. Through studying the exchanges that clarified the relations of inequality connecting the parts, the social movements could turn abstract representations of conflict into mediations that stressed the interests in conflict.

19 Darrell E. Levi, `C. L. R. James: a radical West Indian vision of American studies' , American Quarterly (Vol. 43, no. 3, September 1991), pp. 489-490, 499 . After the eighteenth century, the indentured slaves from Asia were also part of the Caribbean encounter.

George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? ( New York, Anchor/Doubleday , 1972), p. 129.

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution ( London, Secker and Warburg , 1938). James had been introduced to the publishers by the editor of New Leader, Fenner Brockway.

22 C. L. R. James, `Civilising the Blacks: why Britain needs to maintain her African possessions', New Leader (29 May 1936), p. 5. In this review of Padmore's How Britain Rules Africa (1936), James responds to the author's contention that there are sectors of the dominant classes interested in ending colonialism.

P. Le Blanc and S. McLemee (eds), C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: selected writings of C. L. R. James ( Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press , 1994), pp. 215-217.

24 Robert A. Hill, `In England, 1932-1938', op. cit., p. 77.

25 Stuart Hall, op. cit., p. 22; Robert A. Hill, `Afterword' to C. L. R. James, American Civilization ( Cambridge, MA and Oxford, Blackwell , 1993), p. 65. Hill notes that the sense of having mastered what is necessary is acquired by the colonised in spite of the official order. I agree with Hill that James's perspective on culture was informed by his experience as a colonial subject.

26 Antonio Benítez Rojo, La Isla que se Repite ( Hanover, NH, Ediciones del Norte , 1989), p. 294. Vincent Oge, Victor Hugues, the British Consulate in Havana and the fleet that operated out of the French and Swedish islands in the eastern Caribbean in the 1790s can be mentioned as examples.

27 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, pp. 69-70.

28 The Beacon ran from 1931-33. It was produced by a multiracial group concerned with the lower classes and rejected by the Trinidadian elite. It provided the only context in which its members could meet as equals. Though the underlying causes of conflict were seldom identified in its pages, it nonetheless consistently and as a matter of policy published material on Caribbean working people. It commented on national, regional and international issues and reprinted material from banned journals such as New Republic and Negro World. The editors used the publication to identify references for popular resistance and to commission and guide research on workers' living conditions. It was thus an important attempt to understand contemporary society.

29 Scott, op. cit., pp. 5, 127.

30 See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, pp. 276, 281-8.

31 Ibid., pp. 300-6, 356-62.

32 Ibid., pp. 408, 413-18.

33 Another way to access unrecorded memories is to start with the conscious oral traditions of victorious Maroons and return to the past through them. That has been done in Daniel Maximin, Lone Sun (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1989) about events in Guadeloupe that occurred at the same time as the Haitian revolution.

34 Published in Small Axe (No. 8).