AT THE FORMAL LIMITS
Through a reading of C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (a reading of Melville's Moby Dick, which James wrote while imprisoned on Ellis Island in 1952 awaiting deportation hearings), this essay examines James's effort to rethink – through an anti-colonial and Marxist lens – the political limits of the novel form in general and the realist novel in particular as representational regimes. The essay begins by examining how James uses his own status as a political alien not merely to ‘reinterpret’ Moby Dick but more importantly to (re)tell what he claims was the novel's intended but ultimately ‘untold’ central story – i.e. that of the crew – a collectivity of stateless migrants and refugees labouring in the shadow of US Empire. That these stories remained untold, for James, was not merely a political choice but a formal one – that is, these experiences of migrant labour and collectivity haunt the ideological and representational limits of the realist novel. As such, I argue, ‘retelling’ these untold stories requires not merely different content but more importantly, for James, different forms of representation. Often considered an odd literary interpretation of Moby Dick, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways – with its generic mix of criticism, memoir and political commentary – can instead be read, I argue, as James's effort to enact precisely this different form of representation – as an effort to decentre the realist novel as the privileged form of postcolonial representation and articulate a different representational mode – one that might rethink the relationship between artist/intellectual and the ‘people’ (including James's own) and one that might enable the stories of the ‘mariners, renegades and castaways’ haunting both Melville's novel and the US to be heard.
Culture and the State
From the end of the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, a remarkable convergence takes place in Europe between theories of the modern state and theories of culture. Culture and the State explores that theoretical convergence in relation to the social functions of state and cultural institutions, showing how cultural education comes to play the role of forming citizens for the modern state. It critiques the way in which materialistic thinking has largely taken the concept of culture for granted and failed to grasp its relation to the idea of the state.
At the Borders Between: A Reply to Critics
I am profoundly grateful to Harvey Neptune and Belinda Edmondson for the conversation they have initiated here, and to David Scott for providing a forum for us to discuss Black Empire. My response revolves around two clusters of ideas in each of their essays respectively: first, the relationship between interdisciplinarity, Caribbean Studies, and the “newness” of discourses of diaspora; and second, the question of masculinity and its relationship to both African American and American discourses of race, freedom, and empire.