Cynthia Hamilton

Chair Director: African and African American Studies

University of Rhode Island
E-Mail: cha6734u@uri.edu

432 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES/ MARCH 1992

Bondman. In all of his work, it is the recognition of the "vitality and validity" of the independent Negro struggle that serves as James's guide.

James's life work has been devoted to what we might call "a way of seeing." He recognizes the plight of consciousness resulting from the fragmentation in society, while at the same time, he identifies the ways in which ordinary people struggle to make their lives whole. He wrote in this regard:

The whole world today lives in the shadow of state power .... This state power, by whatever names it is called, one-party state or welfare state, destroys all pretense of government by the people, of the people. All that remains is government for the people.

Against this monster, people all over the world, and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention. Sometimes their struggles are on a small personal scale. More effectively they are the actions of groups, formal or informal, but always unofficial, organized around their work and their place of work. Always the aim is to regain control over their own conditions of life and their relations with one another. Their strivings, their struggles, their methods have few chroniclers. They themselves are constantly attempting various forms of organization, uncertain of where the struggle is going to end. Nevertheless, they are imbued with one fundamental certainty, that they have to destroy the continuously mounting bureaucratic mass or be themselves destroyed by it. (James, 1968, p. 5)

James's recognition of the political significance of the independent and daily initiative of working people is in many ways a continuation of the social observation he employed in his earliest work as a fiction writer and social historian. In his semi-autobiographical work Beyond a Boundary (1969), we get a sense of the source of James's skills of social observation and his early acknowledgement of the power of ordinary men and women in shaping events. He wrote in his opening pages:

Our house was superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket. I doubt if for some years I knew what I was looking at in detail. But this