Introduction: The worldliness of cricket and its literature

In introducing the four articles that constitute a cricketing moment of focus for this issue of JPW, I have one key point to make – that cricket is a worldly and “worlded” game, one that should be read as such through, and sometimes against, the long tradition of literature it has inspired and the recent upturn in cricket fiction it has provoked.

Cricket will be immediately recognized as the colonial game and ideological hallmark of the British Empire, associated with an imagined rural idyll of Englishness and the disciplinary discourses of public school gentlemen, “fair play” and “it’s not cricket”. It will also be known as a key cultural feature of anti-colonial/postcolonial “playing back” across former imperial regions, specifically Australasia, Southern Africa, the Caribbean and the Asian subcontinent. Today it is a game that stands as an expressly global and somewhat confused international sporting product. Beyond the “traditional” cricket-playing regions, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has a number of European countries, such as Ireland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, plus America, Canada and others, as “associate members”, suggesting that the remnants of British hegemony continue to bear sporting fruit. And despite cricket typically being thought of as opposed to North American self-understanding, the real cricketing blind spots of today – of central African, of much of Latin America and, currently, of China – are clearly zones in which British influence has been notably limited. We should, though, remember the informed and exposing history of the game that Mike Marqusee (1994) offered in Anyone But England. Marqusee explained that this seemingly rural but aristocratic game of 18th-century England, particularly southern England, emerged with the world’s “first market economy” and fully capitalist-imperial state, and was managed by London-linked men who “took for granted their right to rule at home and abroad” and created cricket’s “laws” so as to manage their own sizeable wagers (44). Marqusee’s explanation serves to remind us that England functioned as a “core” within the British Isles before and during empire, leaving the other nations of Britain peripheral or semi-peripheral, including when it came to cricketing conduct. In fact Britain used a particular fantasy of “core” English ethical purity to advance itself during its imperial and hegemonizing phase of dominance, doing so via cricket. Since the Victorian re-imagining of cricket as the gentlemanly game of empire – occurring with and after Tom Brown’s School Days (Hughes 1857) – cricket has been pegged to a set of “lies” that bolster British prestige and its conception of Englishness – lies found, as Marqusee says, “in the cult of the honest yeoman and the village green, in the denial of cricket’s origins in commerce, politics, patronage and an urban society” (1994, 54). The exposure of these lies, most often by players from ex-colonial locations, has been a crucial strategy for exposing the game’s politically aesthetic values and their disruptively pivotal role in claims to independence and self-actualization. This process of self-realization extends beyond zones of formal empire and moments of claimed political separation, and is an ongoing struggle as part of life within and under the logic of capital. Hence it is a mistake – though a commonly made one, even or especially for intellectuals – to take cricket’s imperial history as its signature without recognizing that imperialism is “the highest stage of capitalism”, as (Lenin [1917] 2010) suggested, and, consequently, that the game is bound to capital and the cyclical periodicity of capitalism. Specifically, the game is bound to the British phase of the development of the world-system, but it requires a conception of this world-system to make anything of its ties to past imperialism, contemporary Euro–US hegemony and the rising power of India. Only this kind of understanding of the game can account for its mutational development before and during the 18th century, its 19th-century middle-class ideological repurposing, and its extravagant commodification after formal empire – most obviously in India, and with the shortest form of the game, Twenty20. And it was this relationship between cricket and the capitalist world-system that C.L.R James, the Trinidadian Marxist and cricket’s most insightful theorist, appreciated.

This set of articles, then, oriented towards and engaging with a Marxian concern for cricket’s importance, move, as a set, out from James’s foundational and critically unmatched theorization of the game, as it developed in his earliest journalism in England and in his 1963 cricketing classic Beyond a Boundary (James [1963] 1969), to Jamesian-inspired readings of contemporary and international cricket novels. Across these four articles, key writings on cricketing culture – for example, from Mike Marqusee, Neil Lazarus and Arjun Appadurai – and its relation to literature – especially with Anthony Bateman’s work – reoccur. So too does a sense of cricket’s aesthetic performativity and the difficulties of capturing, in prose, the game’s physical and world-historical expressions of resistance and revolt.

In his analysis of C.L.R. James’s cricket reports for the Manchester Guardian newspaper in the 1930s, Christian Høgsbjerg provides the first, and presently the only, sustained consideration of the links between these formational writings and this politically formational moment for James. Tracking James’s writing on country cricket matches across 1933–35, Høgsbjerg connects James’s burgeoning commitment to Marxism, and specifically his emergence as a Trotskyite, with his aesthetically politicized readings of cricketing action and crowd engagement, binding this to the later developments of these ideas in Beyond a Boundary. Next, taking up James’s cultural materialist reading of cricket in this renowned autobiographical text, Andrew Smith’s article unpacks James’s refusal to think with a segregated and hierarchically organized sense of culture – as “high” versus “low”. Smith argues that James’s cricketing work is valuable for literary analysis precisely because of his eradication of “intellectual” and “popular” distinctions, and, relatedly, the critical lessons that appear in his writings on the game – about “embodied and time-bound” cultural reception, the shortcomings of “determinist” readings of culture, and the need to continue making “evaluative judgements” about “cultural creativity”.

These articles are indicative of the burgeoning and refinement of Jamesian studies that have followed James’s death in 1989. More recently, though, let’s say across the last dozen years or more, cricket has come to feature in a good number of internationally-circulated novels, with the best known examples including: Malcolm Knox’s A Private Man (2004); Romesh Gunesekera’s The Match (2006); Chetan Bhagat’s The Three Mistakes of My Life (2008); Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor (2008); Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008); Geeta Sudan’s Premier Murder League (2010); and Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman (2011). And there are more besides, not to mention a good number of films, building on the legacy of Lagaan (2001), and documentaries, from Out of the Ashes (2010) to Death of a Gentleman (2015). It should be clear, then, that cricket’s cultural potency has grown as the game’s ties to British imperialism have waned and its position in the world-literary marketplace has strengthened.

Here two literary-cricketing texts are taken up for analysis. Robert Spencer explores the “worldliness” and utopian potentiality of cricket expressed in Gunesekera’s The Match. Moving out from Edward Said’s concern with the “worldliness” of texts and critics, and C.L.R. James’s insistence on cricketing aesthetics, Spencer makes strong sociopolitical connections between the “action” that Sunny’s story insists on registering yet distancing – such as Marcos’s dictatorship, the “civil war” in Sri Lanka, and the economic consequences of neo-liberalization in the UK – and his cricketing encounters, as a communal player and as a spectator of India versus Sri Lanka. For Spencer, Gunesekera captures “cricket’s capacity to register and envision alternatives to the trauma and violence” that follow empire and are endemic to the world-system. Finally, Claire Westall considers cricket in O’Neill’s Netherland, a text that has received notable praise without critics penetrating the relationship between cricket and the protagonist’s Dutch-British-American journey of cyclical continuity. Westall contends that O’Neill’s novel encodes the capitalist world-system, including the ways in which structural continuity and “riskless risk” are glorified as the neoliberal conditions for a cosmopolitan class of white international workers, in the face of, and directly at the expense of, their racialized, economic and cricketing “Other”. She also argues that the text goes to extreme lengths to refuse to recognize the future consequences of its own revelations.

These articles, individually and collectively, make a case for cricket’s significance to our understanding of imperial culture and its afterlives, but they do so in the context of a wider sense of the critical importance of Marxist readings of the game, particularly its aesthetic dimensions and, relatedly, its aesthetic renderings. Their cumulative effect is an insistence on the relationship between cricket, as an embodied cultural practice, and the capitalist world-system, including the ways in which such relationships are negotiated in literary texts.

Acknowledgements

All the authors involved in this cluster of articles on cricket and literature are grateful for the helpful and constructive comments of the anonymous JPW reviewer.