Resisting the Nation, Reproducing Colonial Misery: Sports and the Transnational Imaginary (ASA 2015)
In 1844, Canada and the USA played a cricket match at the St. George's Club in New York, which is now the site for NYU's Medical Centre. This long-forgotten match was the first international sporting event of the modern era, predating the revival of the Olympic Games by more than 50 years. Since then, cricket's place in the cultural imaginary of North America has been displaced by the emergence of baseball and hockey as the national sports of the USA and Canada. This piece of historical trivia serves as a line of departure for the panel to investigate how sports have engaged with—by perpetuating, resisting, institutionalizing—the hegemonic narratives of the nation-state. How do sports closely identified with national identities 'translate' across international boundaries? Baseball, for example, has been played enthusiastically in Manipur (a remote corner of northeast India) ever since the USAF introduced the game while stationed in the state during WW II. How do immigrant and exilic populations in North America deploy sports from their native lands to resist the homogenizing tendencies of their host nations? In what ways do these populations use sports—in processes overdetermined by nostalgia and pleasure—to counter the psychic misery effected by the loss of their homelands? These narratives of nostalgic recovery resisting the demands of new processes of identity recalibration (such as Americanization) often occur through sports and popular culture that are served up through the lenses of corporatized consumption. In what ways, then, do such counter-processes register, absorb, and resist the consumptive drives of corporate globalization that glosses over the histories of colonial subjugation in which these sports were often imbricated?
The panel welcomes papers that engage with, through the conceptual lenses of misery and resistance, recent scholarly efforts in American Studies that have focused both on recovering the buried transnational histories of sports before they became part of nationalizing narratives and on studying how immigrants revive old sports and bring them into the national consciousness. How do these efforts of recovery, revival, and renewal negotiate with the traces of social, economic, class, racial, sexual, and gender inequities of the colonial past? How do these revivals of 'old' sports in the 'new' geographies of North America import the miserable aftereffects of colonial histories? Many of these sports, cricket being a prime case in point, were deeply implicated in the interpellative gestures of colonial subject formation via the hegemonic construct of British 'gentlemanly conduct.' If sports can be a response to the miseries of colonial subjugation—the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, for instance, have taken the gentlemanly and very controlled game of British cricket introduced to them by Methodist ministers and transformed it into an outlet for tribal rivalry, mock warfare, eroticized dancing, community interchange, sexual innuendo, and afternoons of riotous fun—in what ways do the seemingly benign revivals of old sports in new arenas portend for a politics that both resist and participate in the glitzy allure of globalization?
Please send 250-300 words abstract and short CV by January 12, 2015 to Bimbisar Irom (b.irom@wsu.edu)