Sport in the Black Atlantic
Globalizing Sport Studies
Series editor: John Horne, Professor of Sport and Sociology,
University of Central Lancashire, UK
Public interest in sport studies continues to grow throughout the world. This series brings together the latest work in the field and acts as a global knowledge hub for interdisciplinary work in sport studies. While promoting work across disciplines, the series focuses on social scientific and cultural studies of sport. It brings together the most innovative scholarly empirical and theoretical work, from within the UK and internationally.
Books previously published in this series by Bloomsbury Academic:
Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures
David Rowe
Japanese Women and Sport: Beyond Baseball and Sumo
Robin Kietlinski
Sport for Development and Peace: A Critical Sociology
Simon Darnell
Globalizing Cricket: Englishness, Empire and Identity
Dominic Malcolm
Global Boxing
Kath Woodward
Sport and Social Movements: From the Local to the Global
Jean Harvey, John Horne, Parissa Safai, Simon Darnell and Sebastien Courchesne-ONeill
Football Italia: Italian Football in an Age of Globalization
Mark Doidge
Books previously published in this series by Manchester University Press:
The Greening of Golf: Sport, Globalization and the environment
Brad Millington and Brad Wilson
Sport and Technology: An Actor-Network Theory perspective
Roslyn Kerr
Sport in the Black Atlantic
Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean diaspora
Janelle Joseph
Manchester University Press
Copyright Janelle Joseph 2017
The right of Janelle Joseph to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 1 7849 9407 5 hardback
First published 2017
An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC) licence.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Typeset by Out of House Publishing
There is now a considerable amount of expertise nationally and internationally in the social scientific and cultural analysis of sport in relation to the economy and society more generally. Contemporary research topics, such as sport and social justice, science/technology and sport, global social movements and sport, sports mega-events, sports participation and engagement and the role of sport in social development, suggest that sport and social relations need to be understood in non-Western developing economies, as well as European, North American and other advanced capitalist societies. The current high global visibility of sport makes this an excellent time to launch a major new book series that takes sport seriously, and makes this research accessible to a wide readership.
The series Globalizing Sport Studies is thus in line with a massive growth of academic expertise, research output and public interest in sport worldwide. At the same time, it seeks to use the latest developments in technology and the economics of publishing to reflect the most innovative research into sport in society currently underway in the world. The series is multidisciplinary, although primarily based on the social sciences and cultural studies approaches to sport.
The broad aims of the series are as follows: to act as a knowledge hub for social scientific and cultural studies research in sport, including, but not exclusively, anthropological, economic, geographic, historical, political science and sociological studies; to contribute to the expanding field of research on sport in society in the United Kingdom and internationally by focusing on sport at regional, national and international levels; to create a series for both senior and more junior researchers that will become synonymous with cutting-edge research, scholarly opportunities and academic development; to promote innovative discipline-based, multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches to researching sport in society; to provide an English language outlet for high-quality non-English writing on sport in society; to publish broad overviews, original empirical research studies and classic studies from non-English sources; and thus attempt to realise the potential for globalising sport studies through open content licensing with Creative Commons.
Caribbean cricket, especially the elite, professional game, has long been recognised as a force for unifying communities throughout the entire Caribbean region. In Sport in the Black Atlantic: Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean Diaspora, Janelle Joseph critically examines the meanings of being black and Caribbean in Canada. She reveals how cricket operates within the ranks of the diaspora, as a force for unity but also for exclusions, hierarchies and chauvinisms and replicates social divisions in the broader society.
Joseph demonstrates the ways in which first-generation Afro-Caribbean-Canadian immigrants culinary, musical, language, destination and, especially, sporting choices actively help the diaspora to construct homelands. She explores the ways in which playing and watching sport, and supporting or travelling with a sport club, are important to creating racialised, gendered, ethnic and/or national identities. In doing so, she extends, theoretically and empirically, the promise of intersectional analyses of race, gender and globalisation in sport.
The books chapters explore everyday life and the construction of community, as well as the place of transnational mobility in the formation of social networks. Examining the activities of an Afro-Caribbean-Canadian cricket and social club reveals much about Caribbean and Canadian belonging, pure and hybrid racial identities, transnational social networks and performances of nation and masculinity.
Sport in the Black Atlantic also moves beyond earlier analyses to suggest that the gendering of Afro-Caribbean diasporic cultural forms leads to the occupation of different spaces and roles for men and women. In this way, it contributes to the feminist critique of black diaspora studies by showing women to be an integral part of the Black Atlantic. The book builds on foundational sport and diaspora literature to explore how borderless racial and ethnic communities are made. In doing so, Joseph provokes the need for further examinations of other black diasporas in the context of specific nationalisms, transnational networks and physical cultural forms.
John Horne,
Preston and Edinburgh
