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| 1 |
ID:
136947
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| Summary/Abstract |
To a great extent, popular representations of Indo–Australian relations have been viewed through the lens of CRICKET – the national game in both countries. Despite a proliferation of writing on colonial Indian CRICKET, Australia’s contribution to it has been largely ignored. In October 1935, a team of cricketers embarked on the first Australian tour to the subcontinent.1 The tour was conceived and FINANCED by the Maharaja of Patiala to assist preparation of an official Indian team to tour Britain in 1936. In this paper, I will draw upon primary sources and interviews to help articulate the complex colonial relationship between the East and the West, whilst locating the ambiguous position of Australia within this. Despite predominantly conforming to the Orientalist view that Westerners considered themselves a superior ‘race’, the Australian cricketers demonstrated an atypical cultural sensitivity to the Orient and the ‘Other’.
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| 2 |
ID:
136946
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| Summary/Abstract |
The ‘contact zone’ is a concept developed by Mary Louise Pratt (1992). It is a space of colonial encounters where people from very different cultures meet and often clash, but despite their differences and asymmetrical power relations, new relationships are forged. Cricket is generally acknowledged as an important agent in developing imperial bonds and its vicissitudes a barometer of the ‘Britishness’ of a community. While the belief was strong in most Australian colonies that cricket was a valuable ‘civilising’ tool in developing relationships between Aborigines and White settlers, the same could not be said of northern Australia’s ‘contact zone’. The small White minority of the towns of Broome and Palmerston defined and differentiated northern Australia from other Australian colonial societies. A hybrid imagined community evolved in the publicly contested social terrain surrounding sporting activities, providing a microcosm to examine the complex social interrelationships of the ‘contact zone’.
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| 3 |
ID:
136943
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| Summary/Abstract |
Ever since different communities began processes of global migration, sport has been an integral feature in how we conceptualise and experience the notion of being part of a diaspora. Sport provides diasporic communities with a powerful means of creating transnational ties, but also shapes ideas of their ethnic and racial identities. In spite of this, theories of diaspora have been applied sparingly to sporting discourses. Due mainly to its central role in spreading dominant white racial narratives within the British Empire, and the various ways different ethnic groups have ‘played’ with the meanings and associations of the sport in the (post-)colonial period, CRICKET is an interesting focus for academic research. Despite W.G. Grace’s claim that CRICKET advances civilisation by promoting a common bond, binding together peoples of vastly different backgrounds, to this day cricket operates strict symbolic boundaries; defining those who do, and equally, do not, belong. C.L.R. James’ now famous metaphor of looking ‘beyond the boundary’ captures the belief that, to fully understand the significance of cricket, and the sport’s roles in changing and shaping society, one must consider the wider social and political contexts within which the game is played. The collection of articles in this special issue does just that. Cricket acts as the point of departure in each, but the way in which ideas of power, representation and inequality are ‘played out’ is unique in each.
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| 4 |
ID:
136948
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| Summary/Abstract |
The South Asian communities who came to post-war Britain had numerous ways of maintaining links with ‘home’ even as they put down new roots. One conduit through which the interplay between old and new homes was reproduced was through the love of CRICKET many brought with them. The moral and ethical codes, which underpin much CRICKETING discourse, provided a language through which to reinscribe ideas of identity and belonging. CRICKET helped create social networks and diasporic connectivity. These affective relations gave rise to South Asians who are today multiply rooted; secure in their Indian or Pakistani ‘national’ identities, at times identifying as a South Asian diaspora, but nevertheless also ‘loyal’ citizens of Britain. The story of South Asians and their relationship with cricket in post-war Britain sheds light on the complex politics of belonging in the post-colony, and illustrates that diaspora is ultimately an unstable assemblage of collective association.
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| 5 |
ID:
136945
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay uses a narrative inquiry approach to understand diasporas as gendered phenomena that manifest across multiple borders. Ethnographic exploration of a cricket and social club comprised mainly of older Caribbean men drew attention to the women in their lives. Most of their girlfriends and wives do not play the sport; nevertheless, women are essential to the use of a cricket subculture to remake a Caribbean diasporic consciousness. Women are linked to this predominantly male community through their nurturing, domestic and sexualised gender performances. The performances of masculinities exhibited by male club members also depend on women. This study shows that gender relations are an important aspect of fluid cultural circuits and identity-making in the Caribbean diaspora.
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| 6 |
ID:
136949
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| Summary/Abstract |
The cultural significance of ‘ethnic-specific’ CRICKET teams and leagues has received limited scholarly attention, despite increasing evidence of their various social functions. This article aims to contribute to this under-researched area by drawing upon two individual case studies of Pakistani Muslim CRICKET teams; the first is based in the UK and the second in Norway. In this article we argue that leisure and sport are key spaces for the delineation of social identities and hierarchies. We identify how CRICKET represents a significant social network within both the British and Norwegian Pakistani communities. In particular, we articulate the role of cricket in establishing and maintaining friendships and relationships, bolstering a sense of belonging, initiating diasporic sentiments, as well as being significant in the development of social capital, and resisting institutionalised white privilege.
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| 7 |
ID:
136944
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| Summary/Abstract |
The essay examines four major texts that are associated with C.L.R. James’s residence in Nelson, Lancashire, during 1932–1933 – Minty Alley (1936), The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932), ‘The Greatest of All Bowlers: An Impressionist Sketch of S.F. Barnes’ (1932) and Cricket and I (1933), written with Learie Constantine. Arguing that they form a distinctive group rather than a preparatory phase of James’s writing, it focuses upon the dialogic relationship between their various genres and upon their shared concern with the colonised and performative body. Minty Alley, completed before James’s emigration, establishes his interest in the inscription of colonial legacies that delimit the possibilities of indigenous Trinidadian social and economic development, a predicament that informs the explicitly political analysis of the island’s governance in Captain Cipriani. The two later ‘Nelson’ texts chart James’s use of Lancashire League CRICKET to develop parallel analyses of Caribbean and English class and racial categorisation and their resultant social exclusions. Using James’s portrayal of Sydney Barnes to explore the structures of professional CRICKET and traditions of English sports journalism, the essay suggests that the distinctive body culture of the League allowed James to establish an anti-colonial politics rooted in both Caribbean and English popular performance cultures.
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