What Do They Know of Cricket, Who Only Cricket Know?": Classical and Colonial Knowledge in C. L. R. James' Beyond a Boundary

Abstract

Part sociological analysis of race and class in colonial Trinidad, part autobiographical Bildungsroman, Beyond a Boundary is the cricketing memoir of Trinidadian intellectual and anticolonial activist C. L. R. James (1901–1989). We argue that it offers a good site for thinking through the position of the racially minoritized intellectual entangled in neocolonial logics of cultural hierarchy and identification. We examine James' use of ironic narrative voice to instrumentalize the colonial values encoded in the "Spirit of Cricket." Beyond a Boundary therefore re-imagines the scope of knowledge-making, be it in cricket, art, or indeed Classics, beyond traditionally naturalized hierarchies of race and class.