Cricket and Colonization?

Answer 1

In the 19th and into the 20th century, English imperialists brought cricket to the many places they colonized, including, perhaps most notably in the literature on this topic, India, the West Indies, and the Trobriand Islands.

However, colonized people responded to cricket by appropriating it and transforming it so that it served their own ends.

There's a fascinating film called "Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialsm," in which Trobriand Islanders are shown to have appropriated cricket, and transformed it into a locally meaningful ritual of warfare between various sociopolitical groups.

There is also a wonderful article on this topic by Arjun Appadurai, entitled "Playing With Modernity: the Decolonization of Indian Cricket," on pages 89-113 in his book called "Modernity at Large," (Oxford University Press, 1997) in which he describes "indigenized" cricket as a forum in which colonized people "experiment with modernity."

The literature on cricket in the West Indies is also plentiful. The essential texts here are:

Beckles, Hilary McD. and Brian Stoddart, ed. Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture. New York: Manchester UP, 1995.

James, C. L. R. Beyond a Boundary. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. Viking, 1989.