Dedication plaque inside the current C.L.R. James Library in London. Photograph by sarflondondunc, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Antilles has been silent the past few weeks — not because there’s nothing going on, but rather the opposite: there’s been too much happening for your Antilles blogger to keep up. The Port of Spain contemporary art centre Alice Yard — which, wearing another hat, I help run — marked its fourth anniversary with a programme of exhibitions and artists’ projects and talks. Then there was the trinidad+tobago film festival. I’ve also been keeping an eye on Carifringe, a new arts and culture festival launched in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, the CRB has been publishing reviews, essays, fiction, and poems every week — you can catch up with those here.

As we prepare to wrap up the current issue and launch the next, Antilles will return to a more active posting schedule — look out for an overview of the CRB’s special film coverage in September and October, firsthand accounts of some key Carifringe events, and our usual coverage of Caribbean literary and cultural happenings.

Finally, some good news. In the previous post, I reported the proposal to rename the C.L.R. James Library in London, and pointed Antilles readers to the online petition to stop this dismaying development. Well, enough people around the world raised their voices to persuade the Hackney Council that the renaming plan was a truly bad idea. Today it was officially announced that the new library building will continue to bear the name and honour the memory of C.L.R. James. (Now if only we could get the Trinidad and Tobago government to name a library after James in his home country . . .)

C.L.R. James

. . . it is appalling to learn that the C.L.R. James Library in Hackney (a borough of London) is going to be renamed the Dalston Library and Archives, after the neighborhood in which it is located. James was there when the library was christened in his honour in 1985. The authorities insist that, in spite of the proposed change, they will continue to honour James. But this seems half-hearted and unsatisfying . . .

Some have denounced the name change as an insult, not just to James’s memory, but to the community in which the library is located, since Hackney has a large black population. I don’t know enough to judge whether any offense was intended. But the renaming has a significance going well beyond local politics in North London.

C.L.R. James was a revolutionary; that he ended up imprisoned for a while seems, all in all, par for the course. But he was also very much the product of the cultural tradition he liked to call Western Civilisation. He used this expression without evident sarcasm — a remarkable thing, given that he was a tireless anti-imperialist. Given his studies in the history of Africa and the Caribbean, he might well have responded as Gandhi did when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation: “I think it would be a good idea.”

As a child, James reread Thackeray’s satirical novel Vanity Fair until he had it almost memorised; this was, perhaps, his introduction to social criticism. He traced his ideas about politics back to ancient Greece. James treated the funeral oration of Pericles as a key to understanding Lenin’s State and Revolution. And there is a film clip that shows him speaking to an audience of British students on Shakespeare — saying that he wrote “some of the finest plays I know about the impossibility of being a king.” As with James’s interpretation of Captain Ahab as a prototype of Stalin, this is a case of criticism as transformative reading. It’s eccentric, but it sticks with you.

— Scott McLemee on the campaign to stop the renaming of the C.L.R. James Library in London. He includes a link to an online petition, which your Antilles blogger has already signed.