English cricket and literature jointly structured C.L.R. James’s colonial consciousness

Evidence

Cricket, he writes, became one of his obsessions. He played it, he read about it, and in time as we have noted he came to write about it. In a way, his youth was dominated by the game; cricket was the means of his introduction to the island’s Brown middle class; it selected his personal friends; it grounded his perceptions of manhood and the judgments he would make of other men; and eventually, through Constantine, it became the reason for his coming to England. His other obsession was literature. This, too, was an emanation of the English bourgeoisie. For James, it had begun with William Makepeace Thackeray: “I laughed without satiety at Thackeray’s constant jokes and sneers and gibes at the aristocracy and at people in high places. Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1243

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how the colonized intellectual interiorizes the colonizer’s culture — comparable to how the reader’s Frankfurt School sources trace the formation of compliant subjects through culture.