Tag Archives: CLR James

Obeahing the Word

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 08, 2019

“Can there be a national life without a national literature?”

—Jose Marti

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeMarina Warner, a distinguished English writer of Trinidadian provenance and professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, read from her work, Fly Away Home, at the Bocas Lit Fest on Thursday. She argued, with tremendous encouragement from the audience, that imaginative literature possesses the capacity to capture dimensions of a society’s unconscious in ways that realist fiction seldom does.
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New Daughters of Africa

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 08, 2019

“Know you not that love, when firmly established, is priceless?”

—Nana Asma’u, “Lamentation for ‘Aysha.'”

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI met Margaret Busby in the 1980s just after her press (Allison & Busby) published three volumes of C. L. R. James’s collected work (The Future in the Present [1977], Spheres of Existence [1980], and At the Rendezvous of Victory 1984]). It was an exciting time for James scholars. The assembled pieces were important parts of James’s intellectual corpus.
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Every crook can govern

By Raffique Shah
November 16, 2016

Raffique ShahSixty years ago, Trinidad and Tobago philosopher CLR James penned a lengthy essay titled “Every Cook Can Govern”. As I recall its theme, having read it in the late 1970s, CLR argued that direct democracy, as practised in ancient Greece centuries before the birth of Christ, was the best form of governance ever.
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Tell me something good

By Raffique Shah
September 29, 2012

Raffique ShahI WAS privileged to have known and spent some invaluable time with one of this country’s great thinkers, CLR James. He was in his winter years, mostly lying in bed, but his mind remained razor-sharp. A conversation with “Nello”, as he was fondly called, was worth several high-level lectures at any university, so I extracted the most I could from him during what would be his final sojourn in the land of his birth. Today, I remember him more for his wit than his wisdom.
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