Jeffrey Hill

Sport Stripped Bare Deconstructing Working-Class Masculinity in “This Sporting Life”

Modernization and decline were matters of intense debate and concern in the Britain of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Among the many strands that made up the debate were the issues of gender and masculinity. This article examines them by means of a close reading of texts taken from the often-overlooked field of creative writing and film. In both the novel and film of This Sporting Life, attention is turned to questions of sporting heroism, social class and change, and, particularly, male-female relationships. The texts reveal a radical perspective on the problems of British society, seeing sport and the social and cultural conditions that sustain it as a conservative force to be confronted in the drive to modernize.

‘I'll Run Him’: Alf Tupper, Social Class and British Amateurism

The comic-book hero Alf Tupper – ‘The Tough of the Track’ – dominated the fictional world of international middle-distance running from the 1950s to the 1990s. He was a true amateur who divided his life between running and his job as a welder. To a largely working-class readership of teenage boys in the Rover and the Victor, his stories spoke of an athletics tradition that had little in common with the upper-class gentlemanly amateurism to be found in cricket, rugby or the dominant stratum of athletics itself. Alfs sport gloried in the physical pleasure and competition of running but offered a stinging critique of the social conditions in which the sport existed.

Queering the pitch: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and the cricket novel

Cricket writing both factual and fictional has been a major part of the games development. To a great extent, we understand cricket from the ways in which it has been written about. During the nineteenth and a large part of the twentieth century cricket writing was intimately connected with the games ruling aesthetic; fictions constructed and reflected certain notions about Englishness, morality and social relations. In recent years, novelists have cultivated a more subversive approach that casts the game in a different light and engages with changes that have taken place in both sport and society.

Sport and Literature A Special Issue of Sport in History: Introduction

This special issue of Sport in History presents the work of several academics who explore the literary representation of sport. A number of disciplines are covered literary criticism, sociology and cultural studies as well as history itself. Also present therefore are a variety of methodological approaches that range from looking at large-scale topics such as the centre and periphery (of writing and geographically) to looking at those of a more modest scale, including community consciousness and how it might be conveyed, and to what may be called self-narration (recently described as an ‘emotional turn’). Some contributors combine all, or most, of these in an interdisciplinary approach. Each contribution has its own style; as a whole the collection offers variety in method, conception, focus, period and place. We have considered it important to have this range of perspective. Equally we felt that, although we might see links, in treatments of competing masculinities for example, or questions of generational continuity and conflict, it would be artificial to group the articles according to any preset ‘themes’. There is no ‘party line’, but in exploring literature we wanted to stretch our readers’ expectations. The ‘core’ readership of the journal is based on historians, but not all its readers are confined to history; nor, we feel, should historians themselves be. The opening up of the subject in recent years through exposure to multiple influences and methodologies across the humanities and social sciences has, many would argue, been beneficial to the subject. Some, though, might regard what has been imported from other disciplines as undesirable, as recent debates in the journal suggest. Whatever criticisms might be voiced about this journal and its contents, however, over-adventurousness can scarcely be seen as a fault: the standard fare of Sport in History has been, and will no doubt continue to be, aligned with the mainstream traditions of the discipline. We hope, therefore, that this foray into ‘hybridization’

The detachment of West Indies cricket from the nationalist scaffold

West Indian people have made their greatest single cultural investment in cricket. This commitment of effort and emotion profoundly shaped the mindscape of citizens, and led to the allocation of scarce financial resources that enabled physical infrastructures to dominate the landscape of each territory. As a deeply rooted historical process it has had several implications for critical aspects of anti-colonialism and the nation- building project. While the enormity of this enterprise is generally grasped, there are important aspects that often elude general attention. Two such aspects are the historic depth and ethnic participation of the process. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the zenith of the slavery period, masters and slaves were passionate participants in the game, and made separate preparations for its future. By the 1830s, when the regional slave system collapsed in the face of intense human-rights pressures, cricket was well on its way to becoming the first expression of Caribbean popular culture. This experience in cultural development is often narrated without specific reference to its fundamental multi-ethnic nature. While colonial white elites imported and domesticated the game, branding it for respectability with the ‘whites only’ tag, equally important was its appropriation by disenfranchised blacks who propelled its development as a site of racial and class contest. By the mid nineteenth century cricket had spilled out from these narrow social confines and found fertile ground in the larger communities of the emerging white and coloured middle classes, and the black labouring poor.

Cricket and international politics

The first agreed rules of modern cricket were laid down in the 1720s. This makes it, effectively, the only modern sport to be established in a pre-nationalist age. For much of its history cricket has been seen as the quirky and defining game both of the English and of the British Empire. While historians divide over whether cricket was an element in some civilising mission on the part of the imperial power or whether it was simply adopted by colonial people, it is clear that the inhabitants of contemporary India, Australia, Barbados, Bangladesh and elsewhere were playing cricket long before these territories were recognised as nations. As an international sport, crickets present is defined by its imperial past. Ten nations qualify to play Test cricket. One is England; the other nine are all former British colonies – three of which (Australia, South Africa and New Zealand) were established as semi-autonomous dominions between 1901 and 1910. These countries all had substantial native populations, but exclusively ‘white’ governments. Formally constituted international cricket dates from this period: the Imperial Cricket Conference came into being in 1909, with England, South Africa and Australia its only members. Test matches, it was decreed, should be those solely involving the representative elevens of these three countries. (New Zealand, the third cricket-playing dominion, was allowed to compete in Test matches from 1930 onward.) The word ‘politics’ rarely, if ever, entered the discourse of cricket in these times.

Hero, celebrity and icon: Sachin Tendulkar and Indian public culture

121508992363-1-1-5 Public Culture 1988 Volume 1, Number 1: 5-9. Show PDF in full window Full Text PDF.This special issue of Public Culture is, and is not, about Africa. Would have little value, both for Public Cultures readers and for us as editors. Why?Eric Klinenberg. Public Culture 2015 272 76: 197-199 doi: 10. Full Text Full Text PDF. In recent months, much of the worlds attention has turned to Anonymous, the rhizomatic, digitally based.Public Culture. It is today widely recognized that world capitalism is in the throes of a massive wave of.Public Culture is a peer-reviewed academic journal of cultural studies, established in 1988 by anthropologists Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai and.Public Culture. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and.show less. Christianity and Public Culture in Africa takes the reader beyond Africas apparent. Pdf icon Download PDF 153. Read more.Public Culture 14. Access article in HTML Access article in PDF. Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Spheretion of courts in American public culture, this essay explains how the contradictory embrace of. Pdf. 14 Congress and the Public, Gallup, 2014.In Culture and Public Action. Rao, Vijayendra and Michael Walton ed. The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of.Public Culture. 22 consequences and reinvent our own type of existence, political, economic and cultural. Instead of rejecting sexual norms that were meant to.well to the editors of Public Culture for their helpful suggestions and improvements. I wrote this article while resident at the Scientific Research Center, Slovene.I would like to thank Kelly Brewer, Caitrin Lynch, the editors of Public Culture. Following Sharon Zukin 1995, I call this urban space a public culture, which.PUBLIC BOOKS Go to June 1 Issue Public Culture. Public Culture is a reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year in.Public Culture in. Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations. Public culture : bulletin of the Project for Transnational Cultural Studies.

Football and literature in South America

The literature of sport has now assumed an established place in sport studies, recognized for its importance even by those whose background is not a literary one. The idea that sport is less an obj...

Cricket and Community in England, 1800 to the Present Day

of his regime. Next, another excellent chapter explains how the dictatorial government of Brazil controlled the configuration of the national team it sent to the 1970 FIFA World Cup (which eventually won) and, still more interestingly, the creation of local teams that were included in the national league as a strategy to distract the people from politics. This gave rise to the famous saying in Brazil, ‘wherever the government has any problem it creates a local team, and where it has no problems, too’. It is also worth mentioning how the Corinthians team, captained by the player Socrates, used football to try to democratise the regime, by means of several democratic gestures (e.g. playing with the word ‘democracia’ stamped on the shirts). A chapter about Iraq closes the section and includes a description of the ways the dictatorial regime tried to control football; players from any team could be transferred to the leader’s favourite team; prison and torture were exerted over teams that did not live up to the expectations of that same leader and so on. In the conclusion, the author offers some suggestive reflections, recognising that football – above all at international level – is ‘a very important thing’, and so to try to take advantage of it is a behaviour not only exclusive to dictatorships (as shown above) but also common in democratic regimes. He rightly points out that South Africa tried to improve its international image with the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and largely succeeded, and that Brazil now seeks the same result with the 2014 FIFA World Cup. It is only logical, he points out, that since organising those events costs a lot of money to the host nations, they want to get something positive in exchange. In the same way (although the author does not mention it), democratic regimes also use the successes of their national teams to try to boost the image of their nations. In Spain, for example, the triumphs of its national football team in 2010 and 2012 have been used by the government (and by all sectors of Spanish society) to lift the country’s morale. In conclusion, this is a useful and generally comprehensive book for those who want to start researching in the subject, who will find it a practical general overview of the theme and a good analysis of the main cases to study, but which would need to be followed up with more detailed reading subsequently.

Martin Polley, The British Olympics: Britain’s Olympic Heritage 1612-2012

competition and budgeting and/or cultural, political and human rights proved too difficult. Symons traces the differences in philosophies in her coverage of Gay Games VII (with a large sport programme) and the first Outgames (with a large cultural and conference programme). As Symons makes the point, this schism in the social movement of the Gay Games was painful for many people involved. The concluding chapter highlights the positive effects of the Gay Games as well as the Outgames on LGBTQI (Queer and Intersex) communities and sport culture. As Symons stresses, ‘[t]he Gay Games have been an alternative Games’ (p. 247). As such, they have challenged and continue to challenge prevailing homophobia and heterosexism in sport and in society. In her book, Symons skilfully examines the complexities and intricacies of this challenge for the period 1982 to 2006.