This essay examines C. L. R. James's relationship to the heroic and inspiring arc of labour rebellions that swept the colonial British Caribbean during the 1930s. The essay begins by discussing James's 1932 work putting the case for West Indian self-government, The Life of Captain Cipriani, and its generally positive reception in the Caribbean. We then turn to the 'outbreak of democracy' represented by the Trinidad general strike in 1937 and James's attempt to rally solidarity with this and subsequent rebellions elsewhere while in the imperial metropole itself as a leading member of the International African Service Bureau. Finally, this essay stresses how the Caribbean labour rebellions themselves, with their demonstration of the 'modernity' of the mass of working people in the West Indies and apparent vindication of the Marxist theory of permanent revolution, played their part in the shaping of James's majestic The Black Jacobins.
In this essay Glenn A. Elmer Griffin adopts a January 2009 parricidal attack in St. Lucia as an instantiation of the escalating problem of fratricidal crime in the postcolonial Eastern Caribbean. Following the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Griffin argues that this violence constitutes the nonarrival of postcoloniality as it is anticipated by Frantz Fanon's periodization of fraternal violence. The familial murder embodies an unbroken period of self-killing that warrants a critical reexamination of the provisions of our postcoloniality and the terms of West Indian identity formation.
