The corridor of uncertainty: Media, cricket and West Indian identity

Abstract

When C.L.R. James published Beyond a Boundary in 1963 – forever attaching the sport of cricket; its rituals, its rhythms and its customs to the construction of a West Indian identity – it was a time of great hope, the early dawn of the postcolonial era and concurrent with the rise of constructions of culture being framed as the sum of everyday lived experience. The cricket-playing Caribbean (the West Indies) was a different place and cricket was a different game. The intervening half century has seen the monetization of sport, the globalization of the media and, most significantly, paradigmatic shifts in the presentation of the sport of cricket in step with a continued decline in the fortunes of the West Indies cricket team. These shifts have had tremendous impact on the region as the West Indies, the geographical outliers in the cricket-playing world, have become further isolated as sub-par performances have lessened the team’s value in this age of commodification. In cricketing terms, the corridor of uncertainty in which West Indies cricket finds itself is indicative of the region’s inability to rise to the demands of globalization. Given the dominant assumption in postcolonial studies that in all the ex-colonies and dominions the imperial past strongly informs the present – through analysis of mediated sport in the region and the impact of the monetization of cricket on West Indian players and consequently on the regional team, this article seeks to bring to an end the conflation of cricket and West Indian identity and, further, questions the relevance of such an identity in the absence of a West Indian nation.