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.
This essay uses the three interlocutors' reflections to return to Creole Recitations, and to reconsider Thomas's nineteenth century as an arena for thinking about Caribbean male intellectuals' self-fashioning and desire, diaspora and degeneration, the sexual politics of creolization, and what it means to think of the period as merely preceding the anglophone Caribbean's important political and cultural developments.
This essay argues that the death of a fictional photographer in the 1907 novel Rupert Gray: A Tale in Black and White allays anxieties posed by photographic surveillance and 'feminization.' Even if the novel's faith in the British Empire disqualifies it from being radical, its portrayal of the political fortunes of black male leadership in the Caribbean as potentially thwarted by female authority, ancestral shame, and the objectification of tourist photography offers a useful way of conceptualizing the black radical tradition in terms of vulnerability as a condition to be avoided. Moreover, Rupert Gray illuminates concerns about sovereignty and surveillance in our present.