NEO•GRIOT

Born in the rural American south, James Boggs lived nearly his entire adult life in Detroit and worked as a factory worker for twenty-eight years while immersing himself in the political struggles of the industrial urban north. During and after the years he spent in the auto industry, Boggs wrote two books, co-authored two others, and penned dozens of essays, pamphlets, reviews, manifestos, and newspaper columns to become known as a pioneering revolutionary theorist and community organizer. In Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, editor Stephen M. Ward collects a diverse sampling of pieces by Boggs, spanning the entire length of his career from the 1950s to the early 1990s.

Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook is arranged in four chronological parts that document Boggs’s activism and writing. Part 1 presents columns from Correspondence newspaper written during the 1950s and early 1960s. Part 2 presents the complete text of Boggs’s first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, his most widely known work. In part 3, “Black Power—Promise, Pitfalls, and Legacies,” Ward collects essays, pamphlets, and speeches that reflect Boggs’s participation in and analysis of the origins, growth, and demise of the Black Power movement. Part 4 comprises pieces written in the last decade of Boggs’s life, during the 1980s through the early 1990s. An introduction by Ward provides a detailed overview of Boggs’s life and career, and an afterword by Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs’s wife and political partner, concludes this volume.

Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook documents Boggs’s personal trajectory of political engagement and offers a unique perspective on radical social movements and the African American struggle for civil rights in the post–World War II years. Readers interested in political and ideological struggles of the twentieth century will find Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook to be fascinating reading.

Surrealism stands for a continued rejection of a great many things, possibly giving it the lasting appeal it has had since its formation in inter-war France.  It can be broadly summarized as a rejection of western capitalist society and its values, a rejection of the intolerance, alienation and war that follow from its supposed rationality.  Robin D.G. Kelley’s book

 Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (found in the Provisions Library) includes a chapter arguing that through an affinity of European Surrealism, particularly its anti-colonial leanings, and the African diaspora. The poet and Statesman Aimé Césaire of Martinique claimed that non-whites ought to repossess their destroyed culture, and explore the spirituality offered outside of Anglo-European methods and religions. The Surrealist interest in spontaneity and rejection of classical rationalism translates directly into the genre of “jazz” music, which was already in full swing before the first Surrealist manifesto was even written, and Kelley describes Thelonious Monk as an unwitting surrealist in a comparison to the Comte de Lautréamont.

In this instance, the Surrealist search for “the marvellous” becomes a quest for a new spiritual identity for the colonized as part of a rejection of the superimposed culture of the colonizer.  Kelley advocates the influence of Surrealism in the Black Freedom movement as a positive, visionary source of revolutionary change.  It’s optimism and faith in the poetic as a medium for social change shines through in Kelley’s writing, and its force as an active proponent of a worldwide creative freedom makes it a powerful force for any anti-colonialist, or, perhaps more pertinently, anti-capitalist cause; and Kelly urges a re-examination of the Surreality of any such exploit.