It's not cricket': Financial time and postcolonial temporalities in Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland

In: Finance and society, Band 4, Heft 1, S. 92-107

Abstract

AbstractBased on a reading of Joseph O'Neill's 2008 novel Netherland, this article discusses the relationship between cricket and finance capitalism from the perspective of time and temporality. Despite its function as a global commodity, cricket inserts a flow of postcolonial time into the temporal streams of transnational market culture, neoliberalism, and the increasing financialization of the world. Set in the aftermath of 9/11 and before the financial crisis of 2008, Netherland juxtaposes the deviant temporal power of cricket with the time structures of finance capitalism to illustrate how the conduct of Wall Street before the crisis can be understood as a colonial appropriation. In O'Neill's novel, this conflict is embodied in the precarious friendship of a cosmopolitan Dutch financial analyst and a Trinidadian version of Jay Gatsby.