«It’s not cricket!» Race, colour and West Indian cricket in C.L.R. James (1901-1989)

The Trinidadian writer and intellectual C.L.R. James is now recognized as a major voice in a number of areas such as literary criticism, cultural studies, political theory, and history. As a critic but also as a political activist, his life and work spanned the Caribbean, Britain, and America to the extent that he may be seen as an emblematic figure of what Paul Gilroy has termed the «black Atlantic». This essay looks at some of his writings on cricket, and at the ways in which the categories of race and colour emerge in them as part of a complex stratification of meanings, many related to issues of power, empire, and class. James appears as a figure strongly tied to certain elements of British culture such as Puritanism, a link which he fully recognized himself. James is confirmed as a distinctive voice articulating Black and Caribbean culture within the watery space of the British and American Atlantic world, but one which refuses to attribute to race and colour any essential a priori status.