Arts for the 21st Century

CLR James

CLR James

CLR James (1901–1989) was a cultural historian, writer, novelist, playwright and political activist who was a leading figure in the Pan-African movement. Among his publications are The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932; revised as The Case for West-Indian Self-Government, 1933), Minty Alley (1936), Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), the seminal Beyond a Boundary (1963), and probably his most notable work, The Black Jacobins (1938), a Marxist study of the Haitian slave revolution of the 1790s, which won him international acclaim.

THE WEST INDIAN CLR James

Mr. Chancellor, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I feel very much at home here. Maybe later I will be able to tell you in personal terms why I do, but I wish to say that since the federation has gone—and federations come and they go and we hope they will come again—I have always referred to myself as a West Indian, a member of that community which produced, among others, George Lamming and Garfield Sobers. There are other distinguished West Indians whom I would speak about at other times and in other places. I speak about those two because I refer to them always as friends of mine and people who belong, or I belong to their nationality and nothing will ever prevent me from saying that.

THE WEST INDIAN

Mr. Chancellor, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I feel very much at home here. Maybe later I will be able to tell you in personal terms why I do, but I wish to say that since the federation has gone
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