1. Englishness as a Category of Whiteness
First it is important to propose a working definition of such
concepts as Englishness and blackness. Englishness is the privileging
of a certain use of language, literature, ideology, and history
of one group over populations that it subordinates to itself.
As a colonial instrument its mode of existence depends on the
construction and main- tenance of dichotomies: England/the West
Indies, Prospero/Caliban, religious/idolatrous, good English/broken
English, etc. Thus it is a modernist phenomenon which ties the
lives of colonized people to industrialization, literacy, Christianity,
and individualism only for the ascendancy of England, and for
the denial of the rights of these people to enjoy the fruits of
modernism. Englishness sets in motion absolute barriers between
white and black, England and the West Indies, civilized and primitive,
and, in the process, empowers the English subject as original
and disempowers the colonized subject as the copy. As George Lamming
has shown in the relations between the West Indian writer and
the English critic, Englishness cannot register Caribbeanness
as a subject for intelligent and thoughtful consideration, "as
part of his historic contract, the English critic accepts-for
What else can he do?-the privilege so natural and so free of being
the child and product and voice of a colonizing civilisation"
(30).
As a postcolonial instrument Englishness continues to lay paternity
claims to thecategories of modernism and to render invisible or
minimize the contribution of blacks to science, literature, art,
and philosophy. Today, even as there are second and third generations
of blacks living in Britain, normative Englishness continues to
reproduce blackness as its other; the image of the black man connotes
the mugger, the deviant, the drug-pusher, that which pollutes
the purity of Englishness: i.e., the purity of language, race
and nation, customs and culture.' Throughout this book I will
use Englishness interchangeably with Britishness and whiteness.
2. Blackness
The first manifestation of blackness, on the other hand, took
place during the confrontation between European slave drivers
and Africans in Africa and in the slave ship as a resistance to
the reifying gaze of whiteness:
During the process of their becoming a single people, Yorubas,
Akans, Ibos, Angolans and others were present on slave ships to
America and experienced a common horror-unearthly moans and piercing
shrieks, the smell of filth and the stench of death, all during
the violent rhythms and quiet coursing of ships at sea. As such,
slaves ships were the first real incubators of slave unity across
the cultural lines, cruelly revealing irreducible links from one
ethnic group to the other, fostering resistance thousands of miles
before the shores of the new land appeared on the horizon-before
there was mention of natural rights in North America. (Stucky
1)
Contrary to common belief, I submit that the grounds for the
emergence of a self conscious concept of blackness as a humanist
alternative to whiteness was not developed first in Africa. As
a discourse, it was shaped in the Americas by the performative
acts of liberation by black people through Western arts, religion,
literature, science, and revolution. Blackness for W. E. B. Du
Bois is the function of attaining a better and truer self than
the one revealed to black people by whiteness: "the assertion
Of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance"
(35).
For people of African descent, blackness is therefore a way of
being human in the West or in areas under Western domination.
It is a compelling performance against the logic of slavery and
colonialism by people whose destinies have been inextricably linked
to the advancement of the West, and who have therefore to learn
the expressive techniques of modernity: writing, music, Christianity,
and industrialization in order to become uncolonizable. They have
to recuperate the category black from the pathological space reserved
for it in the discourse of whiteness, and reinvest it with attributes
that are valorized in modern humanism. Blackness insists on a
discourse of difference which enables it to combat "the image
of the Black as an abberation of Whiteness," and, by undermining
white privilege over aesthetics, economics, and law, to posit
relativistic aesthetics and the aesthetics of relativity. As a
concept, blackness questions the homogenizing desire of modernist
theories to reassert the sover-eign subject of whiteness. It insists
that categories such as literature, Marxism, Christianity, and
cinema in themselves are "not enough," and it holds
on to compound words such as black literature, black marxism,
black Christianity, and black cinema to reveal the space omitted
or silenced by Eurocentric definitions of these categories Blackness
is therefore a way of being African in modernity, a way of resisting
both exclusion and silence. Thus blackness is, to borrow a concept
again from Du Bois in the Souls of Black Folk, an "afterthought"
of modernity, "the tangle of thought and afterthought"
(63), the reflexive movement of modernity which empowers the elements
of freedom, revolution, identity formation, and resistance to
tyranny.
When blackness is conceived as a humanist discourse on the conditions
of black people in the West and in areas under Western domination,
it becomes easier to see how people in Africa take it from the
West under its different manifestations as "Negritude"
or "black consciousness" in order to sing their right
to independence. Formations of blackness in the West also empower
themselves with "Africanism," i.e.African traditions,
history, languages, and nomenclatures. Clearly, therefore, blackness
and Africanism depend on each other, feed on each other, but are
not always interchangeable.
The view of blackness as a modernist discourse of the West with
revolutionary and liberating potential is also enabling as a model
to other repressed discourses such as feminism, gay and lesbian
rights, and minority discourses in totalitarian systems. The struggles
and artistic creations of black people serve as a model for world
liberation and life-affirmation: for example, the Chinese students
and workers in Tianaman Square, sang "We Shall Overcome,"
a black signifying on Christianity, to challenge the logic of
authoritarianism. Blackness itself is challenged in the hands
of its postcolonial and postmodern subjects to account for its
totalizing effects on women, gays, and lesbians. By focusing on
such zones of ambivalence as identity formation, sexual politics,
and hybridization, the postmodern subjects of blackness attempt
to prevent it from falling into the same essentialist trap as
whiteness.
3. Film Theory and Blackness
a). The Classical Narrative
It is possible to understand the positioning of blacks in Englishness
through an examination of the assumptions that support the positioning
of spectators in classical Hollywood cinema. Furthermore, an application
of certain aspects of the concept of suture, which puts the spectator
into relation with the discursive field of the film, promises
to yield some understanding of contemporary discourses of blackness
and their articulation with Englishness. According to David Bordwell,
the classical Hollywood narrative proceeds by concealment of artifice
and cheat cuts, as it elaborates and reproduces the spatial and
temporal precepts of post-Renaissance bourgeois theater. The Hollywood
narrative gives itself "naturally" to the spectator
by invisibilizing its own forms of presentation, and by providing
the viewer with a totalizing sense of closure.
Like the world out there, the Hollywood narrative is a story without
a narrator; a story created, as it were, by God the omniscient
narrator himself. For Bordwell, the "ideal spectator"
in Hollywood narratives is not a passive subject, but an active
reader of hypothetical expectations placed within the text: "Narration
is fundamentally reliable, allowing hypotheses to be ranked in
order of probability and narrowed to a few distinct alternatives"
(40).
In other words, the classical narrative rewards those who make
the best guesses among the normative hypotheses and punishes those
who refuse to play the game by denying them a sense of pleasure.
The concealments of artifice and cheat cuts leave unsaid the assumption
that the ideal spectator constitutes a unifying power across race,
gender, sexuality, and class. As Bordwell puts it, "shots
will be filmed and cut together so as to position the spectator
always on the same side of the story action" (56). Clearly
a case can be made against the classical narrative for the way
it homogenizes all the spectators by putting them on the same
side of the action. Similarly one can fault Englishness for naturalizing
its local customs as normative behavior for all.
b). The Concept of Suture
For film theory, the concept of suture gained currency in the
early seventies as a reception theory which turned the seemingly
neutral classical narration into a problem of representation.
Problems surrounding the definition of the suturing process and
a its distinction from the already established shot/reverse shot
theory impeded further investigation of the way in which the concept
of suture exposed the assumptions behind the classical narratives
I am interested, here, in the deconstructive power in the concept
of suture to reveal the hitherto invisible elements of classical
narrative. The concept of suture makes visible the "fourth
wall" of the frame which reveals the distance between the
image on the screen and the camera that filmed it. Crucially,
for Jean-Pierre Oudart, an awareness of the "fourth wall"
marks the end of jubilation, and the beginning of the spectator's
construction of the film as a discourse, and his/her own position
in it ("Suture 2" 51). The suturing of the spectator
in a single shot involves the articulation of the following three
elements: first there is what Oudart calls the "Absent One,"
or the presence hiding behind the fourth wall; the images in the
shot which "fill in" the void left by the "Absent
One"; and finally the imagination of the spectator which
activates the images on the screen into a cinematic discourse.
I am attracted to the way in which the suturing process includes
categories that question representational devices at the site
of the screening. In other words, the concept of suture shows
that there is no guarantee of narrative pleasure that circulates
with the film, unlike the assumptions behind the construction
of the classical narrative which, in Bordwell's vvords, depends
on conventional 180 degree editing and the shot/ reverse shot
schema to position the spectator: "Conventional 180 degree
editing assumes that the establishing shot and the eyeline match
cut and directorial continuity of movement and the shot/reverse
shot schema vvill all be present to 'overdetermine' the scenographic
space" (58).
As a reception theory, there are three issues at stake in suture:
first the concept of suture raises the problem of the "Absent
One" that seems to determine the image on the screen, and
to be determined by them. Who is the "Absent One?" A
narrator, the author, the camera, an ideology, a discourse in
the Foucaldian sense, or whiteness in the classical narrative?
For Stephen Heath it is the "mother" in the mirror phase
where the subject's desire is first constructed in her discourse
(83). For Bordwell, it is narration which is always already absent
from the frame: "I have treated the 'Absent One' entailed
by the image as the narration, not another character in the fiction"
(421,note 48). For Oudart, the discovery of the "fourth wall"
eclipses our relation to film as pure pleasure into film as discourse,
and makes visible the imaginary field of the film as well as the
image that it represents. For my part, I will use the "Absent
One interchangeably with such categories as Englishness, or as
discourse, in the analysis of the work that will follow. The pursuit
of the "Absent One" in the text constitutes what Heath
describes as a pseudo-identification, "suture names not just
a structure of lack but also an availability of the subject a
certain closure" (85).
In the second place, the concept of suture brings up the possibility
of differentiated spectator positions. The spectator is the index
of suture, he/she is essential to the activation of the film's
narration. It is in this sense that Oudart refers to the spectator
as the "filmic subject" for whom and by whom the operation
of suture takes place ("Suture 1" 38). The view of the
spectator as subject of the signifying chain of the film amplifies
the moment of reception and the "floating" quality of
the signifiers on the screen. Contrary to the hegemonizing position
implied in the notion of ideal spectator, there is a move in suture
toward every spectator articulating his/her relation to the image.
One needs only to look at feminist film criticism to be aware
of the multiple subject positions in film. In Spike Lee's films,
the sign is deliberately endowed with a floating quality so as
to position several contradictory spectators: the black nationalist,
the feminist, and the antiblack nationalist spectators.
Finally, the concept of suture considers the formal disposition
of objects on the screen. Oudart often uses the book analogy to
describe the image on the screen as "lettre figee,"
a stiffed sign. Every single object on the screen enters in relation
vvith the "Absent One" first, and the filmic subject,
before forming a relational whole with the other objects. This
means that the objects on the screen represent an absence, a hiding
place for the "Absent One." The screen is the site where
the ghost of the "Ab- sent One" and the imagination
of the spectator meet. The screen is a "stand in" place
for both of them, in a sense that the spectator, too, engenders
him/herself in the text through his/her activation of its discursive
chain. The screen is the site of envy and resistance: i.e., the
character on the screen is not the same as the "Absent One,"
and the character is not the spectator, and yet he/she/it invisibilizes
the one by taking its place, and causes the other to perform an
act of reading that modifies its own identity. The spectator both
envies the images on the screen and resists being totally constructed
by the discourse of the Other," the "Absent One."
It is possible for every image to create two discursive subjects:
one for the "Absent One" and one for the spectator.
It is also possible for the subject positions to be exchangeable
at some places, to exclude each other at others, or completely
to repress each other's mode of existence. This reduces to a shambles
the notion of ideal spectator position which presumes a closed
subject position where the determination of the spectator by the
"Absent One" "would have reached its ultimate consequences
and would have, therefore, managed to identify itself with the
transparency of a closed symbolic order" (Laclau and Mouffe
88). It is interesting to look at Englishness as the "Absent
One" and to examine the ways in which it reproduces itself
as the subject in every humanist representation.
4. Englishness Beyond the Boundary
The articulation of the three elements of suture, the "Absent
One," the spectator,and the formal field can also be analyzed
in discourses on colonialism. It is fascinating,for example, to
use the concept of suture to look at the relation of the West
Indian to the game of cricket in C. L. R. James's classic, Beyond
a Boundary. Like a film on the screen cricket games are suturing
in so far as their operation places the spectator..........
James's analogy of the cricket field with the stage helps to reveal
the "fourth wall" , behind which Englishness hides to
create an identification between itself and the game. In a chapter
entitled "What Is Art?" James elevates cricket over
all the British games by comparing its mimetic effect to painting,
the stage, and the movie screen, where characters play roles that
move spectators to laughter, terror and piety. If the cricket
game tells a story, it must be that it plots Englishness and its
Other in the narrative structure. Logically, there will also be
an identification with Englishness in i the same manner that characters
take the place of the "Absent One" in film. The formal
to disposition of the players in the field creates, therefore,
a sense of anticipation that,according to the assumptions of classical
narrative, is supposed to cement the spectator in the text. To
put it in James's own words, cricket "is so organized that
at all times it is compelled to reproduce the central action which
characterizes all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our
own: two individuals are pitted against each other in a conflict
that is strictly personal but no less representative of a social
order" (192). For James the cultural significance of cricket
is such that "Victorians made it compulsory for their children,
and all the evidence points to the fact that they valued competence
in it and respect for what it came to signify more than they did
intellectual accomplishment of any kind" (164). It is this
Victorian validation of moral excellence and character building
that the game is supposed to teach in the West Indies, too. In
the book, James talks about his own positioning by this Victorian
sense of manner and virtue in order to explain his outrage, in
the U.S., at people who fix basketball and baseball games: "The
British tradition soaked deep into me was that when youentered
the sporting arena you left behind you the sordid compromises
of everyday existence" (72).
James also credits the cricket field for meeting the mass demand
for entertainment since 1860, and puts it in the same category
as such instruments of modernization as popular democracy in Europe,
the post-Civil War Reconstruction in America, and the creation
of the First Communist International. The British used cricket
and football as their national sports at a time when the modernist
imperative made a movement away from small and elitist forms of
production and entertainment, and put the emphasis on satisfying
the needs of the masses. To put it again in James's words, "if
the industrial revolution organized into a concerted whole the
particular movements of the artisans who practised a trade, cricket
organized into a whole the elementary tensions and stresses of
back-swording, wrestling, racing and the other games of the 'beast'
"(166).
Before proceeding to a description of the articulation of Caribbeanness
on and off the cricket field, it is important, at this point,
to pause for a moment to go over some of the devices which enable
Englishness to emerge in cricket. From the brief description of
cricket above, it is possible to distinguish at least three constitutive
elements of Englishness: i.e., England as origin of the game,
cricket as purveyor of Victorian virtue and manners, and cricket
as the national sport of the modern United Kingdom.
The theme of England as originator of the game casts the West
Indian as the copier,the unauthentic player who will never fully
understand cricket because he is not born as into it. Through
the notion of originality, British cricket constructs its own
identity by deploying a geographical as well as a historical distance
between itself and West Indian cricket which it condemns to mimicry.
Such a logic maintains first of all that the true cricket games
are those played a long time ago between Oxford and Cambridge,
and that other games imitate them in a rescinding manner from
England to the West Indies. Like all claims that rest on notions
of origin, Englishness, too, insists on maintaining a filiative
rapport between England and cricket, a necessary blood relation
which guarantees the reproduction of the sovereign British subject
in the game's formal field. In the West Indies, the colonizers
used the tautological statement that true cricket is cre- ated
by true Englishness in order to reserve the captaincy of the West
Indies team only to white men (James 225). I will return to the
issue of captaincy later to discuss black spectatorship in cricket.
The notions of origin and originality also come into play in the
West Indies to differentiate cricket teams along skin color and
class lines. In Trinidad, the team at the top of the list "was
the Queen's Park Club. It was the boss of the island's cricket
relations with other islands and visiting international teams.
All big matches were played on their private ground, the Queen's
Park Oval. They were for the most part white and often wealthy.
There were a few coloured men among them, chiefly members of the
old well-established mulatto families" (James 55-56).
The Victorian categories of moral excellence and strong character
were also maintained as participatory discourses in cricket as
a way to anchor Englishness in the game and set it above other
constructions of humanism. According to James, such sentences
as "A straight bat," and "It isn't cricket,"
in Victorian England "became the watchwords of manners and
virtue and the guardians of freedom and power" (163). A good
cricket player is also an all-round Englishman "with positive
virtues-loyalty and self sacrifice, unselfishness, co-operation
and esprit de cords, a sense of honour, the capacity to be a 'good
loser' or 'to take it' " (162). For James, this Puritan ideal
in the game is used to unite the British Working class and the
aristocracy around the same moral principal. In other words, the
image of the cricket player as heroic on and off the field becomes,
for post-Victorian England, a guarantor of the Englishness of
the middle class. The moral taught by the game does not belong
to any one class because it positions all the spectators to admire
the ideal cricket player, one Who has character and manner.
However, when the game comes to the West Indies, its moral excellence
becomes the moral of the colonizer, and is used to set a barrierr
between civilized and primitive.Thus cricket is tied to other
colonialist discourses to teach Englishness to an elite group
of West Indians, and to breed contempt for the rest. James discovers
his own Englishness while watching baseball with fellow Marxists
in the U.S.: "I didn't know how deeply the early attitudes
had been ingrained in me and how foreign they were to other peoples
until I sat at baseball matches with friends, some of them university
men, and saw and heard the howls of anger and rage and denunciation
which they hurled at the players as a matter of course. I could
not understand them and they could not understand me either-they
asked anxiously if I were enjoying the game"(51-52).
To turn now to the notion of cricket as national sport in modernizing
Britain, James points out that the game has become part of the
general mobilization for industrialization and national unity
above class differences. The cricket field, unlike the arena of
primitive sports which are class bound, is the center of the embodiment
of a collective British will, a consciousness of Englishness which
distinguishes it from humanist systems such as Germanness, Frenchness,
or blackness. For James, cricket and soccer are an improvement
over class-based games that are unable to create a senseof national
spectatorship. For modernizing and colonial Britain, which was
in the business to conquer more territories and raw material,
cricket is another way of introducing Englishness to the rest
of the world. The very introduction of cricket to new places is
a way of asserting the British cultural presence, a way of linking
sports and politics. In fact, for James,it is impossible to separate
politics and sports, for sports are a nonviolent way of conquering
other people: "The Greeks believed that an athlete who had
represented his community at a national competition, and won,
had thereby conferred a notable distinction on his city, his victory
was a testament to the quality of the citizens city which could
produce such citizens had no need of walls to defend it"
(154). Surely,in the postcolonial era, an analogy can be made
for the way in which American music and film have universally
positioned listeners and spectators.
I want now to consider more closely the game of cricket in the
West Indies, and delineate the modes of articulating Caribbeanness
into a new series of relations with the game that baffle its cultural
disposition by Englishness. To say that Englishness constitutes
cricket in order to be constituted by its formal field is, to
use Oudart's analogy of the screen as "lettre figee,"
to conceive of the players as stiffed signs that are there only
to stand in the place of Englishness. Clearly, cricket and other
reproductive apparatuses of Englishness use a process of disciplination
which banishes the resurgence of all kinds of heresies. Normative
Englishness, which operates in cricket through the game's reproduction
of Victorian ethics, a national ethos, and England as an originary
sign, not only constructs the Caribbean as the Other of the "Absent
One," but also tries to stand in the way of all creativity.
Englishness is like a closed symbolic order, self-referential
and transparent, with the beginning, the middle and the end announced
beforehand. Cricket is introduced in the West Indies only as a
way of converting a small minority to Englishness. Ironically,
school and cricket, which are democratically deployed in Britain
to prepare and organize the masses for the industrial revolution,
have been used in the West Indies to anchor and maintain hierarchies
based on skin color and class.
The birth of Caribbean cricket took place, therefore, in marginal
spaces, outside the Queen's Park Oval where the whites play. Crucially,
the question rises, concerning the implications of a cricket born
outside the logic of Englishness, a modernism that eclipses the
circle of modernity and flies above it in spite of the normative
process of Englishness
5. Shannonism and the Eclipsing of Englishness
The first chapter of Beyond a Boundary describes the young
James at his grandmother's window overlooking the recreation ground
where the local people played cricket. James was fascinated by
the batting of a man called Matthew Bondsman, but, at the same
time, he was puzzled by the man's behavior off the field: "He
was generally dirty. He would not work. His eyes were fierce,
his language was violent and his voice was loud. His lips curled
back naturally and he intensified it by an almost perpetual snarl.
My grandmother and my aunts detested him" (14). It is clear
that we are dealing with an Africanist discourse here, and that
Matthew Bondsman is the African upon whom the discourse projects
monstrosities. James and his family represent the Puritan aesthetic
which defines its Anglican religious and class belonging by repressing
the Africanism represented by Matthew Bondsman.
In the cricket field, however, Matthew Bondsman's performance
redeemed him; his ability to bat with a particular style brought
surprise and joy to the hearts of onlookers,and humanized him
for the moment:
Matthew could bat. More than that, Matthew so crude and vulgar
in every aspect of life, with a bat in his hand was all grace
and style. When he practiced on an afternoon with the local club
people stayed to watch and walked away when he was finished.He
had one particular stroke that he played by going down low on
one knee. It may have been a slash through the covers or a sweep
to leg. But, whatever it was, whenever Matthew sank down and made
it, a long, love "Ah!" came from many a spectator, and
my own little soul thrilled with recognition and delight. (14)
James is, of course, describing the sublime here. Matthew Bondsman's
performance creates a sense of an other-worldness that is indescribable,
it makes the spectator teeter as if he/she is on the brink of
an abyss. The "Ah!" that the spectator utters at Matthew
Bondsman's stroke is the same as the "je ne sais quoi!"
that we experience today during the "Michael Air Jordan"
flight, or "the Magic Johnson 360 degree" move in basketball.
In other words, it is a sense of jubilation that Roland Barthes
calls jouissance
Matthew Bondsman performed and invented himself and West Indian
cricket outside the discursive space of the Queen's Park Oval.
Even though his career did not extend beyond the recreation ground
in front of James's window, he left behind a legacy that challenged
the tautological notion that true cricket was English cricket.
Matthew Bondsman's experience is noteworthy because it echoes
other moments of blacks seizing upon the instruments of modernity
to define their humanism in defiance of whiteness. Matthew Bondsman's
stroke was subversive because it showed that the cricket in the
Queen's Park Oval was no better than his cricket
In terms of performance as self-invention, James writes into the
same chapter another scene, about his maternal grandfather, Josh
Rudler, that parallels the episode of Matthew Bondsman. Josh was
an empirically self-trained engineer who claimed to have been
the first black man to conduct a train for the Trinidad Government
Railway.There was one story that rendered Josh as legendary as
Matthew Bondsman in James's memory. Years after his retirement,
Josh, who never attended a school, let alone earned an engineering
degree, was still sought by the manager of the sugar factory whenever
the white engineers were unable to repair an engine. James remembers
one particular day, at the turn of the century, when his grandfather
was called in to look at an engine that the other engineers spent
hours trying in vain to fix. James explains that on his way to
the factory, "Josh may have dug up from his tenacious memory
some half-forgotten incident of an engine which would not go,
or he may have come to the conclusion that if all of these highly
trained and practised engineers were unable to discover what was
wrong the probability was that they were overlooking some very
simple matter that was under their very noses" (24).
It is possible to emphasize several strands of the discourse of
blackness from this complex quote. Crucially, the notion of memory
is important, because it is that which enables blacks to resist
dehumanization in the West, and the main reliance for survival
for people who do not know how to read. But it is the Du Boisian
notion of after- thought, which is echoed in the statement: "they
were overlooking some very simple matter that was under their
noses," that I want to "signify upon" here. Literally
the concept of "overlooking" denotes some part of the
engine that is passed over by the engineers, either as insignificant
or buried under other parts. It is a part that is not a nodal
point in the discursive chain of scientific inquiry. Connotatively
speaking, however, that part is also Josh, whose life has been
linked to the engine to increase the productivity of sugar in
the factory, but who is overlooked and/or excluded by the scientific
circle of white engineers. Josh, thus, understood something about
the engineers and their science that those who were not endowed
with reflexivity, because they could not put themselves in the
place of things objectified, could not understand.
When Josh entered the engine room, surrounded by skeptical looks
from the engineers, to everyone's surprise he asked to be left
alone with the machine: "No one will ever know exactly what
Josh did in there, but within two minutes he was out again and
he said to the astonished manager, 'I can't guarantee anything,
sir, but try and see if she will go now' " (25). The point
I am making here is that men like Josh and Matthew Bondsman, through
their performance and signifyin' with/on objects originally perfected
for the ascendency of Englishness, created the conditions of blackand
white equality.
James talks about others who have contributed to the development
of the West Indian style in cricket as well. He mentions Arthur
Jones's stroke which is unsurpassed: "How he used to cut!
I have watched county cricket for weeks on end and seen whole
test matches without seeing one such as Jones used to make, and
for years whenever I saw one I murmured to myself, 'Arthur Jones'
" (15). There was also James's uncle Cudjoe whose style was
to hold up his bat and shake it at reputed fast bowlers before
they threw the ball. Finally, there was Piggie Piggot who "never
or rarely wore a white shirt, but played usually in a shirt with
coloured stripes without any collar attached. He did it purposely
for all his colleagues wore white shirts Piggot was one of the
world's great wicket keepers of the period between the wars"
(973)
By the 1920s, as the number of local players increased, a distinct
West Indian cricket was engendered, forming an alternative spectatorship
to the positions reserved for spectators in English cricket. The
appropriation of cricket at the margins of Englishness will liberate
modernization in the West Indies, too, and do for Caribbeanness
what it did for Englishness: i.e., it will create a collective
West Indian will which traversed race and class belongings. It
was a will that was made up of the desire to be as different and
equal to English pcople, at least on the cncket field James describes
it as the first seeds of a creole identity and the formation of
a West Indian nationalism (116.)
The local cricket united the merchants who were usually of Chinese
background, the black and Indian working class, and the upper
middle class. Only the white West Indians, who stayed loyal to
Englishness, resisted being positioned by this new and nationalist
game. James recounts the story of a Chinese shopkeeper who, like
many merchants on the island, was only interested in exploiting
the local population: "But this man, after about fifteen
years, would be seized with a passion for cricket. He did not
play himself but he sponsored the local village team. He would
buy a matting for them and supply them with bats and balls"
(70).
According to James, among all the clubs of that time, Shannon
was the most representative of the way Trinidadians felt about
themselves. The Shannon Club constituted a middle ground between
Maple and Stingo, two black clubs on the opposite ends of the
color and class stratum according to which club memberships were
formed. Stingo was at the bottom of the list with plebeian players:
"the butcher, the tailor, the candlestick maker, the casual
labourer, with a sprinkling of unemployed. Totally black and no
social status whatever" (56) . The young James could neither
lower himself by taking a membership with Stingo, nor aspire to
be part of the Queen's Park Club or Shamrock which only included
whites and the elite mulatto class. His real choices were therefore
between Shannon, which represented men of the same skin complexion
as himself, and Maple, which represented his class belonging,
but was made up of lighter skin members. Thus he played for Maple
for reasons of social mobility, and identified with Shannon because
its members played with the character and emotion that reflected
the sociocultural and political situation on the island. As James
puts it, "Shannonism symbolized the dynamic forces of the
West Indies yesterday" (64). "They played as if they
knew that their club represented the great mass of Black people
on the island. The crowd did not look at Stingo in the same way.
Stingo did not have status enough. Stingo did not show the pride
and impersonal ambitionwhich distinguished Shannon" (61).
The Shannon Club stimulated the social desires and passions of
people in Trinidad by performing cricket in a way that eclipsed
the subordinated position reserved for them off the field. In
James's words, "[a]s clearly as if it was written across
the sky, their play said: Here, on the cricket field if nowhere
else, all men in the island are equal, and we are the best men
in the island" (61). Shannonism wrested cricket away from
Englishness and made it pliable enough to serve the needs of people
in Trinidad. Such a capturing of the game, which destabilized
the monolithic structure of Englishness, constituted the mode
of weaving a Caribbean identity in modernist instruments which
had hitherto made the colonized subject into an object. The Caribbean
appropriation of modernization, i.e., cricket, literacy, Christianity,
and industrialization, demonstrated that there was more than one
way, the English way, of apprehending modernity. The performance
of such Shannon players as St. Hill and Constanti positioned spectators
with the view that West Indian cricket was equal to British cricket,
and that the West Indies did not need to be subjugated to Britain
With Shannon, cricket now echoed Caribbeanness. Furthermore, the
Shannon players' performance made a shamble of the notion that
"cricket would fall into chaos and anarchy if a black man
were appointed captain" (76).3 According to James, the players
were disciplined on and off the field. They acquired their sense
of moral excellence and strong character through a road different
from the Puritanism which prevailed in the cricket of the Queen's
Park Oval. Nonetheless they were the winningest team in Trinidad,
and, in national and international tournaments, they defended
their country's flag with determination and dignity.
Spectator identification with the Shannon Club and other black
players led to the challenge of Englishness around two issues:
first the exclusion of black players from the West Indian National
team to accommodate less talented white players. In chapter 5
of Beyond a Boundary, entitled "Patient Merit," James
describes the exclusions of Telemaque, Piggot, and St. Hill, and
the anger of spectators: "men and women stood in the street
and wept" (76). The other issue concerned the captaincy of
the team which I have already discussed. The spectators felt that
the black players were as good as the white players, and that
the captain should be the best all-round player in the West Indies.
For James this was not a mere application of democracy and justice,
it "was a slogan and a banner. It was politics, the politics
of nationalism" (117). Cricket anchored and nourished pride
and hope in the spectators, giving them black performers of the
game that atoned for the pervading humiliation and objectification
which were the effect of Englishness off the field. The Shannon
Club took cricket away from the Queen's Park Oval, and played
it with spirit and relentlessness: "The crowd expected it
from them, and if they lapsed let them know" (62).
6. Provisional Essentialism
"I wanna take you higher." Sly and the Family
Stone
My reading of Shannonism and West Indian nationalism may be construed
as a form of closure, a new essentialism to replace the essentialism
I criticized in Englishness. Inevitably, such a totality, like
all totalizing discourses, will leave some people in its shadow,
or construct them as its inferior pole. It is also possible to
read my celebration of Shannonism as a manichean construction
of blackness and whiteness, and to fault me for not allowing some
room for ambivalent subject positions. James's oven position is
clear. Not only did he see himself as a Westerner, but he also
believed that "the captain should be not a black man but
the best man" (137). I will argue, however that Shannonism
was, for James, a way of constructing West Indian humanism in
modernity which had only seen the West Indian as an object. Rene
dePestre uses the concept of "codification, (coverting a
man into a thing)" to describe the way in which Africans
lost their identity during slavery: "The problem of identity
is closely linked to a central fact in Caribbean history-Slavery.
And what was slavery but anti-identity by definition? Slavery
'depersonalized' the African man who was shipped to the West Indies.
The principal object of this means of production was to extract
from slave labour the energy to create material riches. The black
man was in that way, converted into a coal-man, combustible-man,
a nothing-man" (61)
Every performance by a Shannon player was, therefore, a humanizing
act which denied the inferiorizing construction of blackness by
Englishness. The Shannon play- ers freed themselves on the cricket
field, and positioned the spectators to taste their freedom. Crucially,
therefore, Shannonism was not an oppositional discourse which
turns the white man into an object; it was rather the discourse
of the new man in the Fanonian sense; in other words, it was discourse
that transformed the negative sign of blackness into a positive
sign, in order to go beyond binary constructions of civilized
and primitive, religious and idolatrous, English and West Indian.
In other words, again, blackness is uplifting. Thus Shannonism
is a necessary provisional essentialism which, because it combats
the concrete reproduction of blacks as inferiors to whites in
every humanist sphere, creates a new human space of difference
and equality.
Shannonism and similar performative acts by blacks seeking their
freedom constitute what I will call a black structure of feeling.
Thus, blackness, too, becomes an "Absent One," the place
of which may be filled by freedom and equality seeking peo- ples.
It is in this sense that one can say of blackness that it invisibilizes
itself by creating an envy: i.e., the envy to be black which is
signified by the desire for freedom. For example, the Jesse Jackson
presidential campaign would be meaningless if divorced from the
desire to be free and equal in the American brand of democracy.
The same notion of desire gives significance to the television
scene of Mandela walking out of the apartheid jail. The scene
is powerful in terms of spectatorship because Mandela, by filling
in the place of the "Absent One," and standing in the
ground of liberty, puts the spectator in relation with his/her
desire: i.e., blackness. The scene is primarily an articulation
of the black structure of feeling. Crucially, however, the linking
of the discourse of blackness to the categories of freedom and
liberty prevents it from reaching closure and fixity. Freedom
and equality are never fully captured, they are endlessly moving
toward zones of oppression. This is the reason Why other repressed
discourses-feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, Chicano and Native
American liberation movements-have used blackness as their model.
Blackness posits the con- ditions of possibility for the fulfillment
of freedom.
To paraphrase Du Bois again, black and white issues constitute
the most complex issues of the twentieth century. They are also
deceptive because their solution is not found in the simplicity
that is implied by the cliche of "black and white" in
the English language. Surely, if the issues were simple, they
would have disappeared with the abolition of slavery, or the Civil
Rights Amendment, or the independence of the African states. They
are not confined to one country either. Blackness as a pole inferior
to whiteness is everywhere and in the reproduction of styles,
stories, fashions, religion and language.
Notes
1. Hall et al, see also Gilroy on Enoch Powell and Lord Scarman.
2. For the controversy surrounding the concept of suture, see
Rothman.
3. Those who feel that such ideas belong to the past would do
well to pay attention to the controversy surrounding the selection
of quarterbacks in American football today.
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