Style and the Anticolonial Politics of C. L. R. James in 1930s London

In 1930s London, the Trinidadian activist-intellectual C. L. R. James made an important shift in his thinking about Caribbean modernity; by the time he writes The Black Jacobins (1938), he considered Africa resoundingly modern and at the fore of world revolution, and questioned the Caribbean’s revolutionary potential. While James’s positive appraisal of Africa’s modernity rested in his sense that they were pursuing revolution in classic Marxist terms, he also came to question the efficacy of modernity itself, suggesting a turn toward the colonial in his thinking — a turn that was ultimately incomplete. Central to that turn were the Africans that James encountered in London who challenged his worldview. Most were students at university, or activists living in the colonial metropole. James later remarked of his time in London that he came away with an entirely different view of black people than he had before. My talk considers what role the sartorial practices, the style of African intellectuals and anticolonial activists in London played in challenging James’s notion of African backwardness. The manner of dress for most stood in contrast to that of Jomo Kenyatta, who at one point during his studies at the London School of Economics, made it a habit of walking about the city practice in “traditional” Kikuyu dress. James and Kenyatta had a long-running dispute about African  tradition, worldviews, cultural practices, and systems of thought in revolutionary struggle. The conflict raises the question, how might James have thought about Africa had the Africans he met in London all dressed like Kenyatta? How might he have written The Black Jacobins differently? These admittedly speculative questions are meant as provocations that bring into focus how respectability, dress, and modernity structure modes of knowing that, up to the current era, frame discussions of and movements around black life as crisis.