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The Un/Making of ‘Creole Nationalism’: C. L. R. James and the Politics of ‘Respectability’ in the British West Indies Youngjun Ha(Hanyang University) This paper is a study on the ambivalent relationship between the early thoughts of C. L. R. James and ‘Creole nationalism’ in the British West Indies. Creole nationalism was the term for Black middle class’s nationalism that advocated for West Indian self-government and ‘respectability’ as its cultural basis in colonial West Indies. The ideal of respectability was equally important for both the British Empire and it’s colonies in West Indies. The English middle class of the Victorian era showed off the superiority of their own culture through respectability and made an attempt to justify their ‘liberal imperialism’ based on it. But for the Black middle class, respectability represented a necessary tool to combat popular racial images of their race as lazy, dirty, unintelligent, morally lax, and sexually rapacious. The Black middle class appropriated English middle class’s respectability to resist against British rule and to hold national hegemony in colonial Trinidad. In particular, through political work, James tried to create a national identity and justify self-government based on local and racial transformation in the ideal of respectability, as in the pamphlet The Case for West Indian Self-Government. It meant to privilege the Black middle class experience as the prime characteristic of national identity and to exclude the heterogeneous experiences of Black lower class and other immigrants in the British West Indies. Creole nationalism had provided a solid foundation for national independence in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago in 1962. At the same time, James also seemed to reveal the problems of the idea of respectability in the pursuit of nation-building, especially in his literary work, Minty Alley. By looking at his political and literary works together, this paper intends to show how James’ early works played an important role in the un/making of Creole nationalism against/for the ideal of respectability in colonial Trinidad.