What They Knew of Nation and Empire: Rudyard Kipling and C. L. R. James

Abstract

These citations show C. L. R. James taking up Rudyard Kipling’s imperial imperative to ‘know’, as expressed in the poem ‘The English Flag’, and transforming it into a postcolonial interrogation of cricket, the sport which stood, by the logic of synecdoche, for the authority of the British Empire but became the global game of the formerly colonised. Kipling’s question has become part of common English phraseology and a number of critics have made passing comment on James’s adaptation of it. At the close of his analysis of the postcolonial rewriting of Kim, Bart Moore-Gilbert briefly highlights this relationship, noting that James won and read two collections of Kipling stories as a schoolboy (2002: 55). That a direct line of literary communication can be drawn between the British laureate of high imperialism who bestrode the two centuries of empire and the Caribbean Marxist intellectual whose life and work occupied (indeed aided) the shift from colonialism to post-colonialism may appear surprising. However, as Christian Hogsbjerg has made clear, James repeatedly referenced his encounters with Kipling’s short stories, described Kipling’s importance to the imperial (literary and popular) imaginary of England, and indicated his appreciation of Kipling as a writer at once within but not entirely restricted by the narrow bounds of English nationalism.