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.
Doing Justice to C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
William E. Cain’s contribution to the volume C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies (1995) is entitled ‘‘The Triumph of the Will and the Failure of Resistance: C. L. R. James’s Readings of Moby Dick and Othello.’’ 1 He represents the essay as, in part, an effort to redress the failure of Melville scholars to acknowledge the significance to their archive of James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. James wrote the book in 1953 on Ellis Island, where he had been detained by the state for his subversive activities. ‘‘Melville scholars said little aboutMariners, Renegades, and Castawayswhen it appeared in 1953,’’ Cain mentions as one example of this interpretive neglect, ‘‘and
The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity
the relation between cultural production and political struggle, and between the aesthetic and the material as expressions of social relations, are absolutely central themes within caribbean studies in all of its disciplinary and interdisciplinary guises. A key question for the field as a whole is what role it might play in generating new approaches to “cultural political economy,” which is emerging as an effective bridging concept at the intersections of anthropology, sociology, economics, political theory, and literary and cultural studies. Both of the books reviewed here navigate the distinctively caribbean confluence of two theoretical traditions: a class-centered tradition of anticapitalist political theory and praxis and an aesthetics-centered tradition of anticolonial cultural theory and praxis. Joy Mahabir describes her approach as “historical materialist” while shalini Puri describes hers as grounded in “Marxist cultural theory.” Both also incorporate questions of racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies. each book engages with a wide range of cultural objects and sites: literary and theoretical texts, musical lyrics and performance, carnival and public festivities. thus while focused mainly on literary studies, these texts contribute to the increasingly prevalent transdisciplinary caribbean cultural studies methodology that encompasses high art and popular culture, performance and politics, theory and history. Indeed, the very relation between the aesthetic and the political is at the core of each author’s concerns.