Turning his lens outward, James, anticipating the emergence of cultural studies as an academic discipline later in the decade, examines how cricket, more than any other sport, produces athletes whose style of play expresses the social, political, and cultural dynamics of the times and places in which it is played. The autobiographical portions focus on cricket’s role in shaping James’s political consciousness. Beyond a Boundary, which appears regularly on lists of the world’s greatest sports writing, is part autobiography and part social, cultural, and political analysis of cricket. Moreover, by including a cricketer in a list of critical cultural and political figures, James echoes the key theme of Beyond a Boundary, a book he published four years earlier. James’s reference to Garry Sobers in a city better known for its adulation of hockey players than of batsmen speaks to the cultural vibrancy of the West Indian diaspora in Canada.

James ended his list of West Indians who had played crucial roles in the development of modernity with “a name acknowledged by critics all over the world as an unprecedented, unimaginable practitioner of his particular art,” referring, “of course,” to the Barbadian cricketer Garfield Sobers. As James concluded his talk, he reminded his listeners of the vital role that the Caribbean people had played in the development of Western culture, arguing that it was “impossible to write the history and literature of Western Civilization,” without names such as Toussaint Louverture, Alexander Hamilton, Alexandre Dumas, Marcus Garvey, and Frantz Fanon. James, the Trinidadian historian, political philosopher, and cricket writer, spoke at the Conference on Caribbean Affairs, one of a series of meetings held in Montreal in the 1960s that brought together West Indians from across the Caribbean and its diaspora to discuss the past, present, and future of the Caribbean as the region moved from colonial rule to political sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013 (originally published in 1963). Beyond a Boundary (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition).

We hope that these posts will help highlight texts that are sometimes forgotten or overlooked, and help us better understand the field of sport history. Of particular concern is how well the works fit into historiographical debates and compare with more recent sport-related scholarship. This post is a part of the series, “Sport History Rewind.” In this series, contributors revisit and reevaluate important texts to determine the degree to which their analyses, arguments, research, and influence resonate in the field today.

Clr james a life beyond the boundaries