1st Edition
Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics C.L.R. James' Critique of Modernity
Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics offers a critical appraisal of C.L.R. James as a major twentieth-century activist-intellectual, exploring his prolific output spanning decades within genres as diverse as history, philosophy, sociology, literary and cultural criticism, prose fiction, and reportage. The book also analyzes some of the flaws and contradictions that surfaced within James’ writings as a consequence of the difficult circumstances in which he worked and lived as an itinerant migrant intellectual invariably involved with fringe political groups. Assessing James as a lifelong committed Marxist and humanist, the book argues that his core concern with racial, political, and cultural questions as central to human and social understanding led him to develop a distinctive critique of the modern world.
Introduction
Modern Epiphanies: C.L.R. James and the Reimagining of Modernity
Chapter 1
‘They brought themselves’: Modernity and the Emergence of the Black Jacobins
Chapter 2
‘Elective Affinities’ and the Intellectual Vocation: Race, Politics, and Poetics
Chapter 3
The Perilous ‘Pleasures of Exile’: Faith, Failed Gods, and the Diasporic Life
Chapter 4
Mapping Spontaneity: The Organic Unity of Self-Activity and Radical Struggles
Chapter 5
‘Freedom is creative universality, not utility’: Sociality and the Cultural Politics of Cricket
Epilogue
‘The Struggle for Happiness’: From Epiphany to Poiesis
Biography
Brett St Louis is Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely on race and racism and is an editorial board member of Ethnic and Racial Studies and New Formations.
