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A Microcosm of the World

C.L.R. James, interviewed by Stuart Hall, introduction by Phoebe Braithwaite

Molly Crabapple

Stuart Hall and C.L.R. James; illustration by Molly Crabapple

In May 1976, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall sat down in the BBC’s studios in West London to interview the Trinidadian-born intellectual C.L.R. James. They were being filmed by Mike Dibb, who had produced John Berger’s Ways of Seeing four years earlier, for a planned BBC Two broadcast commemorating James’s seventy-fifth birthday. Hall was forty-four. The conversation was a torch-passing of sorts, from one West Indian intellectual who made his name in Britain to another.

The tape of that interview was lost before it was ever aired. More accurately, it was destroyed—wiped before transmission. That November the broadcasting executive Aubrey Singer circulated a surly, not to say ignorant, internal memo: “Sorry, but I have no interest in a 45” conversation with C.L.R. James.” The two men made a second attempt for Channel Four eight years later. The second session can still be watched online: Dibb filmed it in the Brixton flat where James saw out his days under the patronage of the racial justice advocate Darcus Howe. But by then James, at eighty-three, had begun to decline. 

“I am very, very sorry that the first interview wasn’t transmitted,” Hall told the anthropologist David Scott in 1996, because in the first session James “was still very cogent, very lucid.” A transcript, however, survives in several copies scattered across archives, including James’s papers at Columbia and the C.L.R. James Library in East London. In September 2023 an excerpt of the London text appeared in an issue of Representology, introduced by the journal’s editor, K. Biswas. What follows is, to my knowledge, the transcript’s first unabridged publication, drawn from the Columbia copy, lightly edited for clarity and to minimize repetitions.

James was born in Tunapuna in 1901, Hall in Kingston thirty-one years later. Both were societies indelibly shaped by centuries of transatlantic enslavement, immigrant indenture, and colonialism—places where color compounded class. James and Hall, middle-class boys who grew up knowing people of different classes and ranks, were both well-placed to apprehend their workings. Through this “small conspectus,” James tells Hall, they won “a certain comprehensive view.” They belonged to the black Caribbean intellectual tradition of, among many others, Frantz Fanon, Aime Césaire, George Padmore, and Marcus Garvey—thinkers, in James’s words, “who come from those miserable scraps of dirt and really have some sort of impact upon the intellectual life of the world.” 

In Trinidad, James went to Queen’s Royal College, the best secondary school in Port of Spain, after which he worked as a teacher, wrote fiction, and participated in anticolonial activities; he never attended university. He first went to England in 1932, the year Hall was born. Arriving in the town of Nelson, Lancashire, at the invitation of the cricketer Learie Constantine, he soon found work as a cricket reporter for The Manchester Guardian. By 1933 he had moved to London and gotten involved in Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist circles. 

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