C.L.R. James

(1901 - 1989)

Born in Trinidad in 1901, C.L.R. James moved to England in his thirties, working as a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. He soon became involved in Marxist politics and advocated for West Indian independence. In 1938 he published The Black Jacobins, a Marxist study of the Haitian Revolution. “Again and again in his discussion of ancient Greece,” wrote classicist Emily Greenwood, “James uses this ‘neutral’ civilization to beat modern imperialism and colonialism over the head and to construct an identity for Trinidad…separate from British culture.”