Englishness and Blackness
Cricket as Discourse on Colonialism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3238357 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Manthia Diawara (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 830 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Callaloo (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2931376 |
| OpenAlex | W2322109306 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 5 |
First it is important to propose a working definition of such concepts Englishness and blackness. Englishness is the privileging of a certain use of language, literature, ideology, and history of one group over populations that it subordinates to itself. As a colonial instrument its mode of existence depends on the construction and maintenance of dichotomies: England/the West Indies, Prospero/Caliban, religious/idolatrous, good English/broken English, etc. Thus it is a modernist phenomenon which ties the lives of colonized people to industrialization, literacy, Christianity, and individualism only for the ascendancy of England, and for the denial of the rights of these people to enjoy the fruits of modernism. Englishness sets in motion absolute barriers between white and black, England and the West Indies, civilized and primitive, and, in the process, empowers the English subject original and disempowers the colonized subject the copy. As George Lamming has shown in the relation between the West Indian writer and the English critic, Englishness cannot register Caribbeanness a subject for intelligent and thoughtful consideration, as part of his historic contract, the English critic accepts-for what else can he do?-the privilege so natural and so free of being the child and product and voice of a colonizing civilisation (30). As a postcolonial instrument Englishness continues to lay paternity claims to the categories of modernism and to render invisible or minimize the contribution of blacks to science, literature, art, and philosophy. Today, even there are second and third generations of blacks living in Britain, normative Englishness continues to reproduce blackness its other; the image of the black man connotes the mugger, the deviant, the drug-pusher, that which pollutes the purity of Englishness: i.e., the purity of language, race and nation, customs and culture.' Throughout this book I will use Englishness interchangeably with Britishness and whiteness
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Biology · Colonialism · Cricket · Literature · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · History · Music History and Culture · Ecology
| Citations per year | 0.26 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1991 - 2018 (28) |
| Highly cited | No |