Critical Reflections On Physical Culture At The Edges Of Empire Francois Johannes Cleophas by Francois Johannes Cleophas 9781928480686, 1928480683 instant download after payment.

Colonisation was imposed upon indigenous people, not only through brute power of military conquest, but also through cultural assimilation. This assimilation was not homogeneous, and the colonised often produced a different outcome to what the coloniser expected. This collection of essays thus portrays new ontologies of decolonising themes in physical culture. They recognise the depth of previous exclusions and start a process of reconstituting qualitative histories of excluded voices of the past. They conform to what the writer, Sindiwe Magona, relayed at a recent community gathering: “I write for ordinary people ... to understand the power of domestic workers over domesticity.” In imitation of Andre Odendaal’s (2018:2) work on cricket, they put into place “new paradigms for understanding [physical culture’s] past and present by rooting the accounts in it’s social, economic, political and global context”. The foundation of this publication, with chapters of varying lengths, is that the gains made by oppressed and marginalised sport persons in colonial contexts are not innocent – they come with the baggage of coloniality (Mignolo, 2013). The writers of this publication are therefore wary not to make past grievances mythical in the present (Leipoldt, 2000:108). What these essays do is expose the interconnectivity between physical culture and the underbelly of colonial society. In more explicated terms, these essays explore physical culture beyond the mainstream narratives endorsed by imperial structures of power and knowledge. The contributors thus approach physical culture with two propositions: First, the body is always dialectic, which is to say its meanings are produced by, and are productive of, wider contexts and social structures. Second, the body is political and politicising, which means it actively contributes to systems of power rather than passively receiving their affects (McLeod & Matthew, 2020:87)
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