Performing nations, disrupting states: sporting identities in nations without states

• Published in: National Identities
• Main Authors: MacLean, Malcolm, Field, Russell
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis 2014
• Subjects: GV557 Sports; Cornish; Norway; Northern Norway; sami
• Online Access: https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/1638/; https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/1638/1/Performing%20nations,%20disrupting%20states.pdf; http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14608944.2014.930427#; https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2014.930427

This special issue of National Identities explores the social and cultural practises of nationhood and the articulation of nations and states in sport contexts. The dominant models of nations and nationalism studies centre on a received paradigm that has an implicit but seldom critically articulated association with states – that is, the nation-state equation appears as axiomatic in many cases of nationalism studies where the received version of politics holds that a nation without a state is incomplete or in some way not a real nation. This issue unpicks these issues through a set of discussions that will explore one of the most pervasive, banal, and comprehensive areas of this taken-for-granted association of culture, nations and states, i.e., sport. There is a set of sports and other cultural practices that disrupt this axiomatic association of nations/states and identities: we see these in, for instance, indigenous sports (such as the question of the Iroquois Nationals' travel documents, visas and attendance at the World Lacrosse Championships), events such as the VIVA World Cup for football teams representing nations without states, in various post-national and post-colonial understandings of sport-as-cultural practice such as the place of cricket in South Asian and West Indies diaspora communities, and in transnational/transcultural sports events such as the Francophone Games that seem to be premised on a cultural nation beyond the state. Papers in the issue analyse rugby, wine and regional identies in France (Occitania), Cornish sporting identities, the potential for normative rules of international sports representation, Circassian sporting identities in the context of Russian nationialism associated with the winter Olympics in Sochi, national and indigenous associations of skiing in northern Norway (Sami) and claims to nationhood in the context of the 2010 VIVA Football World Cup. Our opening essay considers the question of the palce of the state in claims to sporting nationalism.