C.L.R. James was born on this day. James wrote the influential historical book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Ceri Dingle and Rob Harris produced, edited and directed a film that premiered in 2021 about his life entitled Every Cook Can Govern: The life, impact & works of C.L.R. James. In March I was invited by Ogechi Chieke of Bowie State University to speak about the work of C.L.R. James along with the co-producer Ceri Dingle.
I saw this film and I highly recommend it because it shows like no other previous film, how C.L.R. James’s books brought historical figures to life. He did this most profoundly for me in The Black Jacobins, and in the book Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. This film includes archival footage of C.L.R. James, his birth in Trinidad, his sailing to England because of the cricket playing of Learie Constantine, his sailing to France in order to read and write The Black Jacobins in the French National Archives. His getting the money to do this from Harry and Elizabeth Spencer of Nelson, Lancashire in England.
The film makes a wonderful analysis of James’s 1953 book Mariners, Castaways, and Renegades that compares Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick to the elite class and working class of U.S. society. The film celebrates this book the most and missed the profound implications of The Black Jacobins on making Toussaint L’Ouverture relevant to younger generations including myself.
My only critique of the film is its incorrect characterization of Marcus Garvey. Robert A. Hill is interviewed in this film as saying that “Garvey went from denouncing Italian fascism to denouncing Selassie.” This is not true. Garvey always denounced Italian fascism, as Tony Martin as documented in the book The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey, in poems Garvey wrote while he was in prison. In fact, he denounced Italian fascism by denouncing Selassie and Selassie’s appeals to the English government that Garvey thought conceded too much to Italian fascism. Historian Horace Campbell wrote about this in Rasta and Resistance. Marcus Garvey’s love for Selassie and the Ethiopian people is unmistakable and unmatched in human history.
The film addresses a key question in my consciousness about a key philosophical difference between Jamaican Rastafarians and C.L.R. James’s Rastas unite with James on demonstrating the importance of studying the Haitian revolution and history of Pan-Africanism, but they break with him on his refusal to attend the sixth Pan-African Congress in 1974. I talked to a Rasta directly who helped plan the sixth Pan-African Congress and this Rasta believes James betrayed this Congress at the last minute by refusing to attend because he said the Caribbean governments there would not be represented correctly. I struggle with James’s logic in this decision and the film would have better served its purpose if it addressed this question, but the film is already two hours plus long. It covered what it needed to cover.
I highly recommend ALL SCHOOLS purchase this film. It is required understanding of C.L.R. James. You can watch the film here.
In March, I was invited to discuss this film with the filmmaker.