Writing, Migrationand Sport: Contest or Compliance?

83021
29 Apr 2019 05.30 PM - 07.00 PM Alumni, Current Students, Industry/Academic Partners, Prospective Students, Public
Organised by:
Samuel Perks

Neoliberalism today depends the anxious production of migration. Many migrants are rendered ‘infrahuman’ and cast into lives of precarity due to the privations of globalisation, their mobility policed and prohibited. But others are lauded and feted, their presence and prowess required and rewarded by global capital. This workshop explores the recent literary representation of one such constituency of privileged, permitted migrants: sporting athletes. If many migrant athletes have become the pampered playthings of contemporary sport’s global stakeholders, can sport in the twenty-first century retain the transgressive capacity (as CLR James once wondered about cricket) to break social and political boundaries at large? Is contemporary sport an arena of dissident thought or dutiful compliance? In this workshop we explore a range of literary enquiries into sport by writers such as Caryl Phillips, John Lanchester and Joseph O’Neill concerning sport’s ability to contest the circuits and certifying authority of neoliberalism that selfishly circumscribes all migrants, permitted and prohibited alike.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Prof. John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds. He is a leading figure in postcolonial studies, and is the author of landmark publications Beginning Postcolonialism (2000, 2nd edn. 2010), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004), J.G. Farrell (2007) and Life Lines: Transcultural Adoption (2015). He has also edited the collections The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007) and The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (2014). His publications on diasporic and transcultural writing are central to the field, and his theoretical interventions into postcolonial studies remain at the cutting edge of literary-critical debates. John joins us as a Visiting Scholar in the School of Humanities at NTU.

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