CLR James Wrote About Moby Dick While Imprisoned On Ellis Island (opens in new tab)

Relistening to Christina Sharpe’s 2023 conversation with David Naimon on Between the Covers led me to the panel Sharpe organized at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Wu Tsang spoke of her silent film adaptation of MOBY DICK, or The Whale, and how she had been inspired to turn to the novel by C.L.R. James’s powerful 1953 essay, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, in which James countered the prevailing postwar literary establishment’s view of...