Umpire, Empire: Kamau Brathwaite, Athletic Education, and the Literature of Self-Rule

Abstract

Abstract:This article sheds light on a remarkably widespread trope in the literature of decolonization: the pivotal, political sports scene. It documents a shared experience of Victorian athletic education that persisted in colonial schools well into the twentieth century and explains how writers as varied as R. K. Narayan, Chinua Achebe, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Derek Walcott turn to sports to understand the broader cultural contest over their work. In dramatic scenes from major decolonial texts, the article argues, local playing fields reveal the true parameters of the world's literary field. Whereas the academy characterizes this field using disciplinary terms such as comparative or world literature, and whereas scholars increasingly emphasize its cosmopolitan or global dimensions, this article builds on the athletic analogies of decolonial texts to propose that the literature of the last century is, instead, competitive and international. Strategizing for this international competition in the short story "Cricket" and the poem "Rites"—and following a playbook first drawn up by James Joyce's Ulysses and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable—Kamau Brathwaite fixates on the figure of the imperial umpire. To win his independence in an international league, Brathwaite takes the power of arbitration for himself, building his own explanatory system around his poetry and becoming a self-ruled referee.