This paper explores Duncan Bell's heuristic of the mythscape as a means to conceptualize the nationalistic narrativization of the sporting past. Bell approaches the forging of national identity through evocations of the past as mythologized: that is, partial, contested, power-laden, and perpetually mutating. First, we introduce Bell's concept as a means to evaluate the selective, contested and shifting construction of the sporting past through the prism of nationalism. We first chart the narrativisation of the New Zealand - South African rugby rivalry within popular literature during the apartheid era (1948-1994). This was characterized by the production of 'governing' myths and oppositional narrations from the 1960s onward. We then evaluate subsequent post-apartheid narrativizations (1994 onwards) within popular rugby histories, focussing on the 1986 Cavaliers rugby tour to South Africa - the final event in apartheid-era rugby ties between the two nations. We explore how writers use particular narratives, and what they have chosen to exclude, and how it informs a national mythscape. We find the rehabilitation of governing myths that sanitize and redact connections between New Zealand rugby and apartheid. This is symptomatic of a selective construction that valorizes rugby as a idealized national institution. Finally, we offer comments on the utility of the mythscapes concept.
- 9926557671701891
- National Mythscapes and Popular New Zealand Rugby Histories: Representing the 1986 Cavaliers
- Mark FalcousSebastian Potgieter
- International journal of the history of sport, Vol.41(6), pp.510-530
- School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences
- Taylor & Francis
- 02/05/2024
- English
- Journal article