A New World Order: Essays by Caryl Phillips

Author:Caryl Phillips [Phillips, Caryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Literary Collections, essays
ISBN: 9780307488725
Google: aLdnW0h3sZsC
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-21T00:23:51.793523+00:00

In an interview many years later, James reflected upon his departure from Trinidad in 1932: ‘I arrived in England intending to make my way in the world as a writer of fiction, but the world went political and I went with it.’ Inter-war England was at the hub of pan-African thought and activity, and James was refining his theoretical understanding of Marxism at the same time as he was becoming involved in the nascent movement for decolonisation. He fell in with Jomo Kenyatta and T. Ras Makonnen (the latter was the alias of the British Guianan pan-African leader George Griffity), and together with others, including his fellow Trinidadian George Padmore, they formed pressure groups and intellectual bureaus which they defined as ‘clearing houses[s] of information’, which could supply ‘speakers to organisations [and] convene meetings and discussions’ to organise in a militant fashion against the colonial fascism that they saw all around them. But it was James’s increasing sympathy for Trotskyism that was the most important aspect of his intellectual growth in this period, and his fascination with the Trotskyite school of thought resulted in his eventual departure from England. He set sail for New York in 1938 with every intention of returning to London in the spring of 1939 for the cricket season.

He was leaving England with a quite staggering list of achievements. In 1932 he had published The Life of Captain Cyprian: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, and in the following year Leonard Woolf of Bloomsbury fame, had published an abridged version of the same book under the title The Case for West Indian Self-Government. In 1932 there also appeared Learie Constantine’s autobiography Cricket and I, which James was largely responsible for writing. Soon afterwards James found himself employed as a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, travelling the length and breadth of England. In 1936 his novel Minty Alley was finally published and in the same year his play Toussaint L’Ouverture opened on the stage of London’s West End with Paul Robeson in the lead role. In 1937 he published World Revolution: igiy–igjo and in the following year he began to edit the journal International African Opinion. In 1938 he also published both his translation from the French of Boris Souvarine’s huge biography, Stalin, as well as The Black Jacobins, and 1939 saw the appearance of A History of Negro Revolt.

He had left Trinidad a man of letters, but he was leaving England six years later as one of the foremost political thinkers and historians of his age. His reason for moving on was Trotsky who had become interested in having James supervise the ‘Negro’ work of the Socialist Workers’ Party in the United States, the idea being that James might help to recruit black people from all strata of society. Trotsky had read James’s ‘orthodox’ World Revolution: igiy–igjo and, while not in agreement with every aspect of the book, he recognised in James a uniquely gifted individual. The thesis of James’s book was

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