Full Description
"Modern sports" were introduced to Asia in the late nineteenth century as an innovation from the West, concurrently with the development of modern society in Asia. This book traces the historical developments of sporting cultures in Asia in specific local contexts - including Singapore, China, Myanmar, Taiwan, the Philippines, and India - and their intersections with larger social developments of colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism, and the building of modern Asia and its place in a globalized world. The case studies herein present the social history of modern team sports with standardized rules such as basketball and cricket, and less familiar sports such as fives and chinlone, as they vacillate between global and local perspectives. This book also shows that modern sports have had an important influence on the makeup of everyday life in Asia, and the essays here also consider sports' impact on gender, body culture, and celebrity culture, among other concerns.
This book painstakingly bridges the gaps between Asian Studies and Sports Studies in a way that reflects the historicity and multiplicity of sports in Asian societies. By adopting multi-disciplinary approaches, this book innovatively offers significant intersection between sociology, cultural studies and Asian studies of sport in Asia.
This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
Contents
1. Introduction to Modern sports in Asia: cultural perspectives 2. Sports and games in colonial Singapore: 1819 - 1867 3. Towards a national culture: chinlone and the construction of sport in post-colonial Myanmar 4. Beidaihe beach: leisure culture and modernity in Republican China 5. Goodbye Renaissance man: globalized concepts of physical education and sport in Singapore 6. From baseball colony to basketball republic: post-colonial transition and the making of a national sport in the Philippines 7. Cricket and the global Indian identity 8. Keep walking: walking as detour from 'fitness' and the building of self-in-isolation and identity in contemporary consumer society
