The window and the wardrobe: C.L.R. James and the critical reading of sport and literature

This article explores the materialist reading of culture developed by C.L.R. James. Central to James’s approach was his refusal to respect the implicit segregation between “high” and “low” or “intellectual” and “popular” forms of culture. In important respects, the article argues, it is precisely because James begins from an analysis of the practices and audiences of popular sport that his approach to the analysis of literature is as valuable as it is. In particular, the article emphasizes three lessons which James appears to derive from his willingness to think carefully about the political and sociological meanings of sporting practice: first, his attention to the embodied and time-bound nature of cultural reception; second, his consistent rejection of a “determinist” reading of culture; third, his insistence on the necessity of continuing to make evaluative judgements with regard to cultural creativity. Looking back, looking beyond In the famous opening of Beyond a Boundary, his study of the politics of sport in the context of empire, C.L.R. James recalls how, as a young boy growing up in Trinidad, he would watch through the bedroom window of the family house in the small town of Tunapuna the local cricket team practising and playing: “an umpire could have stood at that bedroom window” ([1963] 1983, 13), he remembers. From the same chair in front of the window, moreover, he could “mount on to the window-sill and so stretch a groping hand for the books on top of the wardrobe”. Thus early on, James notes, between the popular sporting practice in front of him, and immersion in the literature beloved of his mother, “the pattern of my life was set” (13). James nowhere uses the kind of technical language beloved of Pierre Bourdieu ([1986] 2000), but nevertheless what he draws attention to in this opening autobiographical reflection is exactly what the latter refers to as the formation of a “habitus”, for which a straightforward description might indeed be “the patterning of a life”. That is to say, the way in which our upbringings and social backgrounds leave their marks on our tastes and inclinations,