“It’s Not Just Cricket!”

Abstract

In promoting both global consumerism and postcolonial nationalistic patriotism, World Series Cricket requires its audiences to negotiate and rationalize affiliations and allegiances that exist outside national boundaries through the construction of spatial neighborhoods. These alliances, inflected by postcolonial narratives of race, nationalism, and international politics, are conditional and shift constantly; they are subject to who is playing on the day. World Series Cricket, and the “play on allegiance” it promotes, provides a space in which diasporic Indian identity can be negotiated and a discourse through which it can be spoken. It serves to highlight the role of popular culture in the process of decolonization and the negotiation of ethnicity and diasporic nationalism.

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