C.L.R. James, Cricket, and American Studies Historiography

In 1932, C.L.R. James moved to England, where he wrote for the Manchester Guardian, lodged with his fellow Afro-Trinidadian cricketer Learie Constantine, and helped write Constantine’s memoir, Cricket and I (1933). Thirty years later, after establishing himself as one of the world’s leading socialist intellectuals, James returned to the subject of cricket with Beyond a Boundary (1963). As bookends to his corpus, these texts suggest that cricket had a deep and lasting influence on the way James conceptualized the intersection of popular culture and political mobilization in the Black Atlantic, even during the fifteen years he spent in the United States, where cricket was rarely visible in sports pages. This is particularly striking in light of James’s scholarly engagement with the seemingly U.S.-centric field of American Studies in the 1940s, which resulted in his manuscript, Notes on American Civilization (1950), and his book on Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953). My presentation examines how James’s work on cricket might illuminate an alternative genealogy for the shift in American Studies toward transnational and hemispheric approaches in the 1990s. Although scholars in American Studies have cast books of the “myth and symbol” school—especially Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950) and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1963)—as hopelessly complicit in Cold War nationalism, these texts actually have much in common with Beyond a Boundary. Indeed, James saw great promise in the field’s treatment of culture and adapted its methods to advance his own vision of transnational Afro-Caribbean liberation.