The history of colonial spaces teaches that sporting practices imported by imperial powers, far from being the unequivocal imposition of a culture, testify to practices of reappropriation on the part of peoples, as shown in the collective work directed by Pierre Singaravélou and Julien Sorez.
Affirming that sport is today a globalized physical practice and governed by universal codes which allow exchanges between peoples is a commonplace that the collective work directed by Pierre Singaravélou and Julien Sorez largely invites us to overcome. Certainly, like football, all of the regulations or techniques appear standardized in the eyes of spectators. However, we neglect to question the historical and cultural reasons which separate the styles of play. Thus, the game “ English style » characterized by the traditional kick-and-rush is not the South American game based on a refined touch of the ball and a propensity to eliminate the opponent with short dribbles. The starting point of this work is to reverse the prism traditionally used by sports historians to explain the diffusion of these specific physical practices in the colonial space. In other words, where historiography essentially focuses on understanding the diffusion of modern sports, through the colonial relationships between the center and the periphery, the interest here is to consider the circulation of sporting practices that make possible interactions between settlers and colonized.
Sport and empire: complexity and plurality
Faced with the immensity of the task, the preface and the introduction accurately establish the modalities which govern the circulation of sports. Whether economic, cultural, geographical or linked to political imperialism, most indicators of the globalization of modern sports are unconvincing because they are reductive for those who adopt a global perspective. Thus, the imposition of a sporting culture by European populations within the framework of colonial relations is not sufficient to understand the processes of circulation of sporting practices. Even if sport can be considered a privileged domain of the colonial encounter, it remains true that the fragmentation of approaches seems to impoverish the debate in the field of the imperial history of sport. The compartmentalization of analyzes by sporting activities (football, rugby, etc.) or by categories “ social » (military, young people, etc.) limits the perspective of the relationships between dominant and dominated. This is the whole point of this work: to measure, beyond the sociabilities of the colonial world, the adjustments of sport linked to the interactions between indigenous peoples and metropolitan people. Going beyond the logic of “ cultural imperialism », the circulation of modern sports stimulates intercultural appropriations, ruling out the idea of a simple acculturation of colonized peoples. The circulation of sporting practices, punctuated by the dialectic between imposition and appropriation, thus outlines a complex and unexpected geography. The agreed relationship between the metropolis conceived as center and the colony as periphery is replaced by a complex order which reveals an early redistribution of imperial sporting excellence, the emergence of a colonial territory in the process of becoming autonomous through relation to the metropolis and even a “ reverse circulation » practices.
Sport and Empire: what constructions of Man ?
After this dense phase of delimitation and clarification of the object of study, the organization of the book into three parts opens up numerous and rich perspectives. The first part aims to analyze the role of sporting practices in the construction of cultural and social identities within the colonial world. The study of African football and Indian cricket shows how sport, an instrument of colonial domination, is recovered by the natives. It then contributes to questioning European domination and serves as a vector for the affirmation of national identities for colonies seeking independence. One of the privileged points of observation of the appropriation of sporting practices is the question of gender and more particularly the construction of an alternative masculinity. By redefining new norms and new bodily techniques, the indigenous people not only attempted to challenge the Western model of sporting excellence, they also modified the process of cultural domination by reinterpreting the social codes of sporting practice. This work of transforming attitudes and technical gestures, by building a masculinity different from that conveyed by the settlers, has enabled the integration of sport into the process of national affirmation.
The second part of the work focuses on the study of the space of sports from an imperial perspective. Sports practice indeed participates in the construction of a colonial territory. Thus, the Algerian car raids and cycling tours are the expression of a Frenchized space, useful for the stability and permanence of the French presence in the Maghreb. They not only contribute to marking the colonial territory with the seal of French technological modernity but they also make it possible to mobilize and strengthen imperial ideology in the metropolis. The function of marking out colonial space is also very present in hunting, closely associated in early Great Britain. XIXe century to sporting practices, which offered the British, in the colonial context, the means of symbolically appropriating certain privileges from indigenous powers. If the practice of hunting indeed contributes to the diversion of economic resources from local societies, it also represents a vector of appropriation of indigenous territory. The multiplication of safaris, the creation of reserves and the codification of the practice in the sense of a “ sportivization » lead to a progressive marginalization of the natives for the benefit of Europeans alone.
The legacy of colonial sporting models in mainland France
The last part of the work considers the question of the legacy left by a century of colonial history. The establishment of modern sports in the contemporary world seems to result from the expansion of the formal British, French and Spanish Empires but also from the development, particularly from the Second World War, of informal Empires such as that of the United States. Many territories have been subject to this double imperial influence, like Latin America, which asserts itself with the success of football as one of the spaces most receptive to British practice and through basketball as a zone of American influence. As for the French Empire, Laurent Dubois, professor of history at Duke University, undertakes a post-colonial analysis of the composition of the French football team. Isn’t its identity partly the result of a special relationship between France and its colonies of which Marius Trésor or Zinedine Zidane are the products? ? The liberation of bodies and the construction of West Indian dignity after the end of slavery, combined with the integration and recognition of the republican framework, allowed France between the wars to be a pioneer in the incorporation of players from the colonies into the French team. However, football, a vector of unity around a republican culture, is at the same time a source of inspiration for nationalist and independence movements as evidenced by the emblematic team of the FLNone of the first symbols of the Algerian nation. The media coverage of football, particularly on the occasion of the repeated successes of the national team at the turn of the XXIe century, depicts the difficult integration of the colonial past and the delicate interpretation of the integration of nationals of former French colonies.
In total, through these various contributions, the unique project of a transnational history of sporting practices is taking shape that the directors of the work are calling for and which, alone, makes it possible to understand the complexity of the processes of “ cultural globalization “.