ABSTRACT

James Berry's subversion of the canon shows that cricket, like any cultural symbol or practice, possesses a degree of fluidity of meaning. In the former British West Indies and its Diaspora, the legacy of James gave rise to a significant tradition of Caribbean cricket literature, including a particularly rich body of both oral and written cricket verse. The poem's spectral cricketers, including important literary figures such as Pelham Warner and the path-breaking Learie Constantine, are rendered as mythical figures who connect the past, present and future of the English-speaking West Indies. Through Packer's active encouragement of this culture in the marketing of World Series Cricket, an assertive, partisan sense of Australianness continued to be reproduced around the cricket field, now with a greater emphasis on youth participation. A consciously more modern and internationalist anthology of cricket writing recently collected by the Indian historian, Ramachandra Guha, points to a similar reconstruction of the cricket canon.