C.L.R. James's social theory : a critique of race and modernity

Abstract

This thesis analyzes C.L.R. James's social theory through the key modalities of race and modernity. Where James's thought has been previously discerned within discrete fields such as Caribbean, postcolonial, and black studies, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach, engaging the full range of his discursive corpus encompassing fiction, historiography, social, cultural, and literary criticism, philosophy, politics, and cricket writing. I argue that the discursivity of James's oeuvre, based on the Hegelian conception of interconnected totality, demonstrates a series of creative tensions bom of the precarious positioning of the black diaspora as simultaneously included and excluded from the West. The motif of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion forms the central theme of this thesis. I approach this task in three stages. The first stage discusses James's personal and intellectual development. Chapter 2 explicates his theorization of the social construction of race through a polygenetic modernity through theories of creolization. Chapter 3 charts the productive paradoxes of doubling in James's intellectual development, juxtaposing his creolized social theory, the pleasures and dilemmas of his exilic life, and his involvement within the organized left. The second stage analyzes James's political praxis. Chapter 4 discusses the tensions of James's especial Marxist theory of spontaneism as a discursive articulation of race and class within a resistant left. Chapter 5 offers a critique of James's inconsistent critique of gender and feminism within his social theory, signalling the counter-revolutionism of his patriarchal Marxian formation of class struggle. In conclusion, the third stage explores the impact of James's social theory within contemporary debates. Chapter 6 engages James's sociopoetics of cricket as a Marxist humanism, suggesting sport as a viable mode of cultural production that contributes towards an oppositional politics of representation. Chapter 7 argues that James's social theory ought to be studied within interdisciplinary modes, eschewing the insularity of 'James Studies.'

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