Deconstructing Sport History

Murray G. Phillips - Editor

Description

This groundbreaking collection challenges the accepted principles and practices of sport history and encourages sport historians to be more adventurous in their representations of the sporting past in the present. Encompassing a wide range of critical approaches, leading international sport historians reflect on theory, practice, and the future of sport history. They survey the field of sport history since its inception, examine the principles that have governed the production of knowledge in sport history, and address the central concerns raised by the postmodern challenge to history. Sharing a common desire to critique contemporary practices in sport history, the contributors raise the level of critical analysis of the production of historical knowledge, provide examples of approaches by those who have struggled with or adapted to the postmodern challenge, and open up new avenues for future sport historians to follow.
Foreword
Alun Munslow

Introduction: Sport History and Postmodernism
Murray G. Phillips

Part One: On Theory

1. Sport Historians: What Do We Do? How Do We Do It?
Douglas Booth

2. Sport History between the Modern and Postmodern
Brett Hutchins

3. A Linguistic Turn into Sport History
Michael Oriard

Part Two: On Practice

4. Partial Knowledge: Photographic Mystifications and Constructions of “The African Athlete”
John Bale

5. Anecdotal Evidence: Sport, the Newspaper Press, and History
Jeffrey Hill

6. Wasn’t It Ironic? The Haxey Hood and the Great War
Catriona M. Parratt

7. Decentering “Race” and (Re)presenting “Black” Performance in Sport History: Basketball and Jazz in American Culture, 1920-1950
Steven W. Pope

Part Three: On the Future

8. Beyond Traditional Sports Historiography: Toward a Historical “Holograph”
Robert E. Rinehart

9. Contact with God, Body, and Soul: Sport History and the Radical Orthodoxy Project
Synthia Sydnor

10. Time Gentlemen Please: The Space and Place of Gender in Sport History
Patricia Vertinsky

Conclusion
Murray G. Phillips

List of Contributors
Index
SUNY Series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations

Sujets

• Sport
• Autour du sport
• Histoire du sport
• Autres sports
• Historiography
• History of sport

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791482506
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

DECONSTRUCTING SPORT HISTORY

SUNY series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations CL Cole and Michael A. Messner, editors

Deconstructing Sport History

A Postmodern Analysis

Edited by Murray G. Phillips with a Foreword by Alun Munslow

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2006 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 122102384

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Deconstructing sport history : a postmodern analysis / edited by Murray G. Phillips ; foreword by Alun Munslow. p. cm. — (SUNY series on sport, culture, and social relations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0791466094 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0791466108 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sports—Sociological aspects. 2. Sports—History. I. Phillips, Murray G. (Murray George) II. Series.

GV706.5.D395 2005 306.4'83—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2004030963

Contents

Foreword Alun Munslow Introduction: Sport History and Postmodernism Murray G. Phillips

PART ONE: ON THEORY

1. Sport Historians: What Do We Do? How Do We Do It? Douglas Booth 2. Sport History between the Modern and Postmodern Brett Hutchins 3. A Linguistic Turn into Sport History Michael Oriard

PART TWO: ON PRACTICE

4. Partial Knowledge: Photographic Mystifications and Constructions of “The African Athlete” John Bale 5. Anecdotal Evidence: Sport, the Newspaper Press, and History Jeffrey Hill 6. Wasn’t It Ironic? The Haxey Hood and the Great War Catriona M. Parratt

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Contents

7. Decentering “Race” and (Re)presenting “Black” Performance in Sport History: Basketball and Jazz in American Culture, 1920–1950 S. W. Pope

PART THREE: ON THE FUTURE

8. Beyond Traditional Sports Historiography: Toward a Historical “Holograph” Robert E. Rinehart 9. Contact with God, Body, and Soul: Sport History and the Radical Orthodoxy Project Synthia Sydnor 10. Time Gentlemen Please: The Space and Place of Gender in Sport History Patricia Vertinsky Conclusion Murray G. Phillips

List of Contributors Index SUNY Series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations

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Foreword

As a history undergraduate, in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, I was told that only through an unrelenting diligence in the archive could I move toward better, balanced, and justified explanations about what happened in the past. And, of course, only through rational inference might I be able to tell what it most likely meant. In this way I learned that the logic of history was empiricism, analysis, and hypothesis testing. I was also schooled to accept that the basis of history was the single statement of justified belief. Moreover, an important corollary to this was also dinned into me. It was that as long as historians are reasonable people, disinterested in their accounts, evenhanded and not judgemental in their inferences, and are happy with tiny incremental advances in knowledge, then the discipline does not merely hold to objectivity and truth as regulatory ideals, but they can be achieved. So it is the natural state of affairs, I was also informed, that historical expla nations are always provisional and that this provisionality is of a particularly worthy kind, indeed, the only kind of provisionality worth having. It was and is the provisionality of interpretation. History is an interpretation because it is always conditional on the estimable triad of new evidence, better inference, and the application of improved conceptualization/theory that explains the widest possible range of available evidence. This virtuous circle is, therefore, the ultimate shield against mendacity and partiality. Briefly, but sternly, I was warned not to confuse provisionality with rela tivism. In other words, the possibility of truthful historical knowledge is there, but only if you do not step outside the empiricalanalytical pentacle. It was only later—after I had become a professional historian and pos sessed a hardcore social science PhD—that I read Hayden White’sMetahis tory. I then lapsed. I began to wonder if the logic of history that I had been taught might not, in fact, exhaust its nature. Inevitably I began to wonder if provisionality in historical interpretation could have something to do with the possibility of historical knowledge itself. In other words, was the

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Foreword

ontology of history even more complicated than I had been led to believe? What I got from White (and other philosophers of history such as Mink, Ankersmit, Danto, Carr, Jenkins, and Ricoeur in their own ways) was a pro found uncertainty about history as some kind of reconstruction or facsimile or something that was even better: an explanation of what the past really meant! Although the “linguistic turn” now sounds faintly old hat in the face of many new “history turns” it is worth recalling that it was not so long ago that it was briefly fashionable to criticize reconstructionist naïve empiricism. But now that particular stalking horse has gone the way of all horseflesh (surely I am not being too optimistic here?) I still harbor doubts that we are yet, as a profession, selfconscious enough to label our constructionist history with a poststructuralist and antinarrativist health warning. But, as this col lection so clearly reveals, history is as much about the historian and the pres ent and its own future as it is about the past itself. Happily, history will always have a future as long as we do not forget to debate the nature of its provisionality and the relationship between interpretation and explanation. Epistemological skepticism is not intellectual irresponsibility. It is, rather, an honest and, perforce, a demanding ethical excursion into that dangerous territory we call “uncertainty”—uncertainty about knowledge of the real, the (im)possibility of objectivity, how we create “historical con cepts” that purport to offer an explanatory match with what happened and, not least, the indeterminacy of our representations. Arguably, the past is only as fixed as our images of it and the metaphors we substitute for it. What we constitute as “the past” is no more rigid than our present practices of classi fication and description. Once we understand that we can free ourselves of the belief that the past is over and done with: that the past does not change. As this collection so clearly reveals, we can usefully and fully engage with “thepastashistory,” we can do it “meaningfully,” but only once we let go of the certainties in which I, for one, was trained. This is a collection that I strongly commend to everyone who has an open mind about his or her engagement with the time before now.

Alun Munslow

Introduction

Sport History and Postmodernism

MURRAY G. PHILLIPS

In our contemporary or postmodern world, history conceived of as an empirical research method based upon the belief in some reasonably accurate correspondence between the past, its interpretation and its nar rative representative is no longer a tenable conception of the task of the historian. —Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History

nDeconstructing History, Alun Munslow offers a critique of the empirical I research method that provides a direct challenge to sport history and a glimpse into the wider turmoil in the historical profession. Disagreements, dissention, and controversy are certainly nothing new to the historical pro fession, but the last couple of decades have witnessed a growing critique of fundamental historical practices that have characterized the discipline. The creation of specific journals, such asRethinking History, and an increasing range of books from the 1980s by prominent historians and philosophers indicate both an expanding interest in and, as Munslow mandates above, a growing skepticism of historical practices. As E. H. Carr was more than well 1 aware, the perennial question “what is history?” refuses to go away. What is specifically pertinent for this book is that the interest in histor ical practices has not been reflected in the subdiscipline of sport history. An analysis of Englishlanguage historical journals includingSport History Review, theJournal of Sport History,The International Journal of the History of Sport, andSporting Traditionsillustrate minimal interest in critiquing the 2 ways in which sport history has been created and produced. As Table I.1

1