National Bodies: Political Ontology, Cultural Citizenship, and Migrant Rugby

Abstract

Athletes, their bodies, and their sport performances validate and vivify the nation by lending physical form to an imagined community. For bodies to express and enact so consistently as to constitute a coherent nation, they must be assembled, defined, and motivated within a complex arrangement of culture, civil society, and institutions. Aihwa Ong called this arranging of people with national objectives cultural citizenship. In this article, I write autoethnographic vignettes of my experiences as a migrant and rugby player from Aotearoa/New Zealand playing in the U.S. South, which I use to demonstrate and add to Ong’s theories on embodiment, cultural citizenship, and the nation. I argue that a nation is an unlikely achievement dependent on its members; members, such as athletes, enact their nation in by augmenting its affects, most notably by making the nation capable of having a physical encounter. I recommend qualitative scholars and sport sociologists study instances where athletes and other members fail to embody the nation, because this is where scholars can best observe and study the contingency of nations.

Reading Agamben backwards: Syrian refugees, biopolitics and sovereignty in Turkey

“…Regarding citizenship, although the AKP's primary vision resembles a sort of 'cultural citizenship' (McLeod, 2018) for the Syrians, in line with the Sunni Islamist reidentification of the People, its discourse varies greatly with respect to the party's domestic concerns, hence pointing to a political bargaining mechanism. In January 2017, for instance, President Erdoğan stated that 'there are highly qualified people among [the Syrians]: engineers, lawyers, doctors.…”