Sport history and the seeds of a postmodern discourse

Douglas Booth

doi:10.1080/13642520902833791

Thirty years after its conception and development as a branch of social history, academic sport history is in a state of flux. The empirical, inferential and objective principles and tenets of modernist academic sport history face an increasing challenge from postmodernism, an explicitly self-conscious and reflexive form of thinking that is recasting history as a constructed discourse of the past. In this article I look at the growth of postmodernism and the extent to which it is redefining sport history as a new discipline. My initial focus is on the seeds of this growth, its conceptual, ideological, narratological and semiological features (Munslow 2007 ). Drawing on examples from sport history, I examine each of these seeds in turn, first, through the lens of modernist history and then postmodernism. In the concluding section, I identify areas of accommodation between modernist and postmodernist sport histories, and I discuss the potential for that accommodation to bloom into histories in which authors openly reflect on their work and their formats and methods, and reveal their ideological and political objectives as well as the limitations of their narratives. Rather than seeing postmodernism as antithetical to the goals of studying the past, I suggest that it can enrich critical perspectives on the past and the way we use the past for our present needs.