From Immigrant to Overstayer

Abstract

During the late 1970s, thousands of—in many cases legal—Samoan immigrants were systematically evicted from New Zealand shores. Today, however, “Samoans” are an integral part of New Zealand's national rugby team, the All Blacks. Although this may, perhaps, be interpreted as evidence of a more progressive racial climate in contemporary New Zealand, this article argues that the All Blacks, in fact, serve to obfuscate the cultural politics of race and nation embodied in, and played out through, the game of rugby. In particular, the article examines the parallels of the exploitation of Samoan industrial and athletic labor, how the public discourses that surround players of Samoan descent raise increasingly complex questions of national eligibility and allegiance, and finally how newdiasporic affiliations such as the Pacific Islanders rugby team may provide an opportunity to build on an emergent “Black Pacific” culture that transcends the boundaries of nationality and nationalism.

Female elite sports achievements in Iran. The Case of the First Olympic Medalist

“…This identification with Islamic culture also means that Iranian women have found opportunities to participate in and promote sports. Such wider identification beyond the nation-state has been described by Grainger (2006), though in a different context where he describes how the players of Samoan descent in the New Zealand men's national rugby team transcended their national borders and placed themselves in the cultural context of the Black Pacific when they were excluded from the mainstream narratives of New Zealand (ibid.). Though these are different contexts, the similarity is that athletes have tried to get included or represented in elite sports by identifying with a new cultural code; one group by identifying with Islamic rather than Western cultural elements, promoted in pre-revolutionary Iran, and the other one with the Black Pacific instead of New Zealand culture.…”

‘It’s a long way to the Super League’: The experiences of Australasian professional rugby league migrants in the United Kingdom

“…However, for sports migrants with indigenous Australasian backgrounds, European culture can be unfamiliar and dislocation from 'home' a possibility. Despite this, a tradition of migrating to Europe in sports such as rugby exists for Maoris, Papuans, Aborigines and 'Pacific Islanders', including Melanesians, Micronesians and Polynesians (Grainger, 2006). Sport labour migration has been framed against theories of globalization (Maguire, 2000(Maguire, , 2002.…”