ABSTRACT
C.L.R. James’s journey to England from Trinidad in 1932 has been interpreted, not least by James himself, as a modernist voyage, inaugurating his circuits of the black Atlantic and a long engagement in anti-colonial agitation in Europe, Africa, America and the Caribbean. In his autobiography, Beyond a Boundary (1963), James represents it as an emergence from a ‘mould of nineteenth-century intellectualism’ shaped by a colonial education into the role of a fully-realised revolutionary in the mid-1930s (James 1963: 117). The writings which track that transition – the novel Minty Alley, completed by 1928 but published in 1936, the ‘political biography’ The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932), Cricket and I (1933), the autobiography of Learie Constantine, which James drafted, and ‘The Greatest of All Bowlers: An Impressionist Sketch of S.F. Barnes’, published in the Manchester Guardian in September 1932 – make for an eclectic group even by James’s standards. The diversity of their modes and interests has
CRICKET, MIGRATION AND DIASPORIC COMMUNITIES
encouraged the sense, again implied by James, that their significance is that of theoretical and stylistic experiments, establishing the ground for his mature work that began with The Black Jacobins (1938). What David Scott terms the ‘inaugural importance’ of that history of the Haitian revolution has shaped critical attention to the earlier ‘Nelson’ texts, as they might be termed after the Lancashire town in which James lodged with Constantine and where most of them were written and one was published (Scott 2004, p. 14). Whilst individual disciplines have celebrated one or other of them – Minty Alley as a prototype of the Caribbean novel, for example, and Cricket and I as central to the history of West Indian sport – there has been little sense of their coherence as a distinctive rather than a formative phase of James’s thinking (see, for example, King 2006, Beckles 1998). That distinctiveness is the concern of this essay which explores the texts’ interests in performativity and the politics of Caribbean and English body cultures as themselves radical interventions in colonial discourses and as resources for – and challenges to – James’s own narratives of his intellectual and political development.
