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At the Cut of the Boundary: On Cricket, Loss, and the Counterdoctrine's Play

Abstract:This essay is both a piece of literary criticism and a creative personal narrative, which takes C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary as its starting point. The essay reads recently discovered writings of my grandfather (1922-2016), a Sri Lankan national, in order to recover his aesthetic and political practices. Sylvia Wynter has read James's Beyond a Boundary as his "quest" for Matthew Bondman; Bondman, she argues, is the loss that James cannot cut. For Wynter, the formulation of the "Jamesian counterdoctrine," James's theoretical, aesthetic, and political critique of exclusionary master narratives, rests upon this loss. Similarly, one could read this essay as a quest for my grandfather's own quest, one that begins from the premise that English literature and cricket are inextricably bound. Various narratives of loss converge on the cricket field: some of them go on to found national and imperial identities, while other, quieter ones, develop a critique of these identities. Tracking the play between both kinds of narratives—for it is never, clearly, one or the other—this essay seeks to understand how the literary imaginary of cricket instigates a tragic, and not epic, form of questing. What is fundamentally sought in such questing, I argue, is a relationship to loss; particularly, one that will inspire various acts of resistance that cut the boundaries between aesthetics, politics, and athletics.