Culture, community, consciousness: The Caribbean sporting diaspora

Abstract

This study shows the utility of the concept of diaspora for physical cultural studies, and particularly for thinking through sport in a Canadian setting. The capacity of diaspora theory to specify a matrix of real and imagined cross-border cultural, kinship, and social relationships makes it useful for understanding community (re)generation in sport settings. Relatively little about recreational cricket in the Caribbean and its diaspora has been documented, despite the sport’s power as a symbol of Caribbean unity. My findings indicate that a group of first-generation Afro-Caribbean immigrants living in the Greater Toronto Area use a particular form of cultural production, the sport of cricket, to generate and maintain diasporic communities, that is, cross-border interpersonal networks with other Afro-Caribbean people who remain in their nations of origin, and who are dispersed throughout the United States, elsewhere in Canada, and England. Regardless of where they play, cricket matches are “home games” that allow players and spectators to lime (hang out) and (re)generate diasporic consciousness, that is, a sense of themselves as one people through the “authentic” Afro-Caribbean environment they create. The reproduction of Afro-Caribbean culture, community, and consciousness includes conflicts with South Asian and Indo-Caribbean diasporic groups.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.