“Recalling CLR James: Decolonization, Socialism, and the Good Life” by Gary Wilder

Gary Wilder is a Professor in the Ph.D. Program of Anthropology, with cross-appointments in History and French, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.

Professor Wilder is the author of Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity (Fordham University Press, 2022), Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Other publications include Theses on Theory and History, an open-source digital publication, co-authored with Ethan Kleinberg and Joan Wallach Scott and two co-edited volumes, The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for the Life is the Matter (Duke University Press 2019 and The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham University Press, 2018). He is currently working on a manuscript provisionally entitled “Revolutionary Refractions: CLR James for Our Times”