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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Dennis Mischke
Dennis Mischke*
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam, Germany
*
Corresponding author: Dennis Mischke, Department of English and American Studies, University of Potsdam, Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam, Germany. Email: dennis.mischke@uni-potsdam.de
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Abstract

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Based 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.

Keywords

PostcolonialismfinancetimetemporalitycricketNetherlandconfidence
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 4 , Issue 1: Financial times , 2018 , pp. 92 - 107
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2018 The Author(s)

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