ANDREW GRAINGER

Rugby Island Style: Paradise, Pacific People, and the Racialisation of Athletic Performance

INTRODUCTION: ISLAND IMAGINARIES

In western1 eyes islands are almost invariably unusual or alien. Even when close to home, islands have long held something of the allure of the isolated, of the foreign. Functioning as something akin to Said’s Orient,2 in the moral geography of the imagination islands have formed part of the political map by which the west has historically – and negatively – oriented itself. In what follows I wish to suggest that this image of “the island” has proved to be both remarkably enduring and remarkably consistent. This has obviously been especially apparent in a textual sense, in that, in matters of writing, thinking, reading, and speaking about islands, they have been persistently defined in terms of cultural difference. This “library or archive of information,”3 manifest in a set of powerful stereotypical representations, can be traced back at least as far as the Age of Enlightenment and, as a discursive system, still has a tremendous influence in determining how those in the west conceive of and understand islands. What I wish to proffer also is a case study in how such regimes of knowledge, though born in the colonial era, play themselves out in the current moment. I turn in particular to the sport of rugby to explore how contemporary physical culture can function – both figuratively and literally – to embody and preserve the discursive legacies of colonialism. My goal is to link the present with the knowledge production of a colonial past by showing how the tenets of what Elizabeth Deloughrey has called “islandism” have been reworked and re-inscribed to characterise Pacific people and the athletic bodies of Pacific peoples more specifically. Ultimately, I propose sport to be a fruitful context within which to demonstrate how islandism must be understood as a discursive system built not only on institutions or internalised regimes of knowledge, but dependent on seemingly banal reproductions, performed, practised and (re)negotiated in daily popular cultural life.

What I also wish to trace is the way in which character is mapped onto geographic space – more specifically, how islands seem to confer a kind of determinant identity at odds with the so-called mainland. Put simply, island dwellers echo islands themselves in their difference. Much of this probably has to do with the idea of insularity in the sense of islands being both discrete and cut-off. It is the very boundedness of islands, borders policed by the sea, which is frequently taken as what sets islands, and their people, apart. Yet, insularity, as we know, is a word that carries with it much semantic baggage. It is not merely an allusion to being confined in space. To be insular is not only to be separate, but to be parochial and, frequently, provincial or backward. In the contemporary sense this exhibits itself in the stereotype of the islander of territorial mentality, antagonistically local, and prone to a distaste for modern life. But many of us also have preconceived ideas of islands as unspoiled, standing aside from the march of civilisation. From there the leap has not been far to make the same assumptions of islanders. To inhabit an island is the very marker of alterity to civilisation and knowledge, to be the happy-go-lucky child of nature – primitive, honest and intuitive.

This is especially true of the South Pacific. For many, these are islands par excellence, the stuff of romance and fantasy and of tourist brochures bursting with white sand beaches, turquoise lagoons, and swinging palms. Indeed, the role of the Pacific as one of the archetypal locales for the western representation of paradise is well known. A European-derived cultural imaginary of the region reaches back in excess of 200 years to the first encounters between European voyagers and islanders, tracing from Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s writings in the eighteenth century, through missionary declamations and the rise of anthropology, to the fiction of Stevenson and London and the paradisal images of modern tourism. Consistent with this Eurocentric perspective has been the way in which depictions of the region borrow from centuries-old imagined representations of the New World – the earthly Pacific paradise through which one could flee civilisation. In addition, and despite the almost complete westernisation of most of the Pacific, Islanders themselves have been similarly caught up in this discourse of primitive alterity. Free from stultifying western culture and form, they are frequently envisioned in terms Jane Desmond describes as “at one with the forces of nature,” variously “hula girls” or “beachboys,” living close to the natural world, secure in their Pacific paradises.4 And, of course, we always go back to nature. In connecting to nature we are connecting to the primitive – thus, the enduring stereotype of Pacific Islanders as “pleasant but basically ignorant natives in subsistence social structures. Even after western contact, they cling to their picturesque but primitive customs and mores.”5 Such clichés persist even today in the way Pacific Islanders are still consistently characterised “as primitive types inhabiting an unchanging Eden that [do] not participate in the Western world of technology, progress and time.”6 The people, like the Islands themselves, are all too frequently preceded by the (western) imagination.

It is not extending this argument too far to suggest that the Pacific is a physical environment that also inscribes racialised meanings. Borrowing from Rona Tamiko Halualani I wish to begin by suggesting that the cultural representation of the geographic – in this case, the Pacific – is a racialised discourse in which difference is articulated, and in which “islandness” is mapped onto the Pacific body.7 Over the course of more than two centuries Pacific space has been suffused with meaning. The space in turn has imbued this history on the materiality of bodies. That is, the Pacific as a place must be seen as critical to articulating racial difference or what may be termed Island Otherness. E Valentine Daniel has argued of the Sinhala people of Sri Lanka that “the historicization of a place by its transformation into space is accompanied by the historicization of a people through their transformation into a race.”8 In one sense, there is a temporality of the Pacific as a space. It symbolises a place and time. It is what Halualani has dubbed an “anachronistic space”9 that condemns Pacific Islanders to the past. And, in constituting the Pacific Other through temporal tropes, by using terms such as “primitive” and “savage”, the Pacific Islander has long been implied to be inferior or less developed than those of the European west. Likewise, the Otherness of Pacific Islanders is constructed through the geographic, through an imagined topography of islands. The very imagining of the Islands themselves has served to reproduce images of Pacific peoples as exotic and distant, by locating them in geographic and cultural spaces wholly separated from the west, their isolation ensuring their peripherality from the European centre. All this is not to say that space wholly determines race. Pacific space and Pacific race are dialectically entwined in discourse. As much as the conceptual phenomenon of the Pacific Islands produces social categories of racial difference, the very materiality of physical difference locates race. In their appearance the brown bodies of Pacific Islanders are naturally placed in the Islands, regardless of their self-identities. In the same way as Radhika Mohanram has said of the cartography of bodies that blackness is “always static and immobilizing,”10 so too the brown bodies of Pacific Islanders are forever tied to the Pacific – and all that it connotes.

Obviously, then, the process of representing Otherness as marked in and on the body “is not peculiar to the colonial period and will not disappear with it.”11 Certainly there is evidence to suggest that it is among the many cultural residues of the colonial era still lingering in the postcolonial world. And it is certainly salient to the analysis of contemporary sport. What I therefore wish to consider is how colonial pathologies are manifest within and disseminated through popular understandings of sport, and the sport of rugby more specifically. I wish to focus on two main strands in which the readings of athletic performance are directly informed by the analytical distinction between mind and body, which I suggest to be impacted on not only by Cartesianism, but by a specific geographic imaginary that juxtaposes primitivism with civilisation. In the first instance, as Brett St Louis has argued, the “racially ascribed paradigm where one is either physically capable or cognitively endowed”12 has important repercussions in understanding the relation between racial representation and modern sporting performance. Secondly, we cannot ignore the fact that the body constitutes “the material core of sporting activity.”13 This is significant because there is a long tradition in social and popular thought of seeing the body as neutral, as ontologically stable. The body is, in many ways, a “totemic object” of nature and the natural.14 That the athletic performances of Pacific peoples are frequently described via recourse to the body has the effect of placing such performances within the “state of nature.” Popular understandings of sport abet this equation of brown bodies/Pacificness/Nature/natural. The consequence is that brown sporting masculinity is overdetermined from the outside as both physical and natural. The net effect is that the racialisation – what could be termed, imputed otherness – of athletic ability is seen as so natural that it requires no comment at all.15 Overall, I wish to argue that these two strands of the way in which colonial discourse is articulated with the racialisation of Pacific physicality can be more generally related through the popular stereotype of “island style,” an imagined aesthetic that purportedly suits best the characteristics of the stereotypical Pacific body. It should be noted here that I am not so much preoccupied with the way in which Pacific people actually play rugby but rather with the way in which they are represented when playing it.

EUROPEAN UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE PACIFIC

In setting the Pacific and Pacific bodies in context, it is important to note that my main concern is with the outsider or European/Euro-American view of islands, and the Pacific more specifically. This conventional western picture of the Pacific is, as Geoffrey M White and Ty Kawika Tengan succinctly describe it, “one of an area of a multitude of indigenous societies where both geography and culture appear as ‘islands’ – small, bounded, and isolated.”16 Such insularity and essentialisms, indeed what we may delineate as the Pacific itself, have been produced politically, socially, ideologically, and militarily by westerners. Too frequently, indigenous peoples’ perspectives “have been silenced, misrepresented, ridiculed or condemned”17 in both popular and academic discourses. Of particular note is the way in which local visions is often displaced, with Europeans almost invariably overlooking the numerous connections among Island societies. In his seminal, and by now universally quoted, 1993 article “Our Sea of Islands,”18 Epeli Hau’ofa has argued that western social scientists have misunderstood the Pacific by consistently envisioning the ocean in terms of “islands in a far sea.”19 In western eyes, he argues, the Pacific came to be defined not by its connections but its insularity, islands not only in the geographic sense, as an objective reality, but as a stateof- mind. In the great Ocean of Hau’ofa’s vision, in contrast, Pacific peoples are not confined to and by their islands, but exist in a world of blurred boundaries, of connections between Islanders beyond and within nation-states. As much as Hau’ofa provides a corrective of history, his argument resonates not only with the long-term migration patterns of the past, but presentday lifeworlds as well. The flow of people, culture, and capital between the Pacific, Europe, and America has intensified dramatically since the mid-twentieth century. Hau’ofa’s work is thus a telling reminder of the need to recognise and include the perspectives, knowledge, and worldviews of the indigenous peoples of Oceania and to reconnect with indigenous ways of thinking about both islands and society more generally.

What I wish to borrow from Hau’ofa for my purposes here, however, is the way in which he is critical of enclosed thinking – in which insularity came to have both a topographic and figurative significance – and his suggestion that outsiders’ representations of the Pacific matter not just because of their discursive hegemony but because Pacific people themselves have, in part, come to see themselves through an outsider’s lens. On the former point, obviously an island is a space unto itself. But as a consequence it becomes “an ideal metaphor for a traditionally conceived, unified and unitary identity.”20 Identity is, in essence, rendered secure by insularity: islands structure certain beliefs about national character and destiny. These prevailing notions of the Pacific since European “discovery” have painted a picture of a series of islands limited by their absolute size and by their isolation. Common to the Utopian narratives of the colonial Pacific was the way in which they rested on a kind of primordialist image of the Pacific: the place and its people were distinguished by a kind of “timelessness which refuse[d] to evolve towards the modern world.”21 In all respects, the Pacific was assumed as backward or behind. Vis-à-vis the European centre, they stood aside from the march of civilisation. Again, this was not necessarily endemic to the Pacific. Islands in general have come to signify perhaps “the ultimate gesture of simplification.”22 Yet it is again telling that the Pacific was discovered in the Age of Enlightenment. Even as modern science flourished in Europe, insecurity and mistrust were also taking hold as cities grew and communities were uprooted from the countryside.

Led by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosophy of the time increasingly decried the supposedly corrupting influence of civilisation, alternatively romanticising the primordial, the world in its natural state. The primitive, so said Europe’s Enlightenment philosophers, was the “positive alternative to an over-civilized society.”23 So far from Europe, and set apart by the sea, islands were seen as such societies free from the corrupting influence of high civilisation. Paradise congealed within the geography of the archipelago. Hence the island archetype took fresh root in the western imagination just as accounts of the distant Pacific began to filter back to the European metropolitan centres through the writings of explorers and missionaries.

Of course, “primitive” was a term used to describe both a state and a people. From fiction through the journals of explorers and missionaries, from the memoirs of traveller-writers to anthropological treatises, the people of the Pacific were consistently presented as modern Europe’s primitive, exotic alter egos. These were “natural men” (sic) to be admired, simple and close to nature, uncorrupted by the evils of modern society. This cult of Pacific primitivism would also give new life to the phenomenon of the Noble Savage, a figure rooted in antiquity and in whose person the factitious Pacific doctrine of lost innocence and unspoiled virtue, of perfectibility through retrogression, came to be embodied. It was a familiar and compelling image around which to build European descriptions of the islands given its currency in the intellectual and literary models of philosophy and literature at the time. The Noble Savage had already been adopted as an illustration of the freedom, simplicity and general closeness to nature which the age admired, and it was perhaps inevitable that the remote Pacific should be cast in similar light. In fact, the voyages of Cook, de Bougainville, and their ilk took place at precisely the time when enthusiasm for the Noble Savage was reaching its European peak.24 So it was that the resurrection of this neo-classical stereotype would have, in O’Brien’s words, “a profound impact upon representation of the Pacific.”25

Without wishing to digress into the multiple meanings embraced by the term, nor how Pacific peoples purportedly epitomised the persona, one of the chief characteristics of the Noble Savage was his assumed links to nature and the natural world. Salient to my analysis herein is the way in which this naturalism discourse frequently set in contrast the “vigorous and healthy savages in the state of nature and modern man in the ‘civilized’ world.”26 In particular, to society’s critics, men (again, sic) had become alienated from their physical condition. As Rousseau himself wrote: “The body of a savage man being the only instrument he understands, he uses it for various purposes, of which ours, for want of practice are incapable.”27 Following the traditional Cartesian dualism of body and mind, it could be said that the natural world, typified by the Pacific, was a physical world – and, of course, vice versa. And, this relation to the physical environment depended on the constitution of the physical body. Or, to put it differently, the primitive offered an alternative model of social organisation rooted in the body.28 In the “ersatz exotic, erotic prelapsarian Eden”29 of the Pacific, the body became a way of conferring the native-nature coupling. If the body was a link to nature, notable too was its very centrality to European perception and discourse. With increasing frequency after the 1770s “what could be seen was paramount, and what Europeans were looking at above all else were bodies.”30 Visual records increasingly focused on the bodies of islanders to such an extent that it could be said that the Polynesian body came metonymically to stand for all that was healthy, natural, leisured, beautiful, and (sexually) alluring about the Pacific itself.In Teaiwa’s terms, we could go further in suggesting that the Polynesian body is given the privilege of representing the Pacific as a whole.31

While undoubtedly it was the female body that attracted the most notoriety, the bodies of men were almost equally admired among early European visitors to the Pacific. One missionary of the early-1800s, for instance, described Polynesian men as “amongst the finest specimens of the human family … the form of many… exhibits all that is perfect in proportion, and exquisite in symmetry.”32 Brendan Hokowhitu has shown that such comments are by no means isolated nor atypical. Noting how proximity to nature was something to be praised, a marker of virility and health, he notes how “many European travellers romanticized the savage Other as part of a natural physical world.” 33 On one hand this was a discourse of reverence and admiration: the natural Polynesian man reputedly possessed superior health and physical strength. But the Polynesian body was also used to orient and ground the modernity of civilised society: physicality acted as the opposite side, or Other, that illuminated European intellect and rationality. Hence, the discourse also replicated the Cartesian dualism famously premised on the belief that the material body is distinct from that which inhabits and motivates it, that the body and mind are exclusive. It also had the effect of racialising primitivism. Originally a nonfigurative category, primitivism, as Mary Brewer notes, “increasingly came to be registered visibly as a physical demarcator: mental and moral differences became linked to physical differences in an updated, color-coded version of the Great Chain of being.”34 Via the modality of the body, and in this mind/body opposition, the conceptual basis was laid for the racial distinction between intellectual reason and physical passions. That is, the popular stress on physicality in depictions of the Pacific ignored, if not negated, the mental capacities of Pacific peoples. In reducing Pacific people to their physical being, European discourses implied them as less advanced, as the flip-side of European intellectual development and reason. But we can argue further that in the Pacific the physical also tacitly reinforced the production of uneven social relationships by articulating the physical with race.

ISLAND STYLE : RUGBY AND THE RACIALISATION OF PACIFIC PHYSICALITY

During the most recent New Zealand census in 2006, those identifying with Pacific ethnic groups numbered 265,974, up some 14.7 per cent from 2001. Moreover, by 2021 the Pacific population is projected to grow by some 59 per cent over 2001, with the proportion of Pacific peoples estimated to rise from 6 per cent to 9 per cent of all New Zealanders.35 It is scarcely surprising that rugby in New Zealand should in some way reflect this shifting social milieu. In fact, to use the word “reflect” here is to underplay the changes: once rare in rugby’s élite ranks, the increase in the number of Pacific players now far outstrips their population growth generally. Though they may only comprise 6 per cent of New Zealand’s population, by one recent estimate, Pacific peoples make up near half the players in the country’s five provincial rugby sides.36 One local reporter has even gone as far as suggesting that, such is the “browning” of New Zealand rugby, that “it’s not inconceivable that come the 2011 World Cup, New Zealand as hosts kick-off the first game with a match-day 22 that consists solely of players who come from a Pacific Island background.”37 What factors explain this over-representation are likely myriad. They include the perception of rugby as a path to social mobility and the fact that playing for the All Blacks has long been a goal for many Pacific peoples, both from the Islands and New Zealand-born. More often than not, however, the favourite shibboleths in popular and media discourse are variations on the theme of genetic predisposition. Indeed, in New Zealand rugby has become a prominent arena of social life in which the idea that Pacific men are biologically different – in a meaningful way – is encouraged. The success of Pacific boys in junior rugby, for instance, is frequently reduced to commonsense presumptions of their precocious physical development. As one high-school coach is recently quoted as saying, “There is no doubting that Polynesians, especially, mature early. They are often wonderful physical specimens.”38 (emphasis added) This pernicious discourse carries through into explanations of Polynesian success in the senior ranks. Perhaps the most explicit example is an article published in New Zealand Fitness magazine titled “Lomu and the Polynesian Powerpacks.”39 Noting the “enormous impact” of “Polynesians” on New Zealand sport, the author (interestingly herself of Samoan-Māori descent) sets out to “uncover” the basis of “Polynesian people’s obvious assets: natural muscularity, hand to eye co-ordination and sense of rhythm.”40 (emphasis added) Most of the article is based on the “scientific evidence” gathered by University of Otago anatomy professor Phillip Houghton, whose research was later published as the book People of the Great Ocean: Aspects of Human Biology of the Early Pacific.41 In brief, Houghton traces the roots of Polynesian sporting success to the inheritance of body types from “early Polynesian navigators.” As Leilua explains it, “Houghton’s theory is that their [Polynesians’] muscle comes from their ancestors enduring extremely cold temperatures while exploring and settling the Pacific Islands hundreds of years ago.”42 Houghton suggests that the type of muscle fibre involved – “fast twitch” (i.e., those muscles “particularly suitable for sprinting”) – is explained by a similar case of evolutionary pressure: “Their demand was for a muscle fibre type to keep them warm and act as a heat engine and type two, fast twitch, was ideal for this.” Suppressing more likely social constraints as an explanation, Houghton then goes on to attribute the “recent phenomenon of Polynesian prowess in sports” to “the fact that, previously, Polynesians weren’t reaching their genetic potential because of their lifestyle.” (emphasis added)

Houghton’s argument is but one of many examples of what Donna Haraway calls the contemporary “pseudo-objectivity” of “genetic fetishism”43 which suffuses any discussion of Pacific success in New Zealand rugby. Biology makes its way into several recent commentaries on Pacific sporting performance. Two recent television documentaries, The Brown Factor and Polyunsaturated, both appeal to “science” in their attempts to trace “the physical reasons for the Polynesian superiority in rugby.”44 (emphasis added) I use emphatic quotes here because the apparently obvious “scientific” evidence – in these programs as elsewhere – seldom extends beyond the anecdotal evidence of athletic trainers, coaches, or ex-players. Jim Blair, the All Black fitness trainer, for example, is quoted in a recent piece on “the growing dominance of Pasifika players”45 as saying that

significant numbers of Pacific Islanders possess fast-twitch muscle which makes them genetically predisposed towards building mass around the critical joints and being quick over short distances. It is an explosive game and the Islands produce huge numbers of explosive athletes.46

Elsewhere, the rugby writer Lindsay Knight suggests that “Fijians have such an aptitude and flair for playing on the wing” because they have more of “what physiology experts describe as ‘fast twitch fibres’.”47 On these lines, the Fijian-born All Black Josevata Rokocoko is similarly praised by columnist and author Chris Laidlaw for his “sinuous talents…Just where all that leg power and electrifying acceleration come from only a physiologist really knows,” he concludes.48 Other examples are numerous, but not wishing to belabour the point, we can see even from this small sampling the way in which the myth of natural Pacific physicality is assimilated into “commonsense” discourse via the putative objectivity of science. As Tasileta Te’evale has noted in regard to Pacific peoples, the putative biological basis of racial athleticism has been absorbed by the popular media in such a way that theory and hypothesis have been quickly turned into truism.49

These pseudo-scientific distortions often take a more subtle rhetorical guise in allusions to Pacific players as “naturally gifted.” Surveying the New Zealand press over the past three years we find a rich number of examples. For instance: Ma’a Nonu is variously described as “naturally gifted”50 and a “sublime natural talent;”51 Viliame Waqaseduadua is a “God-given talent,” a “natural athlete;”52 according to the All Blacks assistant coach, Isaia Toeva has “all the physical gifts;”53 Rodney So’oialo is “an instinctive player;”54 and Sitiveni Sivivatu is cited by Laidlaw as “another classic example of a completely instinctive, undisciplined firecracker of a player.”55 (emphasis added) Such examples clearly illustrate how a cultural stereotype can be made to look like a natural difference; so much so that athletic ability has come to be viewed as a traditional characteristic of Pacific peoples. What I wish to suggest is that this stereotype of Pacific peoples as natural sportsmen is derived from various European discursive representations of Pacific Islanders from the late eighteenth century. We see, in particular, a repetition of the Noble Savage ideal and a related kind of “soft primitivism”56 connoting such attributes as childlike, libidinous, free, and, of course, natural. Notably, in this primordial state, romanticised by European Enlightenment philosophers, the body, and bodily practices, loomed large. In western epistemology a series of oppositions functioned – and still function – “implicitly to define the body in nonhistorical, naturalistic, organicist, passive, inert terms.”57 The body, in essence, was the preserve of the natural. In being closer to nature Islanders in converse inhabited a history-less physical world vis-à-vis Europeans who were alienated from their physical condition yet possessed of intellect and cultured of mind. The sum in the case of Pacific Islanders is a kind of circular, and inescapable, “discourse of naturalism”58 in which nature, islands, and bodies are conjoined: the state of nature is metaphorised in islands, the island way of life in bodily practice, with the body, preordained and given in nature, closing the circuit.

To demonstrate how this “island discourse” frames the comprehension of Pacific performances in rugby, consider the widespread belief that there exists a particular island style of play, an aesthetic reputedly born of genetic and geographic heritage. This is perhaps best embodied in the notion of “flair.” Flair, in the rugby sense, incorporates unpredictability, innovation, and unorthodoxy.59 The antithesis of controlled, methodical play, flair notably gives emphasis to physical over cognitive skill. It is largely synonymous with bodily performance unmediated by the mind. From their very beginnings in New Zealand rugby, Pacific Islanders were viewed as being unable or unwilling to play structured rugby or what Colin King may have described as “the white man’s game.”60 The popular picture of Pacific players during the 1970s, for instance, was that they played a quick, athletic style at a time when New Zealand rugby was “all about forward domination, patterns, few risks and winning.”61 Given the tendency among Pākehā to make unfounded associations between Pacific Islanders and Māori,62 these stereotypes perhaps unsurprisingly mirrored those pegged to Māori rugby during the same era. If New Zealand’s largely Pākehā national teams through the 1970s and 1980s were “dull, staid and rigidly controlled,” as writes Malcolm MacLean, they found their counter in a “traditional style” of Māori rugby “somehow freer than regular, All Black rugby.”63 The same could easily have been said of Pacific Islanders at the time. Even today, the former All Black Frank Bunce suggests “the brown guy” as preferring “the free-flowing game, he likes to roam in the wide open spaces.”64 Likewise, the erstwhile Australian coach Eddie Jones believes that

[t]he Islanders generally play with a lot of flair and natural talent. They like to throw the ball around and run it from anywhere, which usually makes for a fast, free-flowing match…The great strength of Pacific Island rugby is that it is visually exciting and full of passion and open play.65

While such comments may appear approbatory they must be seen in the context of a long history of racialising athletic ability, particularly given that the physical occupies a social space in strict opposition to the cerebral and scientific. As already noted, all too frequently the intellectual and the physical are assumed as antithetical and antagonistic. St Louis describes the synergy as a kind of “zero-sum proposition”66 in which physical superiority is twinned to intellectual inferiority. In this case we could say that Island flair is implicitly countervailed by an assumed deficiency in reasoned cognition.

What Island flair dovetails into, then, is the popular shibboleth that Pacific peoples lack both intellect and application and are, consequently, “difficult to coach in more strategic elements of the game.”67 The idea that Pacific players are short on tactical thinking is based on the widespread assumption that they either have little time for, or, are simply incapable of controlled, methodical play. Sometimes this is framed as a matter of rugby philosophy. Strategy, safety and efficiency are presupposed as anathema to Pacific players. Instead, they favour a brazen style that privileges the aesthetic – and is notably born from improvisation rather than practice. Positing a thesis as to why Fiji has been so successful at the abbreviated seven-a-side version of rugby while underachieving in the full-blown game, Chris Laidlaw’s comments on Fijian sides are indicative of such professed truisms:

The Fijian game was built around dexterity, an eye for a sudden gap and the ‘hail Mary’ pass which might or might not have come off. The Fijian sevens team prospered on the back of this inventiveness but the 15-a-side game languished as more and more positional specialization became necessary.68

The presupposed contrasts in playing orientation between Pacific players and their Pākehā counterparts evinced in such remarks are notable both in the way Pacific performances are reduced to innate physicality and in their very ambivalence. Island style is at once admired – if with an air of voyeuristic superiority – and arraigned. Some, such as the rugby writer Gregor Paul, see the growing influence of Pacific players as a boon, the “Pacific influence” bringing “pace, power, [and] flair” to the “happy melting pot” of New Zealand rugby.69 Others are more circumspect in their suggestion that there will always be a need for the more methodical (read: intelligent) “Pākehā style.” This is borne out in the ambiguous suggestion of Laidlaw that, while the “view that Pacific Islanders are not thinkers on the field and that too many of them in a team means a dumbing-down of tactical acumen isn’t a very persuasive argument,” it is nonetheless

a factor in some teams because, on balance, Māori and Pacific Islanders tend to be more instinctive than measured in their approach and every team at the top level needs someone who can plot and plan, adjust and adapt. There will always be a place for a Grant Fox [a former Pākehā All Black] and that is what is so appealing about rugby.70

A further, and exemplary, illustration of this type of race-based cleaving of the muscular and the cerebral is the representation of the Auckland provincial rugby team. Auckland is widely touted as the “largest Polynesian city in the world,”71 and its teams through the years have including a large number of Pacific people. Though Auckland has won the National Provincial Championship (NPC) a record 16 times, it is frequently chided in times of lesser fortune for fielding “too many Polynesians.”72 For instance, after winning the NPC in 2003, Auckland began 2004 with several heavy losses. As they sat near the bottom of the points table, one rugby writer was moved to ask, “What’s wrong with Auckland?”73 Answering his own question, he proffered the high quotient of Pacific players, the coaching staff (notably all of Pacific descent), and too many “flash-Harry players.”74 In a similar vein, reporter David Leggat suggested that while “some of the broken-field running [was] outstanding…when they needed to tighten up, to play percentages, there was reluctance.”75 Seemingly with Auckland in mind, Tea Ropati in an article titled “Island Magic” sums up this course of reasoning:

The superlatives are endless when it comes to commentary about [‘Polynesian’] athletes. However, there are also an endless number of detractors who make assumptions about natural physical strength and superior skill being diluted by lack of discipline and ability to concentrate.76

As an aside, it is perhaps worth noting that Auckland went on to win the NPC the following year – with the same coaching staff and largely the same playing personnel.

If Pacific players are almost invariably described as lacking the cognitive capabilities of their white peers, this intelligence myth is compounded by the under-representation of Pacific peoples in positions of authority. This fact was recently observed by well-known local radio host Martin Devlin when asked about rugby’s Pacific “success stories.” “It’s a tough subject to get around when you consider the hierarchies,” he is quoted as saying. “The coaches, the management, the administration; they’re all white faces and they are continuing to be white faces. You’re allowed to play but you’re not allowed to run the game. I mean how does that work?”77 On a related theme, it is also worth noting that the accomplishments of Pacific players are frequently mitigated and undercut by ascribing successes to the guiding influence of a white coach or white authority figure. The most obvious example is the current New Zealand All Black coach Graham Henry. Henry was coach of the famed Kelston Boys High School First XV during the 1980s and 90s when the school “emerged as a rugby powerhouse.”78 The dominance of teams during his tenure has been largely attributed to the Pacific talent drawn from Auckland’s western suburbs as well as Henry’s professed ability to “press the right buttons for many of these Pacific players.”79 His later successes with the Auckland Colts, Bs and Auckland A are explained in similar terms. One writer, praising “The Henry Touch,” suggests Henry has “been able to get the best out of [the] raw ability and flair [of Pacific players] and harness it to the team structure within the very best of New Zealand sides.”80 Similarly, in explaining the All Blacks’ annus mirabilis of 2005 the British reporter Brendan Gallagher puts it down to Henry’s ability to “realise and fully incorporate the massive rugby talent of New Zealand’s ‘island’ [sic] community and, it has to be said, those who started their playing careers on the islands themselves.”81 What we can begin to discern here is that, as much as the spectacle of Polynesian bodies triumphant in rituals of masculine competition reinforces the fixed idea that Pacific men are “all brawn and no brains,”82 this racialised polarity is also dependent on white paternalism – embodied in a figure like Henry. The Pacific athlete in essence becomes a kind of raw talent to be honed by white guile. They are objects to be shaped and controlled. It is in this way a modern repetition of colonial culture/nature opposites: the Polynesian other is denied subjectivity – that is, objectified – while the known (white) self is separated from the known object.

RESISTANCE AND THE ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE OF ISLANDNESS

Obviously, what I am suggesting of Pacific rugby players is that their bodies are deeply enmeshed in social relations and practices, and, more specifically, are located within a particular historically-engendered, and geographically-imagined, racial schema. Island (playing) style, whether real or merely perceived as such, can be seen as a kind of “reified history”83 of general island discourse or islandism pre-dating even the earliest colonial forays into the Pacific. In this way it should be stressed that islandism is not merely a textual phenomenon in that, as evident in the case of rugby, narratives and perceptions have come to be embedded in material objects, and, more especially, bodies. Thus, islandism has a material effectiveness, where, here, the athletic body acts as a bridge between this discourse and its material world. What I wish to make clear in this concluding section, however, is that I do not wish to imply the Pacific body to be wholly symbolic, an entirely sociocultural and historical phenomenon. The athletic brown body is not a simple metaphorical text that can be read in toto as a symbol or signifier, and to point out the body’s symbolic capacity to reflect the social world is to offer only a partial account of Island style. The Pacific body is at once a vehicle for the imposition of a regime of knowledge and a vehicle for resistance to these discursive forces. Although the brown athletic body may serve as a powerful symbolic medium of islandness, it is also endowed with the capacity to participate in the creation of – potentially subversive – social meaning.

To be sure the Pacific body, as the body generally, is a text upon which socio-historic meanings are inscribed. On one hand, here, I am indeed adopting a “profoundly coercive understanding of physical experience,”84 as offered in the early work of Michel Foucault. A Foucauldian understanding of the body underpins much of my argument here, in that it offers a way of comprehending the emplacement of the Pacific body into the realm of the physical via association with nature and the natural as they are actualised through islandness. “The body,” as writes Elina Penttinen, “belongs to the natural world” and follows its “natural laws.”85 Islands, in being coupled to nature, provide a means by which to understand how the athletic performances of Pacific peoples are constructed and read as innate natural characteristics existing prior to signification. They are simply born to run, to jump, to tackle, to play. Given the assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture, and that the Pacific is already wholly racialised as a space of the primitive, island style becomes a gesture of simplification, the literal embodiment of European projections of the islands themselves.

Wholly unsurprisingly given that he was himself influenced by Foucault’s analysis of the necessary combination of power/knowledge, and the way polarities constitute knowledge of an object through differentiation,86 Edward Said’s path-breaking work on Orientalism has proved a fruitful source for my analysis.87 In much the same way as Orientalism positions colonised peoples as “politically and culturally ‘inferior’ or ‘other’ to the West,”88 Europeans have long assembled an image of the Pacific as an Edenic paradise, its people variously living in a natural state of innocence or, less optimistically, wildness, savagery, and barbarism. This “Orientalist” collection of racial and cultural stereotypes about Pacific Islanders is, I maintain, perpetuated in and through the sport of rugby – and bodily performance in particular. In one sense, islandness is read from the brown body even prior to such performance. Typical of “the tendency to see non-Western cultures as more body oriented,”89 the Pacific athlete is assumed as predisposed to a (natural) muscular physicality characterised by reflex and instinct, a particular style possessing an inverse relationship to intellectual capacity. Performance is subsequently seen and understood, indeed inferred, in light of this discursive framework.

In borrowing from Foucault both directly and via Said, however, I do not wish to ignore the fact that what is signified by “the body” remains a source of creative tension. The difficult question of agency is one at play in particular, with Foucault’s take on the body and its relation to normalising power often taken as giving the impression that identities become fixed without having to be constantly maintained. When he argues in “The Subject of Power” that we need to “understand how we have been trapped in our own history,”90 he would seem to nominalise the body within discourses of power, implying also a certain fixity to bodily identity. While Foucault was more alert to the problem of agency in his later writings, even his early account of the body is potentially powerful in the way it “re-embodies agency, yet allows for change in terms of new discourses of the body.” Simply put, if perceptions of the body are constituted in discourse, then they can be changed by changing the forms of discourse through which they are expressed. Perhaps more saliently, power and resistance are ontologically inseparable as they exist as conditions of possibility each for the other. Power, in the Foucauldian sense, creates the conditions for counter-flows of resistance to emerge: where there is power there is resistance, for they are symbiotic or agonistic. Thus, as much as the body is the strategic target of systems of codification, supervision and constraint, the site of what Foucault dubbed “knowledge-power,” it is also a site of resistance “for it exerts a recalcitrance, and always entails the possibility of a counter-strategic reinscription, for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways.”91 One thinks here also of Judith Butler’s notion of “performativity” and her suggestion that “agency is required of each subject to sustain identity by constantly repeating it.”92 Butler insists that “performance” provides the possibility of redefinition and change, since all such “citations” – the “reenactments of norms” – are always incomplete.9933 In assuming power as productive of resistance, and taking that “subjections are not final but must be constantly repeated”9494 we can find the possibility for a more optimistic reading of Island style. We could suggest, for instance, that Island style is a particular performative act that encodes and articulates notions of identity and difference in Pacific bodies through bodily practice. The performing, and especially the kinetic, body may, as Randy Martin suggests, “instigate a tension in the social body,” with individual performances creating the spaces for “interventions, ruptures in the conditions of reproduction of dominance.”95 For Pacific peoples, rugby may serve as a forum for performative acts, providing moments of aesthetic expression and political claim.

In using the term “political” here I wish to also link Island style to critical discussions of the body in post-colonial spaces. Such work has stressed the complexity of the ways in which the body can be constructed, as well as “its ambivalent role in the maintenance of, and resistance to, colonizing power.”96 A useful model in this regard is the work of C L R James and, especially, his seminal book Beyond a Boundary.97 In Beyond a Boundary James provides a lucid illustration of the political role of sporting performativity in re-articulating discourses of sport, race, and the colonial body. In brief, James argues that cricket was central in shaping a politicised sense of West Indian identity during colonial rule by the British. For James, cricket was an idiom through which both creativity and resistance flourished in the face of colonial subjugation. Via the game, colonised West Indians were able to translate colonial discourse in such a way as to express a new statement: the very symbol of Englishness (cricket) was seized upon to represent West Indian (colonised) nationalism, thus “destabiliz[ing] cricket’s ability to represent only the self-definitions of English national character.”98 What I see as salient from James’ work is the way in which he “illustrates how the political and artistic engagements of a decolonizing subject can refunction the master discourse of ‘dialectic materialism’ without being complicit in restoring or recuperating domination.”99 The performance of the sporting body, in particular, has a profound social resonance. As James reminds us, sports such as cricket are political theatres of movement, and in the body there is capacity for expression and resistance in those moments when “statements from one institution [are] transcribed in the discourse of another.”100

Here James also provides us with a powerful model by which to conceive of Pacific athletes as agents and not merely victims. Of the relationship between agency and the sporting body, in particular, it could be said that James’ reading of cricket as a performance was contingent upon understanding bodily production as contextually specific inflections of performativity. He inserts the cricketing body into the heart of systems of society, of metaphor, and of identity in the West Indies. Aesthetics, movement, and deportment become modes of social representation. For James physical displays

[a]re not simple reflectors or expressions of culture or even of changing culture but may themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting ‘designs for living.’101

To finally come back to Pacific peoples and rugby, we could suggest that the sport can certainly be oppressive as it feeds a discursive system of dominance and authority in the uneven relation between the west and its Island Others. Yet, however much the rugby field is underpinned by a white, colonial imperative, as a social space it may also provide expressive opportunities for Pacific peoples. We cannot deny the political resonance of seeing Pacific people attain a status routinely denied them in other walks of life. As Ben Carrington has argued, sport is imbued with racial meaning and as such can be seen at one level as a “transgressive liminal space” where Others can “attempt, quite legitimately, to (re)impose their subordinated…identity through the symbolic, and sometimes literal, ‘beating’ of the other – that is, white men.”102

While, given the Pacific body’s long history as a repository of colonial myth, I am perhaps more inclined to believe that the discourse of Island style produces a mode of knowledge that serves to sustain, rather than challenge, existing social relationships, dismissing outright the expressive social body would be behindhand. The bodies of Pacific people may be determined by their islandness, but they are only determined within discourses that could be otherwise. What I wish to suggest is that the athletic Pacific body is an agent “cast into fluid situations not of its making” and therefore an agent of order, a “practical and theoretical operator of social rules.”103 But at the same time it is also a “body of disorder and effervescence, the practical and theoretical operator of a fundamental dimension [flux] of the social aggregate.”104 The athletic Pacific body is not simply an object of discursive processes nor a passive object of arrangement. Further, new ways of belonging may also be linked to ways of moving. Apropos of the discourse of Island style, we could say that this perceived manner of play may be corporeally taken up as a distinctive marker of racial, national, or regional culture and in doing so this particular bodily aesthetic may again be read as “an index of creativity and resistance, collective and individual.”105 Given that the rugby-playing body can be understood as “never simply a passive object upon which regimes of power are played out,”106 the on-field movement and stylings of Pacific players articulate a certain politics of diasporic nationhood and social struggle. There may actually be an oppositional resonance in the Pacific style of play. For instance, whereas the predominant characteristics of the white European game in New Zealand have historically been orderliness, discipline and resolution, the Pacific game reflects a different rationality. As opposed to excess or irresponsibility, “island magic” may represent a rejection of the coercive moral and ethical codes of colonial/Pākehā rugby. It may very well subvert the cultural subjugation of the Pacific body and transform it textually into a discursive vehicle of affirmation and power. We would do well too (like James) to remember that rugby has an audience, and consequently to bear in mind that cultural consumption and identification is not merely a matter of complicity or submission to forces of dominance. At the very least there is subversive potential in the sight of a Pacific player splitting open defences with a Jamesian “eye for the line.”107 By according the body “a historical and cultural agency in generating, shaping and interpreting changing meanings within the contested spaces of postcolonial societies”108 we can begin to see that rugby for Pacific peoples can be understood as “neither total domination nor pure resistance.”109 In doing so perhaps we can begin to think of how to rearticulate the internal racial discourses of rugby in a manner sensitive to its translation by those who play and those who watch.

  1. Properly speaking, one should capitalise terms such as “west” and “east” when used as nouns, while avoiding capitalisation when they are used as adjectives. However, whether noun or adjective, I take “west” and “western” as constructed terms – worthy of implied quotation marks – because neither can any longer be identified with a particular set of spaces or a geographically defined people. Typical of colonial discourses, terms such as “the west” and “non-west” also suggest cultures both monolithic and collective – and in categorical opposition. I therefore consistently use the words west and western in lower case, with the exception of citations, to avoid implying that they are homogenous entities as well as to highlight the fact that such terms represent a particular set of cultural values and philosophical principles as opposed to an entity or concrete set of people of coherent values and beliefs. More specifically, following Henrietta L Moore, I take “the west” to be a “discursive space, a set of positionalities, a network of economic and political power relations, a domain of material and discursive effects.” Henrietta L Moore, A Passion for Difference (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 132).
  2. Elizabeth Deloughrey, for example, has redefined the Orientalist discourses in the oceanic context with the term islandism, which I use herein. Following Said, she contends that western views were articulated through the representation of these islands as isolated and contained spaces. Elizabeth Deloughrey, “The Litany of Islands, the Rosary of Archipielagoes: Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy,” Ariel, 32:1 (2001), 21-51.
  3. Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). Said is obviously drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse here, especially as developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972).
  4. Jane C Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
  5. Tom Brislin, “Exotics, Erotics and Coconuts: Stereotypes of Pacific Islanders,” in Images that Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, 2nd ed., eds Paul Martin Lester and Susan Dente Ross (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 106.
  6. Alison Nordstrőm, “Paradise Recycled: Photographs of Samoa in Changing Contexts,” Exposure, 28:3 (1991/92), 15.
  7. Rona Tamiko Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiian: Native Identities and Cultural Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
  8. E Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 58.
  9. Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiian, 6.
  10. Radhika Mohanram, Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3.
  11. Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 21.
  12. Brett St Louis, “Brilliant Bodies, Fragile Minds: Race, Sport and the Mind/Body Split,” in Making Race Matter: Bodies, Space and Identity, eds Claire Alexander and Caroline Knowles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
  13. John Hargreaves, “The Body, Sport and Power Relations,” in Sport, Leisure and Social Relations, eds John Horne, David Jary and Alan Tomlinson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 141.
  14. David Green, “Classified Subjects: Photography and Anthropology – The Technology of Power,” Ten/8, 14:3 (1984), 3-37.
  15. Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997).
  16. Geoffrey M White and Ty Kawika Tengan, “Disappearing Worlds: Anthropology and Cultural Studies in Hawai‘i and the Pacific,” The Contemporary Pacific, 13:2 (2001), 381-416.
  17. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999), 20.
  18. Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, eds Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, 1993).
  19. Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 7.
  20. Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/colonial Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18.
  21. Andrew Cowell, “The Apocalypse of Paradise and the Salvation of the West: Nightmare Visions of the Future in the Pacific Eden,” Cultural Studies, 13:1 (1999), 141.
  22. Robert Shannan Peckham, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London: I B Tauris, 2001), 102.
  23. Gina M Rossetti, Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 3.
  24. Brian V Street, The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction, 1858-1920 (London: Routledge, 1975).
  25. Patty O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006), 40.
  26. Peter H Marshall, Nature’s Web: Rethinking Our Place on Earth (London: M E Sharpe, 1996), 241.
  27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. and ed. GDH Cole (New York: E P Dutton, 1950), 201.
  28. See Edmond, Representing the South Pacific and O’Brien, The Pacific Muse.
  29. Sarina Pearson, “Darkness and Light: Dusky Maidens and Velvet Dreams,” Camera Obscura, 58, 20:1 (2006), 185.
  30. William Cummings, “Orientalism’s Corporeal Dimension,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4:2 (2003).
  31. Teresia K Teaiwa, “Reading Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism and the ‘Polynesian’ Body,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, eds Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
  32. John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands: With Remarks upon the Natural History of the Islands, Origin, Languages, Traditions, and Usages of the Inhabitants (New York: D Appleton, 1837), 514; quoted in Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 144.
  33. Brendan Hokowhitu, “Tackling Māori Masculinity: A Colonial Genealogy of Savagery and Sport,” The Contemporary Pacific, 16:2 (2004), 268.
  34. Mary Brewer, Staging Whiteness (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 3.
  35. Statistics New Zealand, QuickStats about Pacific Peoples: 2006 Census (Wellington, New Zealand: Statistics New Zealand).
  36. Daniel Williams, “Power Play,” Time, 8 September 2008, 40-43.
  37. Gregor Paul, “Pacifika Players Dominating Ranks,” The New Zealand Herald, 4 March 2007. Http:// www.nzherald.co.nz/author/story.cfm?a_id=196&objectid=10426898 (last accessed 5 March 2007).
  38. Quoted in Joseph Romanos, The Judas Game: The Betrayal of New Zealand Rugby (Wellington, New Zealand: Darius Press).
  39. Iulia Leilua, “Lomu and the Polynesian Powerpacks,” New Zealand Fitness, February/March 1996, 24-7.
  40. Leilua, “Lomu and the Polynesian Powerpacks.”
  41. Phillip Houghton, People of the Great Ocean: Aspects of Human Biology of the Early Pacific (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  42. Leilua, “Lomu and the Polynesian Powerpacks.”
  43. Donna Haraway, “Deanimations: Maps and Portraits of Life Itself,” in Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, eds Avtar Brah and Annie E Coombes (London: Routledge, 2000), 120.
  44. The Brown Factor (TV One, 2004) and Polyunsaturated (TV3 Network, 2003).
  45. Paul, “Pacifika Players Dominating Ranks.”
  46. Ibid.
  47. Lindsay Knight, “Viliame Waqaseduadua: God Given Talent,” New Zealand Rugby World, 2007, 66.
  48. Chris Laidlaw, “Bula Bullets,” Player, July 2006, 28.
  49. Te’evale, Tasileta. “We Are What We Play: Pacific Peoples, Sport and Identity in Aotearoa,” in Tangata O Te Moana Nui: The Evolving Identities of Pacific Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand, eds Cluny Macpherson, Paul Spoonley and Melani Anae (Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, 2001).
  50. Paul, “Pacifika Players Dominating Ranks.”
  51. NZ Rugby World, 2005.
  52. Knight, “Viliame Waqaseduadua,” 66.
  53. NZ Rugby World, May 2007.
  54. NZ Rugby World, August 2006.
  55. Laidlaw, “Bula Bullets,” 28.
  56. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
  57. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1994), 3.
  58. Hugh Marles, “Arrested Development: Race and Evolution in the Sculpture of Herbert Ward,” Oxford Art Journal, 19:1 (1996), 16-28.
  59. Matani Schaaf, “Elite Pacific Male Rugby Players’ Perceptions and Experiences of Professional Rugby,” Junctures, 7 (2006), 41-54.
  60. Colin King, “Race and Cultural Identity: Playing the Race Game Inside Football,” Leisure Studies, 23:1 (2004), 20.
  61. Paul Neazor, Ponsonby Rugby Club: Passion and Pride (Auckland, New Zealand: Celebrity Books, 1999), 162.
  62. Tamara Ross, “New Zealand’s Overstaying Islander: A Construct of the Ideology of Race and Immigration,” Unpublished MA dissertation (Victoria University of Wellington, 1994).
  63. Malcolm MacLean, “Of Warriors and Blokes: The Problem of Māori Rugby for Pākehā Masculinity in New Zealand,” in Making the Rugby World: Race, Gender, Commerce, eds Timothy JL Chandler and John Nauright (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 14, 12.
  64. Quoted in Jim Kayes, “All Black – Or is the New Breed All White?”, The Dominion Post, 19 July 2002, Sport, 1.
  65. Television New Zealand, “Island debut against Australia,” tvnz.co.nz, 15 April 2004, http://www.tvnz. co.nz (last accessed 16 April 2004).
  66. St Louis, Brilliant Bodies, Fragile Minds, 119.
  67. Teresia K Teaiwa and Sean Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships?: Pacific People in New Zealand,” in New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, eds James H Liu, Tim McCreanor, T McIntosh and Teresia K Teaiwa (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2005), 214.
  68. Laidlaw, Bula Bullets, 28.
  69. Paul, “Pacifika Players Dominating Ranks.”
  70. Chris Laidlaw, Rights of Passage: Beyond the New Zealand Identity Crisis (Auckland, New Zealand: Hodder Moa Beckett, 1999), 183
  71. Immigration New Zealand, “Auckland,” Immigration New Zealand, http://www.immigration.govt.nz/ nzopportunities/mapofnz/auckland.htm (last accessed 12 December 2008).
  72. Wynne Gray, “Why Auckland’s Going Down the Gurgler,” The New Zealand Herald, 11 September 2004.
  73. Ibid.
  74. “Flash Harry” is British slang reference to “a self-confident, vulgar person” (see Cassell’s Dictionary of Word and Phrases, 2002).
  75. David Leggat, “Auckland Full of Talent but Losers Just the Same,” The Weekend Herald, 21 October 2006, Sport, 4.
  76. Tea Ropati, “Island Magic,” Player, October 2006, 20.
  77. Quoted in The Brown Factor (TV One, 2004).
  78. Campbell Burnes, “The Henry Touch,” Spasifik, September/October 2004, 22
  79. Burnes, The Henry Touch, 23.
  80. Ibid., 23.
  81. Brendan Gallagher, “World Domination Next on ABs Coach’s Hit-List,” The Dominion Post, 30 November 2005, Sport Section, 5.
  82. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994), 178.
  83. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990/1999), 166.
  84. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 7.
  85. Elina Penttinen, Globalization, Prostitution and Sex-trafficking: Corporeal Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008), 10.
  86. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge.
  87. Said, Orientalism.
  88. Michelle Keown, Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body (New York: Routledge, 2005), 7.
  89. Murphy Halliburton, “Rethinking Anthropological Studies of the Body: Manas and Bodham in Kerala,” American Anthropologist, 104:4 (2002), 1125.
  90. Michel Foucault, “The Subject of Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., eds Hubert L Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 210.
  91. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 64.
  92. Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1995), 109.
  93. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 25.
  94. Simons, Foucault and the Political, 109.
  95. Randy Martin, Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1990), 176.
  96. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 167.
  97. CLR James, Beyond a Boundary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963/1983).
  98. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Using the Master’s Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South Asian Diasporas (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 34.
  99. Epifanio San Juan, Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St Martin’s Press), 228.
  100. Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 22 Victor Witter Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986), 24.
  101. Victor Witter Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986), 24.
  102. Ben Carrington, “Sport, Masculinity and Black Cultural Resistance,” in Power Games: A Critical Sociology of Sport, eds John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson (London: Routledge, 2002), 273.
  103. James Richard Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550-1730) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 7.
  104. Ibid., 7.
  105. Mike Marqusee, “Sport and Stereotype: From Role Model to Muhammad Ali,” Race and Class, 36 (1995), 5.
  106. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996), 204.
  107. James, Beyond a Boundary, 204.
  108. Simon Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 69-70.
  109. Brett St Louis, Rethinking Race, Politics and Poetics: CLR James’ Critique of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 167.

Andy Grainger is a senior lecturer at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Broadly interested in the relationship between globalisation, immigration, and identity, Grainger’s recent work examines the cultural politics of race and nation as played out through physical culture, and the sport of rugby in particular. Despite the nature of this research, and in a classic case of Orwellian doublethink, he remains a fan of the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team.