'Guilty, m'lud, to fiction [...]' 1 : Neville Cardus and Cultural Crisis

In 1932, C. L. R. James sailed to England with the ambition of establishing himself as a novelist. Apart from helping James to become a professional cricket journalist, Constantine was instrumental in the writer's political radicalisation. When James arrived in England he had already written The Case for West Indian Self-Government but identified himself more as an aesthete than as a politician. James also critiqued the colonialist axiologies of English cricket discourse, understanding that they reproduced a colonial value system based upon a racist mind/body dichotomy. At the same time, as James understood, the aestheticisation of non-white colonial cricket served to isolate these narratives of colonial 'otherness' from relations of political and economic power. Surprisingly, although James's cricket writings contain numerous references to, and interpretations of, the English cricket canon, little attention has been paid to the way that his work re-articulates this discourse in a manner that is simultaneously profoundly traditional and markedly radical.