ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to introduce approaches to the study of the sportized body from a postcolonial perspective. Like postmodernism, with which it shares several characteristics, postcolonialism can be looked at in three ways. The chapter considers briefly postcolonialism as an epoch or time-period. It looks at what postcolonial sport might be, the postcolonial as content. The chapter focuses on postcolonial method in connection with sports. Postcolonial sport could be said to have arrived when the first ‘Third World’ sports workers arrived in ‘First World Sport’. In recent decades, postcolonial sport has been seen as a form of resistance – by colonies or post-/neo-colonies. A central theme of postcolonial methodology derives from the so-called crisis of representation, which is regarded as common to most disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Representation, via the written word, has been crucial in colonial ‘constructions’ of the colonized athlete.