Books, Works & Articles

In Urbane Revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for a New Society, Frank Rosengarten traces the intellectual and political development of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), one of the most significant Caribbean intellectuals of the twentieth century. In his political and philosophical commentary, his histories, drama, letters, memoir, and fiction, James broke new ground dealing with the fundamental issues of his age-colonialism and postcolonialism, Soviet socialism and western neo-liberal capitalism, and the uses of race, class, and gender as tools for analysis.

The author examines in depth three facets of James’s work: his interpretation and use of Marxist, Trotskyist, and Leninist concepts; his approach to Caribbean and African struggles for independence in the 1950s and 1960s; and his branching into prose fiction, drama, and literary criticism. Rosengarten analyzes James’s previously underexplored relationships with women and with the women’s liberation movement. The study also scrutinizes James’s methods of research and writing.

Rosengarten explores James’s provocative and influential concepts regarding black liberation in the Caribbean, Africa, the United States, and Great Britain and James’s varying responses to revolutionary movements. With its extensive use of unpublished letters, private correspondence, papers, books, and other documents, Urbane Revolutionary provides fresh insights into the work of one of the twentieth century’s most important intellectuals and activists.

Reviews:

“Frank Rosengarten’s life of James, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society, is an altogether more scholarly affair. Page after page is filled with scrupulously detailed political analysis, unleavened by references to James’s other interests, even though much of James’s Marxism sounds germane to his views on cricket… Urbane Revolutionary is essential reading for anyone interested in the full range of the James oeuvre. Although it is clearly intended for an academic audience, there is much here to reward a diligent general reader.” – Brendan de Caires in the Caribbean Review of Books

“Among the biographical details Rosengarten provides are at least two which provide thought for rethinking James. Small coin, perhaps, but they were unknown to me and are further evidence of James’s confounding theoretical inconsistency. The first is an account of a month-long trip James took to Cuba in early 1968, in the company of a large group of intellectuals and activists including Dennis Brutus and scholar Robert Hill, who would later become James’s literary executor. While Rosengarten indicates that James had some ambivalent feelings toward government control of the arts in Cuba, his attitude was for the most part strongly positive. While this is a small example, I find it impossible to reconcile this attitude toward a heavily state-oriented regime with the strongly mass-oriented nature of the work of J.R. Johnson (James’s political name) of the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, the whole theory of the foco, developed by Che Guevara (who was killed in Bolivia the year before), is best understood as an explicit negation of mass participation in the revolutionary process. The second is a perplexing engagement with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger James undertook in the 1960s. While the Marxist critique of existentialism was an important task (Dunayevskaya criticized Sartre in her Philosophy and Revolution, published in 1973), this intellectual episode is difficult to fathom.

“I have not mentioned yet James’s literary writings, which are the subject of much of the recent James scholarship, but Rosengarten treats the topic at length. His discussion of James’s Melville book, Mariners, Castaways and Renegades, is unfortunately hampered by his strong U.S.S.R.-nostalgia (Gorbachev is described as having “rallied the forces of democratic renewal”). While I agree with Rosengarten’s position on the indispensability of that book’s concluding chapter for interpreting it as a whole, I disagree with him on the merit of the content of the chapter.” – Criticism &c.

Chapters:

Part One: Marxism and Johnsonism
Chapter 1 From Reformism to Revolutionary Socialism
Chapter 2 C. L. R. James’s Engagement with Marxism
Chapter 3 Johnson Agonistes
Chapter 4 Th e Internal Life of the Johnson-Forest Tendency
Chapter 5 Women’s Liberation
Chapter 6 Revolutionary Struggles in Eastern Europe and Cuba

Part Two: National-Popular Politics
Chapter 7 National-Popular Politics and Pan-Africanism
Chapter 8 Paths to Socialism

Part Three: Literature and Society
Chapter 9 Poetry and Truth in C. L. R. James’s Fictional Writings
Chapter 10 Th e Social Criticism of Literature
Chapter 11 James’s Melville Criticism
Chapter 12 American Civilization and the Popular Arts
Chapter 13 Th e Haitian Revolution
Chapter 14 Beyond a Boundary

Frank Rosengarten was professor emeritus of Italian and comparative literature at the City University of New York. He sadly passed away in summer 2014.

Buy the book here.