Sports Mobilities Across Borders: Postcolonial Perspectives

Abstract

The circulation of mobile professional athletes, a phenomenon whose visibility increased exponentially in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, poses important questions for postcolonial approaches to the human condition. At first glance, the orientation of entire segments of the population in some countries in the global South to the possibility of migrating to sport careers in the global North seems to reproduce patterns of economic dependence of the world's peripheries on the world's centres, with the latter obtaining resources from the former in non-reciprocal fashion. A more nuanced approach, however, demands that these dynamics be framed in a broader context of multiple power relations that are at once local and global, material and ideational, and rooted in complex histories that have somewhat obscured colonial relations of yesteryears. This approach is illustrated here with materials about migration-oriented football academies in West Africa and the transnational circulation of Pacific Island rugby players.