This session challenges the existence of sports, gamesmanship, and sportsmanship as exclusive entities focused majorly on sound health and amusement purposes. Ancient Egyptian and Hellenistic cultures saw sports as concomitant to war and holistic education. The Enlightenment found the empirical value of sports behind the creation of modern man, whereas in the late twentieth century, sports were elevated to the matrix of social determinants that controlled the flow of global capital and forged cultural exceptionalism. On a deeper analysis of a sports’ trajectory from its origin to its present form, we find how political ideologies and social constructs have reconstructed sports and sportspersons through the ages and across countries. Here, we explore how sports function—as a decolonizing tool in the face of colonial suppression; as a social matrix to identify and overturn racial, gender, and class discrimination; and as a commodity in the late twentieth-century transnational world shaping players and the game. The three presentations based on three different topics and genres are seamlessly integrated to destabilize the depoliticization of sports and establish the discourse of sports in the larger political, economic, and academic spaces of inquiry.

The session begins with Dr. Nathalie Bouzaglo’s paper titled “The Politics of the Corset at the End of the Nineteenth Century in Latin America.” Here, she underscores the polemics generated by a selection of Latin American texts (novels, medical theses, reports, and advertisements) about the participation of women in athletic activities. Her paper challenges the traditional female figure through the female athlete’s ability to experiment with a wide variety of bodies, sexualities, aesthetics, and politics. She focuses on the debates over the use of the corset and women’s participation in sports that went hand in hand due to the difficulty of engaging in athletic activities with a corset. In doing so, her paper analyzes the varied images of Latin American female athletes that imposed unpredictable fantasies on gender constructs while reflecting the cultural chaos towards the end of the nineteenth century in Latin America.

Moving forward, Dr. Richard Johnston draws our attention to cultural politics through the depiction of football in popular media. In “‘I'm not here to talk about football’: Ted Lasso, Sports, and Culture,” he focuses on the critically acclaimed drama series Ted Lasso to show its protracted mediation on family, class, education, mental health, and social media embedded within the macrocosm of sports. His paper underscores the generic decentering that the series performs by transferring the action from AFC Richmond’s competitive matches to the training ground, locker room, club office, local pub, and the surrounding community. Although the series evinces some indifference to English or European politics, Dr. Johnston revalidates its significance in wresting our gaze from football to football’s entanglement with money, politics, and colonialism’s aftermath.

Finally, my paper titled “Disruption of Colonial Hegemony Within the Enunciatory Space of Cricket in C.L.R. James’ Beyond a Boundary” explores the agency of sports discourse in destabilizing racial and class politics in the colonial Caribbean islands. I focus on the marginalized “zone of non-being” to dissect performance parameters, psychological heterodoxy, and alternate gamesmanship of the Black West Indian cricketers during the first half of the twentieth century. I draw on Homi Bhabha’s theory of “colonial mimicry” to ascertain how the disenfranchised Black players gain agency by disrupting the cultural dominance of White players through sporting differences and excesses. I question Gayatri Spivak’s idea of whether the subaltern player can speak against systemic discrimination in and outside the cricket field or needs an intellectual (James) to speak for them. My paper, thus, investigates West Indian cricketing discourse that subverts colonial ethics of the game and reshapes the philosophy of cricket.

As the session presider, I allot no more than 17 mins for each presentation, which gives us 9 mins to account for brief introductions, transitions, and pauses. This ensures 15 mins at the end for a rich unstructured discussion, where we first respond to questions from the audience and afterward from fellow speakers. Thus, through our succinct presentations and evocative discussions, we aim to stimulate the audience to rethink the political, economic, and cultural connotations within the episteme of sports.