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Sportcult (Volume 16)
Describes how people perform their sexual identities as athletes and spectators.
304 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1999
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August 22, 2012
History and Cultural Studies do not have a good relationship. Mutual rivalry undermines mutuality. Some years ago Michael Steinberg set out to disrupt the argument that “History is the site of traditional knowledge and the civilising process, while Cultural Studies is the site of disruption and subversion” by proposing “the cooperation of disciplinarity and dissent”.[1] SportCult is a significant step towards this cooperation.
This collection is firmly within the broad church of cultural studies and is historically well informed. Martin and Miller’s introduction points to the politics of sport, its definition, questions posed by the popular and global-local axis which become the subject of the book. Miller’s ‘Competing Allegories’ addresses the allegorical functions and forms of sporting discourses and proposes a political programme for engagements with sport. In addition to its incisive review of the literature of contemporary analyses of sport, this is a critical and socially aware academy dealing with the contemporary politics of sport - it is the Social Text Collective at its best (despite the protestations of Alan Sokal’s supporters). This article highlights the themes around which the book’s sections are organised.
The book’s strong contributions to our understanding of the social roles of sport combine to make this one of the most significant collections to have been published, and a promising fin de siécle contribution to sports scholarship. In Part I ‘Building Nations’, Tanzanian urban youth responses to Kung Fu films during the 1970s, cricket in post-apartheid South Africa and the nationalist politics of Sri Lankan cricket combine to unsettle and disrupt conventional views of the sport-nation relationship. Fareed’s wide ranging discussion of post-apartheid cricket gains specific focus in his assessment that the selection of Paul Adams, once classified as ‘coloured’, for the South African team reveals both historical amnesia, through the forgetting of Basil D’Olivera, and the persistence of apartheid symbols. The problematic sport-nation relationship is extended in Qadri Ismail’s investigation of Sri Lanka cricket. He undermines the association of cricket and nation by posing the simple question - do Sinhalese and Tamil nationalists watch Sri Lanka cricket in the same way? This centralisation of the viewer severs the linear connection between cricket and nation to expose the hegemonic functions of cricket in Sri Lanka - and the remainder of the sub-continent.
Investigations of the politics of aerobics in Part II ‘Building Bodies’ prioritise gendered and racialised politics, at the expense of the potential for investigations of the functioning of class dynamics in these arenas. The strengths of this section lie in Jon Stratton’s ‘Building a Better Body’ and Heather Levi’s ‘On Mexican Pro Wrestling’. Stratton’s analysis of body-building links spectacle, the politics of consumption and commodity fetishism. Heather Levi investigates Mexican pro wrestling as a melodramatic form of popular culture, rather than the more usually understood dramatic or theatrical dynamic applied to analyses. For sports historians, these two papers are challenging and exciting. By situating themselves in theoretically informed analyses of the popular they have much to offer sports historians considering the reasons for the development and popularity particular sports and codes.
Continuing the theme of melodrama, David Rowe and Jim McKay open Part III ‘Buying and Selling Nations and Bodies’ by investigating the struggle for the corporate control of rugby league between media magnates Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer. Perhaps the only thing that made this contest significantly different from other struggles for control of sport is its intensely public form. Bradley Klein develops a number of ideas with currency in cultural geography by reading through golf course landscapes. In doing so he points to the politics of landscape and the role of both celebrity and the spectacular in contemporary sporting cultures. There are few people working in the cultural geography of sport. This, then, is a vital contribution to contemporary scholarship. Gitanjali Maharaj links many of the themes in the preceding three sections of the book with her investigation of current cultural role of black men in professional basketball. Pro ball, through the NBA, has become the most globalised and commodified sporting form of late capitalism. She places this discussion in US social policy debates and history of commodified black (slave) bodies, and of the anger of black urban masculinity. It is an exceptional instance of disciplinarity and dissent.
Finally, Bruce Robbins, Amanda Smith and Rosemary Coombe are grouped together in Part IV ‘Signifying Sport’. Robbins discusses of the problematically linked questions of mentorship and mobility in the film Hoop Dreams by exposing difficult relationships between coaches, family and promising sports stars. Smith looks at the role and options for women sports reporters in her discussion with sportswriters from Australia, the UK and Canada. Finally, Coombe shows the potential of critical legal studies by linking intellectual property rights, corporate power and ownership, celebrity and the politics of rumour to show the dynamics of legitimation and resistance involved in struggles over trademarks. This is directly linked to the politics of corporatised sport. The mode of investigation can be applied to the codification of sport, the politics of sporting nationalism, and the commodification of sport. The paper is one of the most valuable in the book - for its argument and for the methodological potential it offers.
The book is shaped within and by contemporary debates within cultural studies and cultural history. It proposes a politicised scholarship of (but not a rigorous political programme for) sport. It suffers two specific problems resulting from this positioning. Firstly, the retreat from class is replayed, rehearsed and reiterated - although materialist analyses underlie several of the contributions. In the second, the tendency towards textual analysis and semotics has dominated. The elements of ethnographic and the cultural popular in some papers are overshadowed by the greater power of the text as derived from the literary origins of North American cultural studies.
Despite these problems, SportCult achieves Steinberg’s objective of linking disciplinarity and dissent. Martin and Miller have assembled a collection of papers that draw on the very local to the global. Even the most particular can richly inform the methodological and theoretical approaches of sports scholars. It is multinational in perspective, trans- and multi-disciplinary in approach and evidence of the rich analyses and potential of sports scholarship. It should become one of the core collections of sports’ studies and is vital reading.
[1] Michael P. Steinberg ‘Cultural History and Cultural Studies’ in Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gankar (eds) Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies Lomdon, Routledge. 1996. p 104.
This collection is firmly within the broad church of cultural studies and is historically well informed. Martin and Miller’s introduction points to the politics of sport, its definition, questions posed by the popular and global-local axis which become the subject of the book. Miller’s ‘Competing Allegories’ addresses the allegorical functions and forms of sporting discourses and proposes a political programme for engagements with sport. In addition to its incisive review of the literature of contemporary analyses of sport, this is a critical and socially aware academy dealing with the contemporary politics of sport - it is the Social Text Collective at its best (despite the protestations of Alan Sokal’s supporters). This article highlights the themes around which the book’s sections are organised.
The book’s strong contributions to our understanding of the social roles of sport combine to make this one of the most significant collections to have been published, and a promising fin de siécle contribution to sports scholarship. In Part I ‘Building Nations’, Tanzanian urban youth responses to Kung Fu films during the 1970s, cricket in post-apartheid South Africa and the nationalist politics of Sri Lankan cricket combine to unsettle and disrupt conventional views of the sport-nation relationship. Fareed’s wide ranging discussion of post-apartheid cricket gains specific focus in his assessment that the selection of Paul Adams, once classified as ‘coloured’, for the South African team reveals both historical amnesia, through the forgetting of Basil D’Olivera, and the persistence of apartheid symbols. The problematic sport-nation relationship is extended in Qadri Ismail’s investigation of Sri Lanka cricket. He undermines the association of cricket and nation by posing the simple question - do Sinhalese and Tamil nationalists watch Sri Lanka cricket in the same way? This centralisation of the viewer severs the linear connection between cricket and nation to expose the hegemonic functions of cricket in Sri Lanka - and the remainder of the sub-continent.
Investigations of the politics of aerobics in Part II ‘Building Bodies’ prioritise gendered and racialised politics, at the expense of the potential for investigations of the functioning of class dynamics in these arenas. The strengths of this section lie in Jon Stratton’s ‘Building a Better Body’ and Heather Levi’s ‘On Mexican Pro Wrestling’. Stratton’s analysis of body-building links spectacle, the politics of consumption and commodity fetishism. Heather Levi investigates Mexican pro wrestling as a melodramatic form of popular culture, rather than the more usually understood dramatic or theatrical dynamic applied to analyses. For sports historians, these two papers are challenging and exciting. By situating themselves in theoretically informed analyses of the popular they have much to offer sports historians considering the reasons for the development and popularity particular sports and codes.
Continuing the theme of melodrama, David Rowe and Jim McKay open Part III ‘Buying and Selling Nations and Bodies’ by investigating the struggle for the corporate control of rugby league between media magnates Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer. Perhaps the only thing that made this contest significantly different from other struggles for control of sport is its intensely public form. Bradley Klein develops a number of ideas with currency in cultural geography by reading through golf course landscapes. In doing so he points to the politics of landscape and the role of both celebrity and the spectacular in contemporary sporting cultures. There are few people working in the cultural geography of sport. This, then, is a vital contribution to contemporary scholarship. Gitanjali Maharaj links many of the themes in the preceding three sections of the book with her investigation of current cultural role of black men in professional basketball. Pro ball, through the NBA, has become the most globalised and commodified sporting form of late capitalism. She places this discussion in US social policy debates and history of commodified black (slave) bodies, and of the anger of black urban masculinity. It is an exceptional instance of disciplinarity and dissent.
Finally, Bruce Robbins, Amanda Smith and Rosemary Coombe are grouped together in Part IV ‘Signifying Sport’. Robbins discusses of the problematically linked questions of mentorship and mobility in the film Hoop Dreams by exposing difficult relationships between coaches, family and promising sports stars. Smith looks at the role and options for women sports reporters in her discussion with sportswriters from Australia, the UK and Canada. Finally, Coombe shows the potential of critical legal studies by linking intellectual property rights, corporate power and ownership, celebrity and the politics of rumour to show the dynamics of legitimation and resistance involved in struggles over trademarks. This is directly linked to the politics of corporatised sport. The mode of investigation can be applied to the codification of sport, the politics of sporting nationalism, and the commodification of sport. The paper is one of the most valuable in the book - for its argument and for the methodological potential it offers.
The book is shaped within and by contemporary debates within cultural studies and cultural history. It proposes a politicised scholarship of (but not a rigorous political programme for) sport. It suffers two specific problems resulting from this positioning. Firstly, the retreat from class is replayed, rehearsed and reiterated - although materialist analyses underlie several of the contributions. In the second, the tendency towards textual analysis and semotics has dominated. The elements of ethnographic and the cultural popular in some papers are overshadowed by the greater power of the text as derived from the literary origins of North American cultural studies.
Despite these problems, SportCult achieves Steinberg’s objective of linking disciplinarity and dissent. Martin and Miller have assembled a collection of papers that draw on the very local to the global. Even the most particular can richly inform the methodological and theoretical approaches of sports scholars. It is multinational in perspective, trans- and multi-disciplinary in approach and evidence of the rich analyses and potential of sports scholarship. It should become one of the core collections of sports’ studies and is vital reading.
[1] Michael P. Steinberg ‘Cultural History and Cultural Studies’ in Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gankar (eds) Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies Lomdon, Routledge. 1996. p 104.
Displaying 1 of 1 review