How Cricket Was Used to Form the Identity of the Caribbean People: The Role of Brian Charles Lara (Hardback)

This book analyzes how success and failure in West Indies Test Match cricket have been used as vehicles for forging identity of Caribbean people during post-colonial periods. Focusing primarily on the three-term leadership of Brian Charles Lara, this work offers an assessment of links among West Indies cricket, the search for collective anti-colonial assertiveness, and the striving of Anglo-Caribbean people for identities of self-determination. The main aims behind this work can be described: demonstrating that cricket can, and has been, used as a powerful instrument of social transformation and liberation among oppressed people, within and beyond fields of play; recovering significant socioeconomic forces that lie behind a lengthy period of shameful decline in West Indies Test Match cricket; showing how inability to appreciate the value of social transformation has contributed to loss of Caribbean dominance in Test Match cricket; and, expressing the elegance, grace, and beauty of a game, at its highest competitive level. These goals are clearly suited to the interests of those who wish to explore how oppressed persons of color have and have not been using routes of sporting improvisation and creativity to assert themselves over colonialism and neocolonialism.