“What would an Athenian have thought of the day’s play?” C.L.R. James’s early cricket writings forThe Manchester Guardian

Abstract

In April 1933 the young Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James started work alongside the famous critic Neville Cardus as a cricket correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, writing nearly 140 brief reports for the newspaper over the next three seasons. Cardus’s appointment of a newly arrived British colonial subject like James to such a prestigious post remains quite remarkable. James’s job meant he travelled widely for the first time across England reporting on county clashes, and he began to develop his distinctive philosophy on the game. This article offers the first critical excavation of James’s cricket writing in these early years and thereby examines the future author of Beyond a Boundary’s first engagement with “English cricket” as a popular dimension of imperial metropolitan culture. It argues that James’s political radicalization towards militant anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist activism in Britain during this critical period found expression in his cricket writing.

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