8 Caliban as Deconstructionist: C. L. R. James and Post-Colonial Discourse

Colonial Scholars and Anti‐Colonial Agents: Politics of Academic Knowledge Production Between the West Indies and London in the Mid‐20thCentury

“…322f.). Besides scholarly and journalistic writing and activism, they were engaged in artistic and literary production (see Reddock, 2014, p. 506), and it has been argued that their shared biographical experiences affected their anti‐colonial work and “[a[fter their time [in London, MC] and because of their work, decolonization and Black liberation would return to their native lands“ (Robinson, 2000, p. 262; see also Henry & Buhle, 1992, p. 112; Hammer, 2017).…”

“…Born in 1901 in Trinidad, where he pursued secondary education financed by a scholarship, James worked as a teacher in the 1920s before leaving for England in 1932 to work as a journalist, writing specifically about cricket. By then, he had already finished the book manuscript of The Life of Captain Cipriani, his “first effort to analyse history and politics through biography” and had assumed a position in favour of Trinidadian self‐rule (Brereton, 2014, p. 2; see also Henry & Buhle, 1992, p. 263). The manuscript was published as a short pamphlet in England entitled The Case for West Indian Self‐Government , in 1933.…”

“…In terms of his academic work during this time, he further elaborated on the methodology he had pioneered in his piece on Cipriani in his famous work on the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, published in 1938, which represented the foundation of a new tradition of Black Marxist thought (see Henry & Buhle, 1992, p. 124). In the preface, James outlines the epistemic effect of eurocentrism on historical studies, 7 further highlighting in an appendix how critical the Haitian revolution was for the self‐observation of Caribbean people on an epistemological level: “West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people in the Haitian revolution” (C.L.R.…”