I am equally certain that in those years social and political passions, denied normal outlets, expressed themselves so fiercely in cricket (and other games) precisely because they were games. I haven't the slightest doubt that the clash of race, caste and class did not retard but stimulated West Indian cricket. In other words, much like Edward Said's notion of contrapuntalism, James insists upon the inextricability or simultaneity of culture and politics:

Those 'who only cricket know' forget that cricket (both a legacy of British imperialism and a means of resistance against it) is an instrument of power, political ideology, and social transformation. The opposition of batsman and bowler serves as a metonym for the broader antagonism between not only colonizer and colonized, but between leader and led, between nation and individual, and between competing Trinidadian class and race factions. As James argues in the preface, 'It poses the question 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?'' Deeply implicated in the workings of intra- and international politics, Cricket is fundamentally unthinkable outside of the context of British colonial rule-much in the same way that West Indian colonialism and decolonization are unthinkable without cricket. James' momentous Beyond a Boundary (1963) foregrounds cricket not only at the center of West Indian cultural practices but also at the nexus of colonial rule and class antagonism that has constructed Trinidad's precarious national identity.Ĭricket's political resonance, as the book's title suggests, extends beyond the 'boundary' of the cricket pitch and, moreover, interrogates the tenuous boundaries that separate culture from politics, race from class, high culture from low. 'Beyond a Boundary': Cricket and West Indian Self-Determination 'Beyond a Boundary': Cricket and West Indian Self-Determination Benjamin Graves '98, Brown Universityīoth an autobiographical memoir of his Trinidadian upbringing and a social-historical appraisal of West-Indian cricket, C.L.R.

Beyond the boundary cricket book