Abstract

This essay argues that the predominant narratives within sport history have remained problematically wedded to assumptions and concepts of Western capitalist modernity. As a result, such sport historiography reinforces modernity’s epistemology as the universal system of knowledge in modern world sporting history by relying on modern sport as a primary category of analysis. By relying on categories and assumptions of Western [sporting] modernity within their historical narratives, such sport histories stymie the possibility of giving historical and poetic representation to non-Western and pre-modern modes of knowledge. While sport historiography has benefitted from deconstructionist histories and postcolonial theories, there remains a need to further problematize sport as the field’s predominant means of representing physical cultural pasts. In order to aid the deconstruction of the universalizing epistemology of Western sporting modernity, the essay introduces and discusses some of the prominent works in decoloniality, particularly those by Anibal Quijano, Maria Lugones and Walter Mignolo. A sport history field informed by decolonial thinking offers the potential consideration of alternative decolonized avenues of historical representation, helping sport historians explore the possibilities in writing deconstructionist and epistemologically-decolonized histories of physical culture.