西里尔·莱昂内尔·罗伯·詹姆斯

塞利尔·莱昂内尔·罗伯特·詹姆斯（英语：Cyril Lionel Robert James；1901年1月4日—1989年5月31日），简称C·L·R·詹姆斯，笔名J·R·约翰逊，非洲裔特立尼达和多巴哥历史学家、新闻工作者和社会主义者。他的作品在各种理论、社会和历史背景下具有一定影响力。他的作品在属下阶层研究方面十分重要，是后殖民文学中的先驱。詹姆斯也是孜孜不倦的政治活动家，1937年，他创作《世界革命》一书，概述了共产国际的历史，在托洛茨基主义者圈子内引发争论。1938年，创作关于海地革命的《黑雅各宾派》。1945年，领导建立约翰逊-弗雷斯特倾向。

Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989), who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, activist, and Marxist writer. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.

Characterised by Edward Said as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician", James was known for his autodidactism, occasional playwriting and fiction writing, and as an avid sportsman. The 1936 performance of his play Toussaint Louverture was the first time black professional actors were featured in a production written by a black playwright in the UK. James' 1936 book Minty Alley was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in Britain. He is also famed as a writer on cricket and in 1963 he published his book Beyond a Boundary, which he himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography".

Biography

Early life in Trinidad

Born in 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago, which was a British Crown colony then, C. L. R. James was the first child of schoolteacher Robert Alexander James and Ida Elizabeth, née Rudder.

In 1910, James won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College (QRC), the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school, in Port of Spain, where he became a club cricketer, distinguished himself as an athlete (he held the Trinidad high-jump record at 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) from 1918 to 1922), and began to write fiction. After graduating in 1918 from QRC, he worked there as a teacher of English and History in the 1920s; among those he taught was the young Eric Williams, who became the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes, and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anticolonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine, in which he published a series of short stories. His short story "La Divina Pastora" was published in October 1927 in the Saturday Review of Literature and was widely reprinted.

British years

In 1932, James left Trinidad for the small town of Nelson in Lancashire, England, at the invitation of his friend, West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine, who needed his help writing his autobiography Cricket and I (published in London in 1933, with a preface by critic Neville Cardus). James had brought with him to England the manuscript of his first full-length non-fiction work, partly based on his interviews with the Trinidad labour leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani, which was published with financial assistance from Constantine in 1932.

During this time, James took a job as cricket correspondent with The Manchester Guardian, recruited by Neville Cardus, alongside whom he worked. In 1933, he moved to London. The following year, he joined a Trotskyist group that met to talk for hours in his rented room. Louise Cripps, one of its members, recalled: "We felt our work could contribute to the time when we would see Socialism spreading."

James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad. An abridged version of his Life of Captain Cipriani was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933 as the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government. James became a champion of Pan-Africanism and served as Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, later renamed the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) — a group formed in 1935 in response to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia (the Second Italo-Ethiopian War). Leading members included Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, and Chris Braithwaite.