Abstract
The extent to which historians impose themselves on the past through their narratives remains contentious. While historians of sport have engaged these debates (e.g. Phillips, 2002; Nathan, 2003; Booth, 2005; Liberti and Smith, 2015), most continue to assume a realist correspondence between historical narratives and the past. In this thesis, I draw on Alun Munslow’s ‘deconstructive consciousness’ to analyse competing popular and academic narrative representations of the 1981 Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand between 1981 and 2019. In order to practically deconstruct these texts, I draw on Hayden White’s Model of Narrative Explanation, which focusses on the form of historical narratives and directs attention to their tropes, emplotments, arguments and ideologies. In applying White’s model, I demonstrate the literary dimensions embedded in all historical texts. Furthermore, I argue that historians are ideologically embedded in the present and project this back onto the past. As a result, changing material contexts means that our representations of the past are never static and always shifting. I map how representations of the 1981 tour have changed across three distinct epochs – 1981 – 1986; 1987 – 1994; 1995 – 2019. In deconstructing these representations of the 1981 tour, I demonstrate that history is both an empirical-analytic and narrative-linguistic discipline.