Beyond a Boundary

Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

I haven't the slightest doubt that the clash of race, caste and class did not retard but stimulated West Indian cricket. I am equally certain that in those years social and political passions, denied normal outlets, expressed themselves so fiercely in cricket (and other games) precisely because they were games. Here began my personal calvary. The British tradition soaked deep into me was that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind you the sordid compromises of everyday existence. Yet for us to do that we would have had to divest ourselves of our skins. […] The class and racial rivalries were too intense. […] Thus the cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance.

C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary is part history of cricket, part history of the West Indies in the mid-twentieth century, part autobiography, part aesthetic treatise, part historiographical manifesto. It’s a curious book, but it’s also considered one of the best books of sports writing ever published. Chris and Suzanne, who know very little about cricket, are still excited to read it and talk about what James has to say about the intersections of sport, race, colonialism, and literature.

31. Beyond a Boundary.

The Spouter-Inn C.L.R. James's book discusses cricket, but it's also an autobiography, an analysis of colonialism, and an inquiry into aesthetics. More episodes

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Show Notes.

C.L.R. James: Beyond a Boundary. [Bookshop.]

Explained: Cricket, a video which goes over the rules of the sport (and its history since Beyond a Boundary was published).

Beyond a Boundary, the 1976 documentary for the BBC.

Our episode on The Black Jacobins.

Our previous episode, on Vanity Fair.

Tom Brown’s School Days.

An archive of interviews with C.L.R. James.

James in conversation with Stuart Hall.

A lecture by Robert A. Hill, James’s literary executor, at a conference for the 50th anniversary of the publication of Beyond a Boundary.

Next: Virgil, Aeneid. [Bookshop.] (We’re linking to the Mandelbaum translation, but read whatever translation you like.)

David Hadbawnik, trans.: Aeneid, Books I-VI. [Bookshop.]

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