The world, the text and the cricket: Romesh Gunesekera’s The Match

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which Romesh Gunesekera’s novel The Match (2006) presents cricket as a versatile and democratic cultural practice. It argues that cricket is a worldly game in Edward’s Said’s sense, being both a versatile practice and an extremely mobile signifier. Cricket’s styles and meanings are radically refashioned by players and spectators alike, in different periods and, crucially, in different places across the diverse and unevenly developed territories to which the game has travelled. Then, with the aid of a brief consideration of C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963), his classic study of the ways in which cricket is played and watched in the anglophone Caribbean, the article goes on to suggest that cricket is also a potentially utopian form of cultural practice. Gunesekera’s novel furnishes images of cricket’s capacity to register and envision alternatives to the trauma and violence of postcolonial history.

Keywords:

• C.L.R. James
• cricket
• Romesh Gunesekera
• The Match
• Sri Lanka
• Edward Said
• democracy
• utopia

Acknowledgements

For their helpful comments on this article the author would like to thank Stuart MacDonald, David Matthews, Mike Sanders, Claire Westall, Natalie Zacek and the JPW anonymous reviewer.

Notes

1. I’m borrowing this concept from Raymond Williams in order to describe how cricket often succeeds in articulating “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship” (1977, 123). Though these meanings and so on may only be materialized in tentative and incomplete ways in the present, they would actually prevail and become dominant, to use another of Williams’s terms, in a genuinely postcolonial and even post-capitalist form of social and economic organization. Could one even call cricket a “residual” cultural practice, in Williams’s terms, a remnant from the past that points the way to a different kind of future?