CLR (Cyril Lionel Robert) James (1901-1989)

Our readings this week (and the week after next) are from CLR James' Beyond a Boundary, a work that some say is the greatest sports book (and not just the greatest cricket book) ever written. CLR James was born in the former British Caribbean (West Indian) colony of Trinidad and Tobago, and worked as a writer, sports journalist and public speaker and political agitator in the UK and the US, among other places.

James gives an overview of his activities in the beginning of the reading - he was a Marxist, and agitated in particular for the political rights of Africans and people of African origins all over the world - a movement known as "Pan-Africanism". He conducted his lecture tours alongside Learie Constantine, a former West Indian cricketer.

Beyond a Boundary (published in 1963) combines personal memoir, sporting analysis, history (of cricket, of the West Indies) and theory. The theme of the book is the phrase "What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?", implying that we can't understand cricket unless we understand its social, historical and political background.

And yet James does not reduce cricket or sport to simply being a symbol of social or political issues: he also thinks that we can't understand society, history and politics unless we understand sport. A lot of the book is about how he learned as much about people, life, politics etc. from sport and players as from studying Marx or talking with "comrades", and also about how his views on sport sometimes placed him at odds with his left-wing friends, who considered sport simply a way of distracting "the masses" from politics (as he mentions in the reading).

As a political historian, James is interested in what "moves" people ("what do men live by?"), what cultural forces have a defining impact on an era or are agents of change, and James not only believes that sport is a major factor in these respects, but denounces the way sport and sporting figures are systematically left out of accounts of historical periods and movements. This is all the more remarkable to James given that organized sports are not a feature of every society and historical period: it is in Ancient Greece and Victorian England that they come to prominence, so what was it about these periods that made sport a major feature of life?

Ancient Greece and 19th Century Britain are also periods when what is at the forefront politically is the development of democracy: the city-state democracies in Ancient Greece and the reform movements promoting and extending modern democracy in the 19th Century. James thinks that the new political impulse requires its own cultural form of expression. In Ancient Greece, however, sport is not an especially democratic activity: participation was mostly reserved for the elites. Theatre, on the other hand, was a highly popular form, and often presented in a competition form a bit like sporting events. In the 19th century however, the situation is reversed: theatre is becoming a more elite cultural form and sport is the popular form.

Why is sport linked to democracy? We have mentioned the way sport provides a focus for a community, and James saw how in the West Indies sport became a focus of popular awareness: contests between West Indian teams and English teams for example would "dramatise" colonial relations, and within the West Indies the organisation of teams and roles within teams also became infused with political meaning - many clubs were organised on racial lines and no African West Indian captained a West Indian team until Frank Worrell in 1960.

From my own experience, games between Australia and England in any sport always have as their background England's past role as "imperial master" and Australia's as "bunch of convicts": no competitor is more loathed than England, nowhere is the determination to win more ruthless. I'm sure there are analogies in American sporting life: famous ones are Jesse Owens at Hitler's 1936 Olympics and Tommie Smith and John Carlos performing the Black Power salute on the Olympic podium at the 1968 Olympic games.

In a couple of the readings we have looked at so far (Bronowski & Olds), the way sporting action forms a "mirror of the self" projected into the future has come up. In any action I guess we project an image of ourselves into future - project ourselves, full stop, into the future. Maybe this works on the level of the team with the spectator: the actions of the team all together form a projection of the community, a possible future.