[SAHS] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Of Interest / The Historiography of the South African Sports Boycott

[Sean Jacobs]

Abstract

There is now a broad consensus that sports were central to the
projects of imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid in South Africa,
but that sports boycotts also played a significant part in apartheid’s
downfall. The foundational histories of the sports boycott researched
and written during apartheid are derived from two different but
interrelated sources: accounts by leaders and activists and those by
activist-academics and researchers. The second group included
professional historians, political scientists, sociologists, and
journalists. Since the late 1990s and into the first decades of the
next century, revisionist histories of aspects of the sports boycott
began to proliferate, revisiting events in major sports like the
Olympic games, rugby, cricket, and soccer but also uncovering the
histories of marginal sports. The work is, however, relegated largely
to subfields like international and diplomatic history, conference
sections on the history of sports, specialist journals, or via the
revival of the memoir as a genre.

Link: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/45139/chapter-abstract/467425718?redirectedFrom=fulltext


-- 
Sean Jacobs is a professor of international affairs at The New School
and publisher of Africa is a Country.