He contrasts this with American culture, his own growing radicalism, and the fact that the values of fair play and acceptance of arbitration without complaint rarely applies in the world beyond the cricket pitch.Īfter university, he played first-class cricket for a year in the Trinidad league. James returns to the values imbued with cricket, first into the 19th-century English bourgeois culture of the British public school, and then out into the colonies.

He recounts the importance of cricket to himself and his community, the role it played in his education, and the disapproval from his family of his attempt to follow a sporting life along with his academic career, whom he describes as ' Puritan'. James was born and educated in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Education, family, national culture, class, race, colonialism, and the process of decolonisation are all examined through the prism of contemporary West Indian cricket, the history of cricket, and James's life as a player of-and commentator and writer on-the sport of cricket. When I did turn to politics, I did not have too much to learn.' Cricket is approached as a method of examining the formation of national culture, society in the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and Trinidad. 'Cricket', he writes, 'had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. He approaches cricket as an art form, as well as discussing its political impact – particularly the role of race and class in early West Indian cricket. Grace in the development of modern cricket, and the values embraced by cricket in the development of the cultures of the British Empire. James argues for the importance of sport in history, and refers to its roots in the Olympic Games of Ancient Greece.

James recounts the role cricket played in his family's history, and his meetings with such early West Indian players as George John, Wilton St Hill, the great batsman George Headley and the all-rounder Learie Constantine, but focuses on the importance of the game and its players to society, specifically to colonial era Trinidad.

The book is in a sense a response to a quote from Rudyard Kipling's poem 'The English Flag': 'What should they know of England who only England know?', which James in his Preface revised to: 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' It mixes social commentary, particularly on the place of cricket in the West Indies and England, with commentary on the game, arguing that what happened inside the 'Boundary Line' in cricket affected life beyond it, as well as the converse. James, which he described as 'neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography'. Beyond a Boundary (1963) is a memoir on cricket written by the Trinidadian Marxist intellectual C.

Becoming rooted by randy woodley