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C. L. R. James Quotes

Cyril Lionel Robert James , who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and socialist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of subaltern studies, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.Characterised by one literary critic as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician", James was known for his autodidactism, for his occasional playwriting and fiction – his 1936 book Minty Alley was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in Britain — and as an avid sportsman. He is also famed as a writer on cricket, and his 1963 book, Beyond a Boundary, which he himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography", is often named as the best single book on any sport ever written. Wikipedia  

✵ 4. January 1901 – 31. May 1989
C. L. R. James photo

Works

Beyond a Boundary
Beyond a Boundary
C. L. R. James
C. L. R. James: 21   quotes 0   likes

Famous C. L. R. James Quotes

“There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Beyond a Boundary (1963)

“Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Beyond a Boundary
Beyond a Boundary (1963)

“The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”

C. L. R. James

Source: The Black Jacobins (1938), p. 77.

“If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.”

C. L. R. James

James is quoting Toussaint Louverture's speech to his troops--most of whom, like Toussaint himself, were former slaves. The "their" refers to the French imperialists, p. 307
The Black Jacobins (1938)

“Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.”

C. L. R. James

Source: The Black Jacobins (1938), p. 334

“The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”

C. L. R. James

Source: The Black Jacobins (1938), p. 283.

C. L. R. James Quotes

“It is an historical commonplace that social explosions take place when most of the fundamental causes of dissatisfaction have been removed and only a few remain. This is the result of a feeling of power.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 229

Feeling

“Cricket is an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community. (…) Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belong with the theatre, ballet, opera and dance.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 196

Communication , Dance , Relation ships , Art

“Dickens saw Victorian England always with the eyres of a pre-Victorian. His ideal England was the England of Hazlitt and of Pickwick.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 161

“The Greeks believed that an athlete who had represented his community at a national competition, and won, had thereby conferred a notable distinction on his city. His victory was a testament to the quality of the citizens. All the magnates of the city welcomed him home in civic procession. They broke down a part of the wall for him to enter: a city which could produce such citizens had no need of walls to defend it. For the rest of his life he ate at the public expense.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 156

Home , Victory , Communication , Life

“I could, of course, wait for the Conservative Party or the Labour Party to organise a sample poll. A poll on art. A sample poll! A sample poll can investigate only what the pollsters know, and it cannot do even that properly.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 153-154

Waiting , Art

“Trotsky had said that the workers were deflected from politics by sports. With my past I simply could not accept that. I was British and the history of those decades in Britain was very familiar to me, both the politics and the sport. The organisational drive for sport had come from Britain.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 153

Sport , Past , History

“The people most affected by this are people of the middle class who, lacking the hard contact with realities of the masses and unable to attain to the freedoms of a leisured class, are more than all types of people given to trivial divisions and subdivisions of social rank and precedence.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 52

Reality , People , Freedom

“These are no random reminiscences. … The Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people. … Then there are the browns, intermediates, who cannot by any stretch of imagination pass as white, but who will not go one inch towards mixing with people darker than themselves.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 51

Imagination , People

“Before very long I acquired a discipline for which the only name is Puritan. I never cheated, I never appealed for a decision unless I thought the batsman was out.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 26

Decision , Cheating

“Respectability was not an ideal, it was an armour.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 8

“That James could not accept automatically that these athletes were the greedy spawn of an exploitative system is the positive proof of his own liberation and oppression through sports. He was ennobled and crippled by cricket; he reached beyond his boundary but would always have a blind spot.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Introduction by Robert Lipsyte (p. XX)
Beyond a Boundary (1963)

Sport

“The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.”

C. L. R. James

Source: The Black Jacobins (1938), pp. 88-89.

Passion , Revenge

“Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold.”

C. L. R. James

Source: The Black Jacobins (1938), p. 3.

World , God

“The totality of the crisis has given manifold forms to the counter-revolution. The most deadly, the most insidious, the most dangerous is the Stalinist counter-revolution because it springs from the proletariat and cloaks itself in Marxist terminology.”

C. L. R. James

State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950)

Spring

“The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers.”

C. L. R. James

State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950)

Problem

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