A Diaspora Approach to Sport Tourism

Abstract

The concept of diaspora offers an alternative approach to understanding sport tourism. Sport-related travel is a powerful diasporic resource that permits migrants to connect simultaneously to their nation, region, or cultural heritage and to their dispersed peers. This ethnographic study of a Caribbean-Canadian group’s cricket tourism in St. Lucia, West Indies reveals that nostalgia sport tourists reminisce about their sporting heroes and regional histories, active sport tourists lime and reenact their homeland culture, and holiday sport tourists contribute to a broadly defined homeland through financial and material donations. These acts allow members of the Caribbean diaspora to rekindle their affiliation with their national and regional cultures, discover and express a sense of self as part of Caribbean histories, and foster a deterritorialized racial community.

Diaspora as aesthetic formation: community sports events and the making of a Somali diaspora

“…Cultural forms such as sport, music and literature are critical aspects of diaspora formation (Werbner 1996;Burdsey 2006Burdsey , 2008Joseph 2011;Burdsey, Thangaraj, and Dudrah 2013). Joseph (2011) shows how sports spaces can act as sites for the maintenance of both a homeland (e.g.…”

“…Joseph (2011) shows how sports spaces can act as sites for the maintenance of both a homeland (e.g. nation of origin) and a homespace (e.g.…”

“…The research question we seek to address is how 'articulations of diasporism' (Clifford 1994, 302), such as the vision articulated by the Global Somali Diaspora (2016), become tangible in community sports spaces like AFT and embodied in subjects who participate in these spaces. We thus interpret sport as an embodied aesthetic practice through which diasporas materialise, with important implications for diasporic identity and belonging (Werbner 1996;Burdsey 2006Burdsey , 2008Joseph 2011;Spaaij 2012Spaaij , 2015. This paper is structured as follows.…”

The City of Sport: London’s Stadiums as Visitor Attractions

“…Brooker (2017, 157) recognises that fans will 'travel across the world to often mundane places that fandom has made sacred' including the football stadium (Jorgenson 1995). In evaluating Trip Advisor reviews of stadium tours there are numerous contributors that liken their visits to pilgrimages (Joseph 2011, Gammon 2004 with the sports spaces honoured as holy or 'hallowed' (Table 5.4).…”

Culture, community, consciousness: The Caribbean sporting diaspora

“…This is done through social networks, memory sharing, economic strategies, communication and transportation technologies, and institutional policies. For example, return visits have been described as critically important in facilitating the economic and emotional survival of local communities and Caribbean diaspora networks (Duval, 2004;Joseph, 2011a). These are facilitated by governments, businesses, and individuals.…”