Rethinking British sport history for a decolonising present: confronting thingification and redaction

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Empire’s subaltern peoples and its justification in coloniality are strangely absent from British sport history, despite a key strand of the field being grounded in links between Empire, masculinity and sport: in this the subject reflects gaps and silences in British social history more generally. This paper that is both theoretical and historiographical explores this absence and considers ways that it might be addressed. It first sketches the coloniality of sport history as epistemology and ontology through an exploration of the field’s methodological national whiteness as redacting the agency and voice (past and present) of Indigenous and colonial subaltern peoples and implicating sport history in a continuing Imperial Archive. Although necessarily broad brush the paper concludes by examining aspects of the field that disrupt methodological nationalism and methodological whiteness to suggest ways of rethinking and recasting historians’ practice to suggest decolonial methods for British sport history that rupture in analyses of sport the constraints of the nation as anachronism and Whiteness as a fundamental characteristic of British history.