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1 C. L. R. James Sees the World Steadily Commenting on the writings of a cricket critic named Neville Cardus, C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian/black British writer, political activist, and theorist, makes a statement that is as true of James himself as it is of Cardus: “He says the same in more than one place” (James 1983, 195). ἀi s declaration that a piece of writing is only one instance of a vast and consistent reworking of themes and ideas also found elsewhere in his works is a succinct way of describing integration , the primary method in James’s writings, which I have taken as a model in this book. In this chapter I use the occasion of “Toward the Seventh: ἀ e PanAfrican Congress—Past, Present and Future,” an essay James wrote in 1976, to elaborate on this method and to make three related claims. First, I claim that in spite of the diverse artistic, political, and cultural contexts of his literary output (in a career that spanned much of the twentieth century), James developed a style which he used to bring together ideas from different, often conflicting, political impulses and traditions. Second, given his personal and political choices, James’s work represents a promising, though not entirely successful, integration of the two putatively antagonistic processes of socialist tricontinentalism and neoliberal cosmopolitanism. ἀir d, although “Toward the Seventh” apparently concerns itself specifically with African realities, James’s analysis and the topic’s historical context indicate that Pan-Africanism goes beyond Africa, pertaining to questions of social justice across the world. In the spirit of this Jamesian method, I read the thematic, stylistic, and theoretical aspects of the 1976 essay in conjunction with a number of texts that say the same thing in other places. Such a reading entails a constant shuttle between the essay “Toward the Seventh ” and several other texts—both full-length books and shorter essays—in which the theoretical and stylistic patterns of integration are in view as James works toward the central questions of his political thought.1 “Toward the Seventh ” is a local example of integration, but that example is distilled from the other books and essays, which provide the occasion for the revision of “the theory” (of Marxist political analysis) that is presented in a co ndensed, integrated form in the essay. If this sounds rather like a dog chasing his own tail, the fact is that James himself describes how he arrived at this method. But I will come to that description shortly, and appropriately as a way of turning to the books. C. L. R. James Sees the World Steadily 31 ἀ e proposition that James works toward an integral idea of human culture implies that his oeuvre is the basis of this effort. ἀ ough he succinctly explores the idea of integration in American Civilization (1993), his study of cultural developments in the United States after the Second World War, the idea saturates his writings around the period of his break with Trotskyist politics in the early 1940s. I focus here, therefore, especially on the books whose conception and actual writing—if not publication—are tied to the political crisis surrounding that break, which he describes directly in his book on cricket: In 1940 came a crisis in my political life. I rejected the Trotskyist version of Marxism and set about to re-examine and reorganize my view of the world, which was (and remains) essentially a political one. It took more than ten years, but by 1952 I once more felt my feet on solid ground, and in consequence I planned a series of books. ἀ e first was published in 1953, a critical study of the writings of Herman Melville as a mirror of our age, and the second is this book on cricket. (1983, 19) ἀ e remaining books in the plan are American Civilization (drafted in 1950 but published posthumously in 1993) and Notes on Dialectics (1980; originally published in 1948). ἀ e various essays collected in his selected writings (1980– 1984) series, such as At the Rendezvous of Victory and ἀ e Future in the Present, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question” (1996a), and Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977a) are also part of the plan, although this time in a di alectical sense. Recent scholarly writings on James’s life and work have focused on the cultural as well as the political conditions that defined him as a writer, and although much of this scholarship is invested...

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