C. L. R. James and formulations of Caribbean cultural identity

This dissertation examines critical intersections between literature and politics in C.L.R. James\u27s work as well as the indivisible nature of his creative work and political activism. As such, this project yields a Jamesian notion of Caribbean cultural identity. In James\u27s representations cultural identity is rendered through the Caribbean\u27s peculiar configuration of race, where and how it collapses and where it is reinforced; gender, how it has determined who speaks for the Caribbean and how they speak; and the contentious politics of national identities. As a member of a particularly important generation of Caribbean intellectuals, activists and creative writers, C.L.R. James (1901-1989) is one of this century\u27s most influential writers and theorists. His work is critical to understanding and situating the Caribbean in discussions of cultural and postcolonial studies. James\u27s texts, particularly the four featured in this study, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, Beyond A Boundary, Minty Alley, and The Black Jacobins, construct and utilize concepts of the intellectual, democracy, masculinity, and nationhood. In close readings informed by discourses of creolization and hybridity, I demonstrate how nation, masculinity and male-centered communities are connected to a construction of Caribbean intellectualism during a pivotal period in Caribbean history. I place C.L.R. James at the nexus of postcolonial theory and, as such, demonstrate that his work is fundamental to both the development of the Caribbean literary canon as well as to the articulation of modern Caribbean cultural identity. In each chapter I ask and posit answers to such questions as, what does it mean to read a man\u27s work as a means through which to discern a regional identity? How does C.L.R. James read the Caribbean? For James, how do the categories and contradictions of his own identity insert themselves into his assessments of Caribbean cultural identity