clr james | Pandaemonium

SIX BOOKS

February 12, 2023 by Kenan Malik

The Week asked for my six favourite books. These are my picks. Though, to be honest, even if I had a choice of 60 books, it would have been difficult to know which ones would make the cut. The Black Jacobins by CLR James (1938) A seamless synthesis of novelistic narrative, factual reconstruction and polemical argument, The Black Jacobins helped transform both the writing of history and history itself. It was a “history from below” long before the phrase was […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik • Tags: books, clr james, dostoevsky, ep thompson, the black jacobins, toni morrison, val wilmer, victor serge

FROM PETERLOO TO THE MANGROVE NINE

October 13, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Steve McQueen’s new film Mangrove and “black history”, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the public being more liberal than the government on immigration.) It was published on 11 October 2020, under the headline “Mangrove isn’t simply a ‘black story’, but central to our country’s history”. “It’s quintessentially a piece of British history. It is about British citizens who dealt with injustice and triumph.” So says director Steve McQueen about his new film, Mangrove, which […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Race & Immigration • Tags: black history, black history month, bristol bus boycott, british history, clr james, ep thompson, haitian revolution, identity politics, mangrove, mangrove nine, paul stephenson, peterloo, police racism, racism, steve mcqueen, the black jacobins, the making of the english working class

EVERTON WEEKES AND THE PASSING OF AN ERA

July 4, 2020 by Kenan Malik

To the outsider, cricket is a bafflingly genteel game. But those who know the game, know also that few sports so seethe with political tension. In the nineteenth century, MCC Secretary Lord Harris called cricket ‘the building block of Empire’. As governor of Bombay in the 1890s, Harris introduced cricket to India to teach ‘moral lessons to the masses’. In the twentieth century it became a vehicle for forging anti-imperialist consciousness and a sense of national pride. And nowhere more […]

Categories: Sport • Tags: beyond a boundary, clr james, cricket, everton weeeks, three ws, west indian cricket

A LITTLE ALTERNATIVE READING

February 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

To accompany my essay on the ‘decolonizing our minds’ debate at SOAS, the Observer asked me to compile a (very) short ‘alternative’ philosophy book list; alternative in the sense of being broadly non-European and consisting of works or authors of whom people may not have heard but nevertheless are significant in the history of ideas. Being limited to just six books necessarily makes the list arbitrary, but I have tried to find a selection that spans both history and geography, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: al-ma'arri, chinese philosophy, clr james, ethics, frantz fanon, ibn rushd, islamic philosophy, jonathan israel, mo tzu, philosophy, toussaint l'ouverture

TO IMAGINE, TO HOPE, TO TRANSCEND, TO TRANSFORM

March 31, 2015 by Kenan Malik

I gave a talk at the launch at London’s Institut Français of Libraries without Borders, the charity inspired by Patrick Weil that aims to increase global access to books and libraries. Also speaking were Ian McEwan, Lisa Appignanesi, Barbara Band and Patrick Weil himself. Here is a transcript of my talk. Let me begin with a story not of a library or a book but of a grand piano. The one grand piano in Gaza, that was discovered still intact […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Human, Justice & Liberties • Tags: clr james, free speech, freedom struggles, identity politics, libraries without borders, malala yousafzai, patrick weil, salman rushdie

CLR JAMES AND ME

May 23, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is an interview, about what CLR James means to me, that I gave to the BBC History Magazine, for its ‘My History Hero slot’. It is published in the June issue of the magazine. For more discussion of CLR James and his significance, see my essay ‘CLR James, Frantz Fanon and the meaning of liberation’. . When did you first hear about CLR James? In my teens. The experience of racism, and the struggle against it, introduced me to […]

Categories: History, Justice & Liberties • Tags: clr james, freedom struggles, marxism

CLR JAMES ON ENGLAND’S HUMILIATION

January 5, 2014 by Kenan Malik

In the wake of England’s cricketing humiliation at the hands of Australia (as complete a humiliation, and as abject a surrender, as I can remember in any sport) I thought I might call upon the great CLR James to analyze what has gone wrong. Novelist and orator, historian and revolutionary, Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist, James (whose birthday it would have been yesterday) was also a great lover of English culture, and of cricket in particular. He produced in Beyond a Boundary, […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: clr james, cricket, sport

SPORTING BEST

June 9, 2013 by Kenan Malik

My essay on CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary got me to thinking about my favourite sports books. And, after much torment and tussle, I finally settled on my list of the sporting best in print. And before anyone mentions it, I know that I have missed out Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. It may be everyone else’s favourite sports book, but it’s not mine. If you are intrigued enough to want to read any of the books, click on the cover. […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Sport • Tags: clr james, david storey, muhammad ali, norman mailer, sporting books, sports

BEYOND A BOUNDARY

May 19, 2013 by Kenan Malik

This year marks the 50th anniversary of CLR James’ wonderful, groundbreaking work Beyond a Boundary. To call it a book about cricket is a bit like calling cricket a ‘game’. Beyond a Boundary blends politics and memoir, history and journalism, biography and reportage, in a manner that transcends literary, sporting and political boundaries. V S Naipaul, not a man given to offering easy praise, described it as ‘one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: clr james, cricket, sports

FROM THE VAULTS: CLR JAMES AND THE BLACK JACOBINS

March 7, 2013 by Kenan Malik

As I continue my life in purdah, trying to complete my book, here is the second book review drawn from the vaults. The review is of CLR James’ The Black Jacobins; it was originally published in August 2010 on Norman Geras’ normblog, as part of his Writer’s Choice series. The poet and statesman Aimé Césaire once wrote of Haiti that it was here that the colonial knot was first tied. It was also in Haiti, Césaire added, that the knot […]

Categories: History • Tags: anti-imperialism, clr james, enlightenment, haitian revolution, toussaint l'ouverture, universalism

CLR JAMES, FRANTZ FANON AND THE MEANING OF LIBERATION

April 16, 2012 by Kenan Malik

1776. 1789. 1917. The American. The French. The Russian. The three great revolutions of the modern world. The three revolutions with which everyone is familiar, each one telling a different story about modernity. Yet, as I argued in my previous post, the fourth great revolution that helped define modernity – the Haitian Revolution of 1791 – is one that barely anyone remembers these days. It was the first true successful revolt in history. But more than that, the Haitian Revolution was […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-imperialism, black politics, claude levi-strauss, clr james, frantz fanon, freedom struggles, haitian revolution, herder, imperialism, negritude, racism, sartre, separatism, universalism