This book considers how Samoans embraced and reshaped the English game of cricket, recasting it as a distinctively Samoan pastime, kirikiti. Starting with cricket’s introduction to the islands in 1879, it uses both cricket and kirikiti to trace six decades of contest between and within the categories of ‘colonisers’ and ‘colonised.’ How and why did Samoans adapt and appropriate the imperial game? How did officials, missionaries, colonists, soldiers and those with mixed foreign and Samoan heritage understand and respond to the real and symbolic challenges kirikiti presented? And how did Samoans use both games to navigate foreign colonialism(s)? By investigating these questions, Benjamin Sacks suggests alternative frameworks for conceptualising sporting transfer and adoption, and advances understandings of how power, politics and identity were manifested through sport, in Samoa and across the globe.

Extending the horizon of regional sport scholarship beyond the Global North, this volume offers an exciting opportunity for sociology of sport scholars to widen the scope of their research in search of fuller understandings of the forms, meanings, dynamics and impacts of sport for Pacific peoples.

This book focuses on the variety of strategies developed by women athletes in the Pacific Islands to claim contested sporting spaces – in particular, rugby union, soccer, beach volleyball, recreational sports and exercise – as a prism to explore grassroots women’s engagement with heavily entrenched postcolonial (hetero)patriarchy. Based on primary research conducted in Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the book investigates contested sporting spaces as sites of infrapolitics intersected primarily by gender and also by other markers of inequality, including ethnicity, sexuality, class and geopolitics. Contrary to historical and contemporary representations of Pacific Island women as victims of gender injustice, it explores how these athletes and those who support them actively carve out space for their transformative agency. Pacific IslandWomen and Contested Sporting Spaces: Staking Their Claim focuses on a region underexamined by sport or gender studies researchers and will be of key interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sport Studies, Sociology and Pacific Studies as well as sport practitioners and policymakers.

This groundbreaking anthology provides a transnational view of the use of physical culture practices - to strengthen, discipline, and reimagine the human body. Exploring theses of colonialism, gender disparities, and race relations, this international examination of bodily practices is a must read for all sport historians and those interested in physical training and its meanings. Erudite, solid, enlightening, this is a truly valuable book for our field.

The emergence, dominance, and alarmingly rapid retreat of modernist industrial capitalism on Cape Breton Island during the “long twentieth century” offers a particularly captivating window on the lasting and varied effects of deindustrialization. Now, at the tail end of the industrial moment in North American history, the story of Cape Breton Island presents an opportunity to reflect on how industrialization and deindustrialization have shaped human experiences. Covering the period between 1860 and the early 2000s, this volume looks at trade unionism, state and cultural responses to deindustrialization, including the more recent pivot towards the tourist industry, and the lived experiences of Indigenous and Black people. Rather than focusing on the separate or distinct nature of Cape Breton, contributors place the island within broad transnational networks such as the financial world of the Anglo-Atlantic, the Celtic music revival, the Black diaspora, Canadian development programs, and more. In capturing the vital elements of a region on the rural resource frontier that was battered by deindustrialization, the histories included here show how the interplay of the state, cultures, and transnational connections shaped how people navigated these heavy pressures, both individually and collectively.

A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry covers the period 1800 to 1920. Over this period, sport become increasingly global, some sports were radically altered, sports clubs proliferated, and new team games - such as baseball, basketball and the various forms of football - were created, codified, commercialized, and professionalized. Yet this was also an age of cultural and political tensions, when issues around the role of women, social class, ethnicity and race, imperial relationships, nation-building, and amateur and professional approaches were all shaping sport. At the same time, increasing urbanization, population, real wages and leisure time drove demand for sport ever higher, and the institutionalization and regulation of sport accelerated. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion and segregation; minds, bodies and identities; representation. Mike Huggins is Emeritus Professor at the University of Cumbria, UK. Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Sport set General Editors: Wray Vamplew, Mark Dyreson, and John McClelland

Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels. In Gridiron Capital Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural and social dynamics that have made football so central to Samoan communities. For Samoan athletes, football is not just an opportunity for upward mobility; it is a way to contribute to, support, and represent their family, village, and nation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and media analysis, Uperesa shows how the Samoan ascendancy in football is underpinned by the legacies of US empire and a set of imperial formations that mark Indigenous Pacific peoples as racialized subjects of US economic aid and development. Samoan players succeed by becoming entrepreneurs: building and commodifying their bodies and brands to enhance their football stock and market value. Uperesa offers insights into the social and physical costs of pursuing a football career, the structures that compel Pacific Islander youth toward athletic labor, and the possibilities for safeguarding their health and wellbeing in the future. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient