Sport in the Pacific ─ Colonial and Postcolonial Consequences

Sport in the Pacific is a comparative consideration of the modern movement of Pacific peoples and their physical pursuits across national and cultural boundaries. It covers Australia, Japan and the United States. Its contributors ensure a deeper understanding of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific—particularly their social identities and cultural responses in the wake of the arrival of modern sport. Sport in the Pacific comprises eight original contributions which analyze Polynesian and Abogirnal athletes and athletics in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Their analyses stress the importance of adaptation and appropriation, reinvention and revivialism, as well as diaspora and globalization. The volume will have three overlapping themes: change and continuity, cultural and transcultural power, and the complexity of race, gender, and national identity. Sport in the Pacific, in short, compares the significance of modern sport in a largely ignored setting: the indigenous societies of the Pacific.

This book was previously published as a special issue of International Journal of the History of Sport.

C. Richard King, professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, has written extensively on the changing position of Native Americans in post-Civil Rights America, the colonial legacies and postcolonial predicaments of American culture, and the racial politics of sport. He is also the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy (a CHOICE 2001 Outstanding Academic Title) Postcolonial America, Visual Economies of/in Motion: Sport and Film and Native Americans and Sport in North America (Sport and Global Society Series).