| Popis: |
This article proposes to place Cyril Lionel Robert James in the Caribbean context, that of his youth in Port-of-Spain. James personifies the crossing of political and intellectual boundaries, from the margins to the center, from literature to history and vice versa. From an unjustly little-known text, Beyond a Boundary, an original book halfway between the history of cricket and the intellectual journey of a young Trinidadian, we highlight the links between the anti-colonial political effervescence he experienced in Port-of-Spain in the 1920s and his intellectual training. The originality of his thought is already apparent in his early works: the short novel Minty Alley, written in the late 1920s, and his first political essay, The Life of Captain Cipriani, a biography of one of Trinidad's first nationalist leaders, published in London in 1933 by Hogarth Press. From these early writings we discover his early efforts to "Provincialize Europe", one might say, using the expression formulated in 2000 by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, and to think outside historicism of a historical continuity whose culmination point would be Western modernity. |
