Memory of the World; 2012 - unesdoc - Unesco

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C.L.R. James collection
Inscribed 2005
What is it
The C.L.R. James collection consists of original
documents including correspondence, manuscripts,
pamphlets and the personal and literary papers
of Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–89).
Why was it inscribed
C.L.R. James was a leading Caribbean writer whose
reputation and influence were global. The collection
opens a window to world affairs at a particularly
important time in contemporary history.
Where is it
University of the West Indies at St Augustine,
Trinidad and Tobago
Cyril Lionel Robert (C.L.R.) James was born in Tunapuna,
Trinidad, in the West Indies and became one of the
foremost intellectuals of the 20th century. He was selftaught,
having left full-time education after secondary
school and having never attended university. He left
Trinidad for Britain in 1932 to be a cricket correspondent
and writer – his first play, Toussaint L’Ouverture, on
the Haitian Revolution, was staged in 1936. Two years
later his influential book, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, developed
the themes in the play and became a landmark in the study
of Caribbean history. In the same year, he went to the
USA, where he became deeply involved in the communist
movement. In 1939 he went to Mexico to see Trotsky and
was active as a theoretician of the Trotskyite wing of
American communism. James eventually fell victim to
the anti-communist hysteria that swept the USA and in
1952, he was imprisoned on Ellis Island, New York, and
was forced to leave the country in the following year.
Following a five-year residence in Britain, James returned
to his native Trinidad and Tobago in 1958, invited back
by Dr Eric Williams and his political party, the People’s
National Movement. James edited the party’s newspaper,
The Nation, and emerged as the main ideologue and
leftist thinker of the party during its most radical phase
(1958–60). He also served as secretary of the West Indian
Federal Labour Party and was one of the architects of the
456 C.L.R. James collection
� The programme
for the world
premiere of
C.L.R. James’s
play The Black
Jacobins,
in Ibadan,
Nigeria, sent
to the author
by the cast
and now in the
C.L.R. James
Collection.
short-lived West Indies Federation. Throughout his life,
James was a strong advocate of Pan-Africanism. He was
an associate of Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister
and the President of Ghana, a prominent supporter of the
anti-apartheid struggle in the 1970s and 1980s and was
extremely influential amongst leftist African-American
intellectuals. From 1965 he mostly lived in the USA and the
UK, and he died in London in 1989.
James was also a renowned writer on cricket, and Beyond
a Boundary, published in 1963, which is a meditation on
cricket, partly an autobiography and a brilliant description
of Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial society, remains a classic.
The collection includes correspondence, manuscripts
(hand-written and typescripts) of works by James as
well as manuscripts which other authors sent to James
for his scrutiny, pamphlets, typescripts of speeches and
interviews, lecture and course outlines, notebooks, flyers,
newspaper clippings, videotapes and audio-cassettes,
together with around 1500 books which formed his
working library. The collection largely covers the four
decades after World War II, dominated by the Cold War,
when the advance of Marxism was a central preoccupation
in James’ life and writings, and the ending of European
colonization, particularly in the former British West Indies,
became a reality.