Deconstructing Sport History: A Postmodern Analysis

2. Sport History between the Modern and Postmodern

CHAPTER 2 Sport History between the Modern and Postmodern BRETT HUTCHINS In dealing with the challenge of postmodern historiography and theory to traditional modes of history, most of us will keep doing what we have always done—attempting to understand the past from the present. The contribution of postmodern thought, however, has been to encourage critical reflection on the processes and methods involved in writing about the past. In an age variously described as late modernity, radical modernity, liquid modernity, globalized, postfeminist, postcolonial and postindustrial, it is practical to engage with the giddying effect of postmodern thinking on the practice and understanding of history. Many of the challenges issued by this school of thought (if it can be thought of in these terms) are relevant and are irreducible to the ambivalence, uncertainty, risk, and anxiety that are central to contemporary social experience. Postmodern thought represents the interrogation of the self, a social and cultural order attempting to dissect former certainties that no longer hold or occasionally even make sense, and as part of this, a past that no longer speaks for itself. It is a traditional order turned upside down and hostile to the maintenance of illusions. Postmodern thinkers ask useful questions about the epistemological and ontological foundations of the historical enterprise. They seek to bring into sight what would otherwise remain hidden in the assumptions of traditional historical approaches, particularly surrounding notions of objectivity, subject position, and truth. Keith Jenkins, Alun Munslow, Robert F. Berkhofer, Patrick Joyce, and F. R. Ankersmit have all supplied demanding and thought-provoking books and articles addressing how and why we write history .1 The study of the past can no longer be an end in itself, if it ever was. 55 None of what has been said so far implies that postmodern historiography has or can devour traditional historical approaches or understanding. Debates between empiricist-cum-scientific historians and advocates of postmodern thinking have been unfolding for the past twenty-five years or more. These dialogues regularly end in deadlock and disengagement, often due to the assertions made and intemperate language used by antagonists. Stereotypically , the “corrosive logic” of the dreaded postmodernists is cast against the “naivety” of the uptight traditionalists.2 This antipathy has created a seemingly unbridgeable divide that I argue is a false one, in that it fails to reflect the diversity of historical practice and the myriad approaches to the study of the past. Only a small number of sport historians have addressed the issues introduced by “postist” theories.3 Journals such as The International Journal of the History of Sport appear to farm out explicitly theoretical articles to sociology and cultural studies publications such as Culture, Sport, Society. The implication of this practice is that postmodern and theoretical approaches to the past are not considered proper or authentic history. Australia’s Sporting Traditions has lately published the occasional article, but this has come after a protracted and regressive debate over “history” versus “theory.” Journal of Sport History and Sport History Review appear open to the publication of the occasional article on postmodern historiography, which indicates a grudging engagement with the issues raised by an attempted reconfiguration of the historical project. Sport history’s lack of engagement with postmodern concepts and theories is disappointing as what is proposed in practice is not necessarily destructive to an understanding of the past. Jenkins, one of the most prolific practitioners among the postmodern brigade, is only half right when he claims that the traditional approaches of E. H. Carr and Geoffrey R. Elton are irrelevant in our “new times.”4 There is little doubt that history as a discipline has moved on from Carr and Elton, but any postmodern replacement is intrinsically reliant on modernist orthodoxies for its analysis and arguments . It is difficult to make a definitive break from modernist conceptions of history in the current social milieu. The postmodern needs the modern to award it conceptual, theoretical, and practical coherency. It is this dialectical interaction between the modern and postmodern that has become a guiding principle of historical practice. This chapter argues that most historians analyze, research, and write in the crosscurrent of postmodern historiography and traditional empiricist modes of writing history. The contested relationship between these positions has resulted in searching questions on what can be known about the past via historical texts, examination of the structures and vagaries of lan56 Brett Hutchins guage, and critique of...