Christian Campbell
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Oxford

*Aunt Judith’s Grands*: James, Gender, and the Resistance Down Under

One of the most prominent aspects of the legacy of C.L.R. James is his pioneering analysis of Caribbean popular culture, demonstrating the many ways in which (post/neo)colonialism and political action extend beyond the white-wigged bounds of parliament and into alternative public spaces, such as the cricket field. In his heterogeneous and ground-breaking text, Beyond a Boundary, James singles out the appointment of (Sir) Frank Worrell as the first black captain of the all-black West Indies cricket team and their subsequent defeat of the Australian team in Australia in 1961 as one of the pivotal moments in West Indian history. Even more than formal political independence, the 1961 cricket match in Australia, then, became grounds for the playing out of multiple levels of anti-colonial resistance— the victory of black West Indian solidarity and the symbolic construction of an independent West Indian nation through political means that are not formally recognisable.

Nearly forty years later in Australia, Pauline Davis-Thompson and her Bahamian teammates Chandra Sturrup, Sevatheda Fynes, and Debbie Ferguson won the gold medal in the historic 4 x 100m relay of the XXVII Olympic Games (Eldece Clarke-Lewis ran all of the rounds except the finals). Jamaica picked up the silver and the United States had to settle for the bronze. This victory of The Bahamas and Jamaica over the USA at the Olympic Games is arguably the most significant moment in Caribbean women’s sporting history. I am interested in the conjuncture, as Stuart Hall has it, between the 1961 cricket victory and the 2000 Olympic victory, which both took place in Australia.

In this paper, I investigate the ways in which James’ Beyond a Boundary does and does not provide the critical language and technique to make sense of these critical moments in Caribbean popular culture. The event of the Olympic relay gold allows me to attend to theoretical concerns with the intersections of gender, nationalism, and regionalism in the Caribbean, which occupy the boundaries/outside lanes/margins of Jamesian discourse. In my analysis, I contextualise this Olympic victory with the 2000 O.E.C.D. (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) crisis in the Caribbean, intra-Caribbean relations, and Caribbean gender systems/codes of conduct. I want to think about the Olympics as resistance on a number of levels and as emblematic of absences in Beyond a Boundary—the fact that the greatest Caribbean victory in the 2000 Olympics came from Bahamian women. A nation, Bahamian and wider Caribbean, in which women are central political players, is articulated and problematised. At stake in my close reading of the Olympic victory are the ways in which the movement of five Bahamian women facilitates a reexamination of the possibilities and limitations of Caribbean resistance and a productive means of inheriting the legacy of C.L.R. James.

A man must go through tribulation
no matter who or where he's from
If he's a man of understanding
He'll then know that time alone will tell.

Dennis Brown, "Tribulation"