Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989), the influential political theoretician and literary critic, was born into a Trinidadian family of "the emergent black professional class." From an early age, he showed signs of intellectual genius (he learned to read Shakespeare's plays by looking at the illustrations); excelling at both his studies and cricket, he "was conscious of bringing himself up as a young English intellectual." In his early 20s, James was associated with Trinidad's "literary flowering," and in 1932, after moving to London and becoming involved with the Labour Party, he published the influential The Case for West Indian Self-Government. Six years later, he published The Black Jacobins,
about the Haitian slave revolts, and moved to the United States. There James worked with the Communist Party, wrote voraciously, formulated a new theory (now an academic discipline) that explicated the political import of popular culture—but McCarthyism forced him to leave in 1953. Dhondy, a friend of James's and an editor at the BBC, writes lovingly and comprehensively of his subject's work and is always careful to humanize James's intellectual life with telling details and subtle analysis of such elements as his complicated relationship with V.S. Naipaul. If at times too reverent—glossing over, for instance, James's abandoning his first wife in Trinidad when he went abroad—Dhondy avoids hagiography and manages to wed James's political life (he founded Trinidad's Workers and Farmers Party and was an inspiration to the Black Power movement) to his writing career, which prefigured what we now call multiculturalism. An occasionally confusing narrative is further marred by a profusion of personal asides, but serious students of black history will welcome this first major critical study of an important cultural figure. (Feb.)
