Sport and South Asian Diasporas ― Playing Through Time and Space

This original collection demonstrates the importance of sporting practices, spaces and leisure affiliations to understanding issues around identity, (post-) migration, diaspora and transnationalism for global South Asian populations. The chapters provide a critical (re-) examination of the roles that sport plays within and in relation to South Asian groups in the diaspora, and raises a series of pertinent questions regarding the multifarious relationships between sport and South Asianness. The chapters range across a wide variety of disciplines, regions, sports and identifications. They are in conversation with each other while showing the particularity of each diasporic context and relationship to sport. The book encompasses a number of global contexts from the "homeland" (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan) to the diaspora (Fiji, Norway, the US, the UK), and addresses a broad range of sporting contexts, including basketball, boxing, cricket, cycling, field hockey, soccer and golf. The chapters combine a range of qualitative methods, including ethnography, auto-ethnography, participant observation, memoir, interview and textual analysis (film, television and print media). This collection comprises the latest cutting edge research in the field, and will be essential reading for scholars and students both of sport and South Asian diasporas.

This book was published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Daniel Burdsey is Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK. His research expertise lies in the areas of race, sport, leisure and popular culture, with particular focus on British Asian communities. He is the author of British Asians and Football: Culture, Identity and Exclusion (Routledge, 2007) and the editor of Race, Ethnicity and Football: Persisting Debates and Emergent Issues (Routledge, 2011).

Stanley Thangaraj is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, USA. He investigates the relationship between South Asian American masculinity, basketball, and challenges to the racialization of South Asian American communities. He is the author of the forthcoming book Brown Out, Man Up! Basketball, Leisure, and Making Desi Masculinity. Thangaraj is also a co-editor of the book Asian American Sporting Cultures.

Rajinder Dudrah is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. He has researched and published widely in film, media and cultural studies in international journals. His books include, amongst others, Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Hindi Cinema (Routledge, 2012); Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond (2007); Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies (2006); The Bollywood Reader (with Jigna Desai, 2008); and Theorising World Cinema (with Lucia Nagib and Chris Perriam, 2011).