A review by aegagrus
Beyond A Boundary by C.L.R. James

4.75

Beyond a Boundary is an engrossing read. Its fluidity and warmth sometimes mask the sophistication of its arguments; one could read it quite often and absorb something distinct each time.

CLR James casts a perceptive eye over the milieu in which he was raised and the subsequent places through which his life took him. He describes the development of his national, racial, political, and ethical consciousness through his interaction with cricket and cricketers, building up from his own experiences a theory about how sport reflects and reifies prevailing values and concerns. Importantly, his theories treat cricket as distinct and special; he is not uncomfortable discussing the aesthetic nature or political function of sports in general, but he is at his most insightful when he draws upon an expert understanding of what makes cricket and cricketers unique. Although this seriousness with which James treats cricket sometimes yields technical passages, the recounting of detail never comes at the expense of the point being made.

There is a bittersweet ambivalence to the book’s closing, stemming from James’ uncertainty whether his reflections on the West Indian cricket that he knew, with all its cultural and political baggage, is relevant to the sport as it existed by the time he was writing. Today, James’ antiquarian quality is one of his most compelling. He was a unique man who came of age in a unique setting, loyal to the literary canon and chivalric values of English public schools, but equally loyal to the colonized, to the African diaspora, to popular culture. CLR James could not exist today. The intellectual sincerity and deep originality evident on every page of Beyond a Boundary are all the more valuable because of it. 

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