The Modernist Attributes of C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley...

The Modernist Attributes of C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley Born in Trinidad and later expatriating himself first to London and then the United States, C.L.R. James was a key figure of the West Indian literary scene during the 1930s. Today he is primarily associated with his nonliterary writings in sociology and politics, and his fiction seems to have dropped from critical attention. Part of this shortsightedness stems from the fact that little of his fiction is readily available to a reading public in this country. Although a selection of his shorter work is now available in The C.L.R. James Reader (1992), the only extant edition of James novel Minty Alley (1936) is published by the small London press New Beacon Books. Because of its†¦show more content†¦In part, my desired shift of critical focus is a response against the predominant tendency in Anglo-American literary studies of underestimating the formal experimentation of early twentieth-century Caribbean writing. Critics tend to construct narratives in which British, Ameri can, and continental European writers set the standard for and carry out the work of producing modernist experimentation. Those few critics who have turned their attention to James fiction continue to follow suit of this general critical trend. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle have remarked that this author’s value lies in his status as an anti-colonial writer, an identity that they believe to be affirmed by Minty Alley because of the careful artistic representation [that it] gives to the lives of working-class Trinidadians and its affirmation of the creative self-projections that such individuals established in relation to their world (122). James did envision his novel as a populist one, affirming his own motherss adage that [t]o write forblack people in the Caribbean was a distinction (James interviewedin Henry and Buhle 57). But does its accessibility to a contemporary audience preclude the incorporation of experimental elements? Aldon Lynn Nielsen, a prominent promoter of Jame s’s workin this country, perpetuates the mythos that modernist