Cricket gave C. L. R. James his lens for understanding colonial life.

Evidence

Cricket was James’s father’s game, his uncle Cuffie’s and Aunt Judith’s game, his cousin Cudjoe’s game; an interest even to be found in his grandfather, the extraordinary Josh Rudder. It was a game of the English school boy. “Recreation meant cricket, for in those days, except for infrequent athletic sports meetings, cricket was the only game. Our house was superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket.” For James, then, it was a natural obsession; one to which he would turn as he sought to make his way in the adult world; and one to which he would return when he sought to make comprehensible his life and the colonial world in which he was raised. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1179

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: Strong seed for a fictional portrait where a sport the colonizer imported becomes the native’s interpretive key to his whole society — a game as epistemology.