"In 1976 Dibb made an hourlong film about James, Beyond a Boundary, inspired by James’s influential cricket memoir of the same name. The documentary followed him both to Trinidad and the cricket-ground in Lancashire he visited as a reporter during his first years in England. When some spare studio space came up at the Television Centre in White City, Dibb and the filmmaker Barrie Gavin, who had worked with James on the cricket film, had the idea of producing a long conversation between James and Hall. The interview was first typed up by James’s wife, the Brooklyn-born feminist Selma James née Deitch, one of the founders of the feminist Wages for Housework Campaign, along with Silvia Federici. Selma James sometimes undertook transcription work for the BBC; this time she was paid £20. (The footage is thought to be lost.)
The C.L.R. James we meet here is a spirited, loquacious interlocutor whom Hall, with courteous restraint, tries to keep on course. The sense of something passionate and unruly in James hints at the distance between them: in his own career as a public intellectual, Hall cut away from the revolutionary humanism James embodied, adopting a chillier and more schematic outlook that skirted invocations of “human nature” in keeping with the skepticism of a deconstructionist, postmodern moment. Their conversation ranges widely among topics: James’s education, upbringing and parenting; his time as a schoolteacher; his encounter with Trotsky in 1939; the writing of The Black Jacobins; the social and political analogues he found in Herman Melville; his pupil Eric Williams, who later wrote Capitalism and Slavery and became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago; his complex relationships with figures like Padmore, Constantine, Dunayevskaya, and Paul Robeson."
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/12/21/a-microcosm-of-the-world-clr-james-stuart-hall/
#Marxism #Trotskysm #CulturalStudies #Capitalism
Miguel Afonso Caetano /
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2024-12-22 13:35:00
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2024-12-22 13:35:00Event JSON
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"content": "\"In 1976 Dibb made an hourlong film about James, Beyond a Boundary, inspired by James’s influential cricket memoir of the same name. The documentary followed him both to Trinidad and the cricket-ground in Lancashire he visited as a reporter during his first years in England. When some spare studio space came up at the Television Centre in White City, Dibb and the filmmaker Barrie Gavin, who had worked with James on the cricket film, had the idea of producing a long conversation between James and Hall. The interview was first typed up by James’s wife, the Brooklyn-born feminist Selma James née Deitch, one of the founders of the feminist Wages for Housework Campaign, along with Silvia Federici. Selma James sometimes undertook transcription work for the BBC; this time she was paid £20. (The footage is thought to be lost.)\n\nThe C.L.R. James we meet here is a spirited, loquacious interlocutor whom Hall, with courteous restraint, tries to keep on course. The sense of something passionate and unruly in James hints at the distance between them: in his own career as a public intellectual, Hall cut away from the revolutionary humanism James embodied, adopting a chillier and more schematic outlook that skirted invocations of “human nature” in keeping with the skepticism of a deconstructionist, postmodern moment. Their conversation ranges widely among topics: James’s education, upbringing and parenting; his time as a schoolteacher; his encounter with Trotsky in 1939; the writing of The Black Jacobins; the social and political analogues he found in Herman Melville; his pupil Eric Williams, who later wrote Capitalism and Slavery and became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago; his complex relationships with figures like Padmore, Constantine, Dunayevskaya, and Paul Robeson.\"\n\nhttps://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/12/21/a-microcosm-of-the-world-clr-james-stuart-hall/\n\n#Marxism #Trotskysm #CulturalStudies #Capitalism",
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