Organized By Iradac GC
365 5th Ave,New York (40.748695, -73.984169)
CLR James Now! Symposium November 4, 2016, 9:45 AM - 6: 30 PM Segal Theatre, Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 Co-sponsored by NYMASA (New York Metro American Studies Association) CLR James's life spanned almost the entire 20th century. He was part of Trotsky's circle in Mexico in the 1930s and Stuart Hall's in the 1970s. A fulcrum of leftist thought for the past fifty years, James was an influential advocate of social change from below. James was a product of the colonial process and an early resister of it, and he recognized that the Global South as a generator of political innovation rather than a container for received ideas. As a theorist of British imperialism and what has come to be called the Black Atlantic, James helps us reorient the geographic perspective of American Studies towards the Caribbean and expands what blackness can mean in the United States. A novelist, playwright, theorist, sports writer, literary critic voracious reader, and polymath intellectual, James forces us to challenge the narrow boundaries of academic life on the one hand and resist the lure of sectarianism in political organizing on the other. In his embrace of cricket, he claims the cultural capital of the colonizer for the post-colonial subject. His critique of Soviet communism as "state capitalism" anticipated the emergence of China as a state-run free market, just as his fascination with the Haitian revolution theorized the inextricable connections between racialization and divide-and-conquer class politics that is a focus of the Black Lives Matter campaign. What can CLR James tell us now? *Can every cook govern? Revolutionary possibilities past and present *CLR James and "friends": overlaps, influences, and influenced: Trotsky, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Hall, Spivak, Said, Davis, Padmore, Dunayevskaya, James and Grace Lee Boggs, and more *James and his "enemies": conflict, opposition, surveillance, suppression *James at the margins, James at the center, James in the black Atlantic *Migration, diaspora, deportation, flight *James's critique of state socialism, from the USSR to Cuba to the Chinese Communist Party *James and the "studies": postcolonial, (post)marxist, transnational, gender, sexuality *Critiquing James