Bringing together leading as well as emerging scholars involved in research on sport and body, this volume of Research in the Sociology of Sport invokes the postcolonial sporting body to understand the long history of contemporary practices of play as well as their renewed, re-charged and re-signified animation within new conditions and contexts.
Responding to an ongoing critical need for decolonisation in and through academic work related to sport in postcolonial nation-states, the dual focus of the collection is to unite a dwindling and often opaque body of scholarship on post-coloniality with the robust, exciting and cutting-edge work on the body in order to illuminate the challenges of sport studies in particular contexts and geographies, as well as possibilities for the future.
Rooted in the belief that scholarship discussing postcolonial sporting bodies has a central role in the shaping of future policies and practices, The Postcolonial Sporting Body occupies the meeting point between post-coloniality, sport and body to consider the future not only of sport, but of global politics and identity in a world striving towards greater equity and decolonisation.
The Postcolonial Sporting Body considers the future not only of sport, but of global politics and identity in a world striving towards greater equity and decolonisation.
Introduction; Veena Mani and Mathangi Krishnamurthy
HISTORIES AND DISCOURSES
Chapter
1. The Body in Indian Sports: A Discursive Trajectory from Colonial
to Neoliberal Times; Sonal Jha
Chapter
2. The Sporty Young Woman in Bengali Fiction: Moti Nandis Kalabati;
Samata Biswas and Supratik Sinha
Chapter
3. Colonial Affects: Desire and Power in a Sporting Figure of the
Malabar Special Police. Veena Mani
BODIES, SPORT AND SPACE
Chapter
4. Beyond the Body Ideal: Everyday Fitness Practices in the Public
Parks of Delhi; Lakshyayog
Chapter
5. Playing Invisible: Studying the Urban Life of Football in
Bengaluru; Kabir Madan
Chapter
6. All Play and No Work? The Sporting Body Inside the Classroom in
Kerala; Amritha Mohan
Photo Essay One
Painful Pitches: Between Railway Bridge and Mighty Krishna The Story of
Mahanadu XI; Aby Abraham
BETWEEN NATION AND GLOBE
Chapter
7. The Muscular Capital of an Indian Bodybuilder: Local Competitions,
Transnational Expectations, and Postcolonial Realities; Michiel Baas
Chapter
8. Parenthetical Team Names, Perpetual Peripheries, and Bodily
Resistance: Early Beginnings and Contemporary Developments in Womens
Football in Goa; Ashish Krishna
Chapter
9. NBA Saviours and the Racialisation of India; Stanley Thangaraj
Photo Essay Two
Swimming in Plain Sight: A Photo-essay on Bodies and Swimwear; Pretika Menon
Veena Mani is Assistant Professor at Stella Maris College, Chennai, India. Her research seeks to develop the domain of critical sports studies in India as a field to study social change, politics of gender and democratic practices.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India. Her areas of interest include the anthropology of work and gender and medical anthropology.
