Postcolonial Anxieties and the Browning of New Zealand Rugby

dc.contributor.author Grainger, Andrew D.
dc.contributor.author Falcous, Mark
dc.contributor.author Newman, Joshua I.
dc.date.accessioned 2013-09-27T23:17:26Z
dc.date.available 2013-09-27T23:17:26Z
dc.date.issued 2012
dc.description.abstract This article examines postcolonial race politics and the re-centering of embodied whiteness and mediated white bodies as constituted through “white flight” and the so-called browning of rugby in New Zealand. Previous studies have problematized the ways in which rugby union is often framed within the national imaginary as a culturally unifying space—commonly depicted as transcendent of New Zealand’s postcolonial racial tensions. Here we extend these critiques by pointing to several themes that have recently emerged within popular sports media, namely, those that position male Māori and Pacific Islander bodies as a threat to the well-being of the national game and the national identities it authorizes, and those that locate the Pākehā (white) male sporting body as under duress, or made vulnerable, by the brown-bodied, interloping “Other.” The article concludes with a discussion of how these popular representations of racialized rugby-playing bodies, in the age of global mobility and national multiculturalism, articulate to and within foundational (white) national myths of white-settler meritocracy, rurality, and coloniality.
dc.format.extent 29 pages
dc.identifier.citation Grainger, A. D., Falcous, M., and Newman, J. I. 2012. Postcolonial Anxieties and the Browning of New Zealand Rugby. The Contemporary Pacific 24 (2): 267-295.
dc.identifier.issn 1043-898X
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10125/30626
dc.publisher University of Hawai‘i Press
dc.publisher Center for Pacific Islands Studies
dc.subject New Zealand
dc.subject rugby
dc.subject multiculturalism
dc.subject postcolonialism
dc.subject national identity
dc.subject.lcsh Oceania -- Periodicals
dc.title Postcolonial Anxieties and the Browning of New Zealand Rugby
dc.type Article
dc.type.dcmi Text
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