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Playing on the Periphery: Sport, identity and memory
London: Routledge, 2006
ISBN: 0415375614
Playing on the periphery tracks the passage of sports away from England, investigating why elite English sports—like rugby and cricket—became national sports in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia. There are also significant questions to ask about why 'working class' English sports—like football—have travelled less well to the Antipodes and the United States of America. A focus on English football, New Zealand rugby and Australian cricket tracks narratives and myths, tracing the passage of colonial truths, behaviours and practices. In a supposedly post-colonial environment, it is clear that—through sport—English truths punctuate the present, even at the outer reaches of the former Empire.
Sport is part of a new visual experience of living, but representations are in the eye of the beholder. Sport is not cut off from social and political life, but thrives with the energy and passion of popular culture. While too often dismissed as trivial, the study of popular culture reveals the relativity of aesthetic values, the implications of technological change, the political conflicts in everyday life and the role of economics in the production of culture. Sport is a crucial mechanism to strategically intervene in debates about difference, social justice and identity. To reduce sport to 'mere' consumption or globalization is to vacate the struggles that are possible through language, bodies and behaviour. The passion of sport, and its sharp performance of difference, is a reminder that the rules, codes and conventions of interpersonal and family life, leisure and the workplace can be organized differently. Sport tenders a vision of how life could be.
This book is not only 'about' sport, but is drawn to the periphery, to those who play on the edge. David Beckham operates at the edges of heterosexual masculinity. Brandi Chastain lifted her shirt, exposing the limits of appropriate femininity. WACA bouncers are delivered at the brink of acceptable cricketing practice. Each chapter in this book captures a moment of representational excess that spills beyond local parochialism or a current season or score. Football, cricket and rugby are of particular focus, but many sports dip in the well of memory to inscribe stories of class, race, nation and gender. Importantly, this work also continues the productive dialogues between sport and tourism, showing how these creative industries—when aligned—may be an economic powerhouse of the future.
Playing on the Periphery forges an innovative path through the sporting world, dancing through the rhythms that separate England and the Antipodes. My work stands against an easy globalization of sport and sporting media. By stressing the specific and the particular, the peaks and troughs of identity and community are discovered. Through popular culture and sporting memory, differences are made.