Late Cuts: C.L.R. James, Cricket and Postcolonial England

This article centres upon C.L.R. James's last cricket writings which were published in the Brixton-based periodical Race Today between 1983 and 1986. The 'Cricket Notes' have received little critical attention but in their surprising focus upon English cricket and their scepticism about the dominant West Indies Test team of the time they provide evidence both of James's intellectual method and his particular use of cricket in exploring the postcolonial Caribbean and England in the mid-1980s. Relating the 'Cricket Notes' to his post-Second World War writings on anti-colonial struggles in West Africa and the Caribbean, the essay explores James's development of an idiosyncratic Marxist cultural politics in which sport was a central mode of performing and instigating revolutionary change. James's late preoccupation with English cricket, and particularly a tradition of stylish batsmen that he traces back to the innovative practices of W.G. Grace and C.B. Fry, is seen as an application of his political method to an English context. In discussing the cultural meanings of David Gower and his team in the most radical black journal of the time, James addressed the question of the means by which a radical postcolonial Englishness might be made and expressed through sport.