Duke University Press will publish the recently-discovered text of the first version of C.L.R. James’s play Toussaint Louverture: the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History next year. No release date has been announced yet. This volume is the inaugural title in what Duke is calling the “C.L.R. James Archives Series,” so apparently […]
Tag Archives: C.L.R. James
AK Press has appearently passed on issuing Matthew Quest’s In the Shadow of State Power: CLR James, Direct Democracy, and National Liberation Struggles. The book will now be released by On Our Own Authority! Publishing (yes, they use an exclamation point in their name), a new outfit based in Atlanta which seems to focus on […]
In his book C.L.R. James: the Artist as Revolutionary, Paul Buhle refers in several places to a manuscript of an abortive attempt at an autobiography by James. Buhle describes the project, undertaken in the last period of James’s life with the assistance of Anna Grimshaw, as one that simply did not jell the way one […]
Stalin by Boris Souvarine, translated by C.L.R. James Alliance Book Corporation, 1939 No biography in the conventional sense can be written about Stalin, due to the far-reaching falsification of the historic record of the “life” the man lived. Although Boris Souvarine’s Stalin is frequently referred to as a biography, it can be more accurately described […]
Among the chapters of Indignant Heart recently made available by Libcom, Chapter 16 (“The Trotskyist Party”) is extremely important for its depiction of the strong current of racism that pervaded the Marxist parties, an under-acknowledged aspect of the history of the U.S. left. It’s not possible to discern any difference between the attitudes Denby faced […]
The Dialectics of State Capitalism: Writings on Marxist Theory, 1940-1956 Edited by Scott McLemee Haymarket Books, July 2012 Scott McLemee has been a literary champion of James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency period since the early 1990s and has edited two valuable collections of his writings, C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism (with Paul LeBlanc, 1994) and C.L.R. James […]
The Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library has opened the C.L.R. James Papers to researchers. The acquisition of this material was announced in 2007 (although the exact provenance of the collection is not clear from the press release). A detailed finding aid on the collection is available online. Of particular interest is a manuscript […]
Historian Paul Buhle reminisces about the 1960s in the latest issue of Against the Current (“Memories of [my] Syndicalism“). Buhle, author of C.L.R. James: the Artist as Revolutionary, describes his entry into the New Left via the oldest of the Old Left, the Socialist Labor Party. Buhle elsewhere (for example, in A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost, […]
The Big Game Benjamin Péret ; translated with an introduction by Marilyn Kallet. Black Widow Press, 357 pages. Black Widow Press has released a translation (by Marilyn Kallet) of The Big Game, a 1928 work by Surrealist Benjamin Péret. In addition to being André Breton’s most committed Surrealist co-thinker, Péret was the the Surrealist most […]
Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Initiatives hosts a collection of scanned images of two important U.S. New Left/post-New Left journals, Radical America and Cultural Correspondence. The two journals, closely connected with the prolific historian of the left and left culture Paul Buhle, were among the more interesting intellectual by-products of Students for a Democratic […]
Criticism &c. 