Claire Westall

The pitch of the world: cricket and Chris Searle

Part of Chris Searle’s wide-ranging contribution to Race & Class — and the subject of this article — is a body of cricket writing that exposes the crippling imperial legacies of the game but still insists on its potential for the future, particularly in England; a future Searle understands as emerging from the country’s working-class, multi-ethnic, inner-city communities. Searle is indebted to C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963) and, like James, sees cricket as a site for the expression, playing out and (sometimes) the imaginary resolution of social relations. Searle also follows James in arguing that, because of the game’s sociality, the politics of cricketing performance must be assessed in terms of the relationship between players and their communities. In this context, he has analysed the significance of figures like Devon Malcolm, England’s Jamaican-born fast bowler, and Brian Lara, the world-record holding West Indies batsman. Notably, Searle’s academic and personal contribution has been ‘Towards a cricket of the future’, as one of his own pieces is entitled. He has also helped lay the ground for a critique of the globalised televisual spectacle that is, increasingly, the international game of cricket.

World-literary resources and energetic materialism

This was the proverbial mantra my lorry-driving father would use to encourage his skinny teenage daughter – with a nascent interest in cars – to eat more, to “get more down”, even though our family resources were limited and the price of food a regular source of dispute. It stands as family wisdom, and perhaps rightly so given its demand for self-care and the ways in which humans and their machines do rely on their respective fuels to “go” – to be, to move and seemingly to be free, whether conceived in terms of Timothy Mitchell’s (2011) Carbon Democracy, or experienced as a university education paid for with lorry-driving overtime, as in my case. It is also the adage that my co-editor, Lucy Potter, and I have repeatedly used (sometimes ironically) in our shared and resource-linked thinking: on food culture and neoliberalization; on the interwoven consequences of the commodity crises and the global economic downturn of the mid-2000s; on the economic examples provided by our families – with my father’s redundancy from an ailing Tesco sitting alongside the retirement enjoyed by her parents as members of a post-war oil-boom generation; and in relation to our respective efforts to create and sustain healthy versions of academic life. The slogan clearly echoes common thinking about human bodies as being like machines, and is used in spite of our knowledge that such thinking is to the detriment of workers around the world and that the vitality of life is not commensurate with the life of machines, however “smart” they may be. It also neatly demonstrates how the language and symbolic currency of petromodernity determines views of human existence, including human survival, even though fossil fuels are not essential to life in the same way as food (notwithstanding their centrality to global food provision) and are, in fact, notably endangering for humans, animals, ecologies and our shared planet. Indeed, under neoliberal capital the entire “web of life” (see Moore 2015) is pegged to a deepening and seemingly disaster-bound culture of extractivism that is enamoured with fossil fuels, mining these and other socio-ecological “resources” in increasingly intensive and risky ways, as if capitalism’s unending and exponential search for value is somehow manageable. This is the crux of our predicament and the baseline premise for this special issue: that we, the planet and the “resources” all species need to survive – including, air, water and food, but also multiple and intersecting human and non-human energy regimes – are presently caught within capitalist modernity’s systemic logic of ever more surplus and the uneven and uncontainable consequences of our present failure to rethink, re-imagine and reorganize ourselves for collective stewardship of the world.

Revisiting the Olympic legacy

Mark It’s no surprise that soon after the Games athletics clubs in the East End of London were reporting hundreds of children turning up wanting to be Usain Bolt, wanting to be Jessica Ennis. The question is whether that will be sustained in eighteen months or two years time. There are huge question marks over that. There is absolutely no evidence from reports after previous Games that they have led to sustainable increases in participation in sport. And there is also no evidence for any connection between numbers of medals won and participation. For example Finland came sixtieth in the medals table at the 2012 Games, but they are number one in Europe for numbers of participation in sport. There are all kinds of different economic, social and cultural factors accounting for that. A very simple example of the disconnect between sporting success and mass participation is football. Once the Olympics were out of the way, sports pitches were full of football, the radio was full of football, the television was full of football, to the exclusion of almost any other sport. Does that lead, year on year, to increased participation in sport or in football? No. What the Olympics does is turn us into a world-leading spectator sport nation.

Brian Lara in poetic form: tradition, talent and the Caribbean ‘mwe’

This essay considers the place of Brian Lara in Caribbean poetry through two literary framing devices. It first situates the iconic image of Lara within the literary frames provided by T.S. Eliots ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and Kamau Brathwaites notion of ‘mwe’, before unpacking Lara poems composed by writers and performers as well known as Jean Breeze, Howard Fergus and Paul Keens-Douglas. The discussion suggests that by reading these pieces as a collection Lara is shown to represent the Caribbeans ongoing negotiation between the one and the many, as well as the potentially hazardous over-investment in the individual hero. Consequently, the discussion is less concerned with the actions and personality of Lara than it is with his heroic image in poetry and the critical messages West Indies cricket and the Caribbean more generally may take from such literary representations.

Marxism, cultural studies and sport

edited by Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald, London/New York, Routledge, 2009, xxxiv + 250 pp., £24.99 (paperback), ISBN 978‐0‐415‐37541‐2 It is perhaps old‐hat, and less than interesting, to write a...

Introduction: The worldliness of cricket and its literature

In introducing the four articles that constitute a cricketing moment of focus for this issue of JPW, I have one key point to make – that cricket is a worldly and “worlded” game, one that should be read as such through, and sometimes against, the long tradition of literature it has inspired and the recent upturn in cricket fiction it has provoked. Cricket will be immediately recognized as the colonial game and ideological hallmark of the British Empire, associated with an imagined rural idyll of Englishness and the disciplinary discourses of public school gentlemen, “fair play” and “it’s not cricket”. It will also be known as a key cultural feature of anti-colonial/postcolonial “playing back” across former imperial regions, specifically Australasia, Southern Africa, the Caribbean and the Asian subcontinent. Today it is a game that stands as an expressly global and somewhat confused international sporting product. Beyond the “traditional” cricket-playing regions, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has a number of European countries, such as Ireland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, plus America, Canada and others, as “associate members”, suggesting that the remnants of British hegemony continue to bear sporting fruit. And despite cricket typically being thought of as opposed to North American self-understanding, the real cricketing blind spots of today – of central African, of much of Latin America and, currently, of China – are clearly zones in which British influence has been notably limited. We should, though, remember the informed and exposing history of the game that Mike Marqusee (1994) offered in Anyone But England. Marqusee explained that this seemingly rural but aristocratic game of 18th-century England, particularly southern England, emerged with the world’s “first market economy” and fully capitalist-imperial state, and was managed by London-linked men who “took for granted their right to rule at home and abroad” and created cricket’s “laws” so as to manage their own sizeable wagers (44). Marqusee’s explanation serves to remind us that England functioned as a “core” within the British Isles before and during empire, leaving the other nations of Britain peripheral or semi-peripheral, including when it came to cricketing conduct. In fact Britain used a particular fantasy of “core” English ethical purity to advance itself during its imperial and hegemonizing phase of dominance, doing so via cricket. Since the Victorian re-imagining of cricket as the gentlemanly game of empire – occurring with and after Tom Brown’s School Days (Hughes 1857) – cricket has been pegged to a set of “lies” that bolster British prestige and its conception of Englishness – lies found, as Marqusee says, “in the cult of the honest yeoman and the village green, in the denial of cricket’s origins in commerce,

Cricket and the world-system, or continuity, “riskless risk” and cyclicality in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland

Abstract In Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), cricket is the dominant thematic mechanism, and anchoring allegorical device, through which the novel encodes the capitalist world-system, including the ways in which structural continuity and “riskless risk” are glorified as the neo-liberal conditions for a cosmopolitan class of white international workers, in the face of, and directly at the expense of, their racialized, economic and cricketing “Other”. This encoding renders visible the “systemic cycles of accumulation” that characterize the history of capitalism. Yet the novel goes to extreme lengths to hold off, seemingly as perpetual delay, the failure-filled future consequences of its own leaked revelations. Hence, it is only by resituating Netherland in a world-systemic frame that critical sense can be made of Hans’s feigned cricketing bildung and the novel’s Dutch-English-American journey of cyclical continuity.

‘We're all going global’: cricket's new rhythms in an age of revolution?

This essay examines crickets past and present relationship/s with music in order to track the notable continuities that are evident in the ongoing connection between the two cultural forms. The discussion also questions whether the so-called globalization of the game and all that is associated with the televisual spectacle of ‘entertainment’ mark new modes of intersections or are outgrowths of earlier forms, genres, tropes and popular musical motifs. It asks: how do and have cricket and music intersected, and is their relationship now structurally different to their relationship in the past, most notably the imperial past of England, Britain and the British world system? The essay is subdivided into five parts with each taking its title from a track on The Duckworth Lewis Method album of cricket pop songs from duo Neil Hannon and Thomas Walsh.

Introduction: We Are Not ‘the Public’

This opening chapter lays the grounds for our reading of the discursive formation of the British public. This public emerges with the establishment of financial management as the governing principle of the unifying British state, and its pragmatic version of property-based citizenship. The public is, and has always been, an encoding of financial stability, working to create a public ‘we’ or financially realist ‘us’ made familiar through wartime consensus. Here, we contend that, in Britain’s case, the resistance to popular determination enabled by this public has been so successful that the term ‘public’ must be re-read as politically paralysing. Indeed, the problem, or our problem, is the public – that which we are so often told will bring us together and provide for us.

The Public as Financial Trust

This chapter traces the British public’s seemingly natural and eternal form back to the Hanoverian Restoration (the Financial Revolution) at the turn of the eighteenth century. This ‘revolution’ gives rise to a British constitution based on infinite flexibility and continuity, and a fiscalmilitary state that only recognises property-citizenship and therefore requires ever-expanding credit for the growth of commercial empire. What becomes the public with this state emergence is a form of franchise that ensures financial exchange via the circulation of sound money. And sound money is created and managed through public opinion as public trust – a way of seeing the future that permanently binds the public to financial governance.