C.L.R. James: A Life

by Farrukh Dhondy

A long-overdue critical appreciation of the West Indian historian and political activist who played a towering role in the cause of Pan-Africanism in the twentieth century.

Born in Trinidad in 1901, Cyril Lionel Robert James was a precocious polymath all his life. By the time he was a teenager and already a certified teacher, he had embarked on a lifelong advocacy for the Trinidadian oppressed. He embraced Marxism while living in England during the 1930s, during which time he published, among other works, The Case for West Indian Self Government and his masterpiece, The Black Jacobins .

James lived in the United States from 1939 until he was expelled during the McCarthy terror for his political activities. Thereafter he divided his time between London and Trinidad (where he served as Secretary of the West Indies Federal Labor Party) and, until his death in 1989, wrote works of both fiction and nonfiction that would profoundly influence the Black Power movement in the United States and independence movements in Africa and the West Indies.

Farrukh Dhondy knew James personally and was given access to his papers. The result is a biography that is a revelation of the life and work of this legendary intellect and revolutionary.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Farrukh Dhondy is an Indian-born British writer, playwright, screenwriter and left-wing activist of Parsi descent. He is well known not only for his writing, but also for his film and TV work.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s scant analysis in this memoir of Dhondy’s masquerading as a biography for C.L.R James. It reads like some self-parodying Wikipedia entry as written by an acquaintance of the subject: rife with irrelevant anecdotes, a serpentine chronoogy, and a very silly deviation of focality.

It’s not clear if this late and bizarre change of perspective to the first-person (chapter 10 of 16) is an oral excerpt from some interview Dhondy pried out of a nemesis of James or just Dhondy’s fiction, again, conveniently acting as a sort of glue for this slapdash book about a writer whose life Dhondy struggles to contextualize and imbue with deeper importance.

There are some nice excerpts of James’ writing, which makes small portions of this palatable.

[Josh]

Here's my question: how do you write a 200 pg. biography of C.L.R. James with only 3 1/2 pgs of footnotes?