Abstract
Stories are always grounded in personal, collective, and ancestral experiences and come in a variety of visual, performance, textile, and text-based forms. Physical culture participation and politics can be better understood by engaging with the stories of people facing ongoing colonial and epistemic injustices, intersectional oppressions, as well as structural and cultural racism. In contrast to dominant trends in the cultural politics of sport, this article offers an ontological, epistemological, and methodological alternative. Following Black and decolonial scholars, we must honor non-Western storytelling modalities to listen to, tell, show, and center many experiences to resist Western colonial culture's binary structures and hierarchies, introduce alternate theorizations, and inject other ways of knowing and being into the sport and physical cultures and into physical cultural studies. This article highlights several areas of Black and decolonial studies that will be essential to efforts at transformative justice in sport and sports scholarship: interdisciplinarity, the biosâmythoi relationship, counter-storytelling, and creation stories.
The story-text itself, read aloud or quietly, is imprint of black life and livingness that tells of the wreckage and the lists and the dance floors and the loss and the love and the rumors and the lessons and the heartbreak. It prompts. The story does not simply describe, it demands representation outside itself. Indeed, the story cannot tell itself without our willingness to imagine what it cannot tell. The story asks that we live with what cannot be explained and live with unexplained cues and diasporic literacies, rather than reams of positivist evidence. The story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with a creative precision. (McKittrick, 2021, p. 7)
As a descendant of people who came to the Indigenous lands now known as Toronto, Canada because of the trans-Atlantic trade of human beings as property, I recognize the ways treaties continue to be broken and my responsibility to engage in a meaningful, continuous process of truth and reconciliation with all our relations. 1 The storytelling work that follows is core to this process.
Before migrating to Toronto, Canada, my family was living in the hot sun of the Caribbean, on the island of Antigua, as descendants of Western Africa and Indigenous Carib peoples. I know this because of family lore, whispers, and oration. The folktales and musical genius of the Burning Flames, King Short Shirt, and Kool DJ Red Alert, world-leading athletic artistry and athleticism of Sir Vivian Richards and Curtly Ambrose, creative nonfiction (Kincaid, 1988), and historical documents (Gaspar, 1978, 1993) laid a foundation to understand the details of the brutal conditions of Black life and the ongoing rebellion, resistance, resurrection, and resurgence on Antigua. Two things are clear from the histories and herstories told by my ancestors. First, we have always moved our bodies across regions and borders through laboring, escaping, and migrating and also through recreational and professional dance, ritual, sport, and embodied obeah (supernatural) practices. Second, memory-sharing, daydreaming, telling and recreating what could be otherwise and is already elsewhere (McGuire Adams et al., 2022) have always been core ontologies of Black Caribbean peoples. Yet these stories have been largely missing from anthropology, philosophy, politics, management, or (applied) sociology among other fields involved in documenting power related to sport, recreation, leisure, and the moving bodyâhereafter physical cultural studies.
I reject the primacy of text-based knowledge and situate my scholarship within the orality and practices of what Black Canadian cultural theorist Katherine McKittrick calls, in the epigraph above, âBlack life and livingness.â Thus, I argue that as physical cultural studies scholars, we must use stories to make meaning of, interpret, and/or (re-)present data. We must find ways to translate, explicate, document, tell and show stories of participantsâ physical cultures âincluding autoethnographic and narrative, fictional and performative, contextual, ethnographic, textual, discursive, visual and sensory, and digital approachesâ (Silk et al., 2017, p. 10) grounded in personal and collective experiences. However, of the 60 chapters of the Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies, it is likely that not one is written by a Black woman.
What distinguishes Black women's writing, Henderson (2013, p. 258) wrote, âis its interlocutory, or dialogic character, reflecting not only a relationship with the âother(s)â, but an internal dialogue with the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of black female subjectivity.â In other words, there is a privileging (rather than repressing) of multiple social positionalities that enables âdialogue with the aspects of âothernessâ within the self.â (Henderson, 2013, p. 259). By extension, and with thanks to Nathan Viktor Fawaz (personal communication, December 23, 2023) for engaging in thoughtful conversations about this, what distinguishes Black and decolonial writing, is the tripartite advantage of polyphony or speaking multiple dominant and subordinated languages and content simultaneously; antiphony or engaging a call-and-response pattern that recognizes an ongoing relationship between a leader and a group, part and whole; and cacophony or the ability to hold a conversation or story about the other in ourselves that is not possible within colonial narrative structures which are by their very nature exclusionary and oppressive in order to maintain the privileging of cismen and those who are White, nondisabled, Christian, heterosexual, lean, and tall among other groups. By telling our âotherâ stories including the dissonances, harmonies, and patterns created through celebrating ways of being in the world that colonial powers repudiate and criminalize, we maintain attention to what needs to be changed in existing power structures of sport and movement practices.
In contrast to other dominant trends in the study of cultural politics of sport, including those in this special issue, I offer an ontological, epistemological, and methodological alternative. I argue that we must honor storytelling as an imperative of Black and decolonial praxis that is grounded in our global and land-based interrelations, while considering the everyday actions we engage in to continuously (un)learn and resist performing dominant ways of being. In short, I suggest storytelling is the route to avoid reproducing interlocking colonial consolidations of power. If we recognize the hierarchies created by Europe including social group hierarchies, processes of capitalism and globalization, and the veneration of Eurocentric expertise and epistemology (Mignolo, 2011, p. 2) related to privileging the few at significant cost to the many, we must also accept the implications of these hierarchies in the microcosms of sport management, human kinetics, kinesiology, physical education, recreation, leisure studies, rehabilitation sciences, coaching and other fields related to physical cultural studies in ranking and segregating bodies and establishing the validity of particular epistemological logics. To resist these logics requires âdelinkingâ (Mignolo, 2009, 2011) from hegemonic knowledge and subject formations.
Delinking demands reconstitution of other ways of thinking, use of alternative vernaculars, imagining otherwise future demonstration of new (and reclamation of old) ways of being based upon colonial rhetorics and logics of meritocratic civilized progress with which it self-constituted, and through which it still exerts considerable influence. Delinking requires supplanting White European men's stories. Consider the influence on physical cultural studies of Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, or the other Jacques (Lacan)âa few social theorists from a small European nation, France, with a population of fewer than 60 million at the height of their careersâwhom nearly every graduate student has heard of, if not read closely. Meanwhile, scholars from the 54 countries in Africa with a continental population of over one billion and a diaspora numbering into the hundreds of millions, including across Latin America and the Caribbean, seem to have barely piqued the collective interest of physical cultural studies scholars. We must challenge what we know about how the world works, how people interact, or how power operates in relation to the moving body that relies on âtheoretical formulations by white European thinkersâ which are positioned as neutral and universal âwithout scrutinizing the historical, philosophical, or political foundations upon which they are constructed;â meanwhile, so-called âminorityâ theorization and the contemplations/experiences from which they emerge are ârelegated to the jurisdiction of ethnographic locality ⊠[and] seemingly cannot inhabit the space of proper theoretical reflectionâ (Weheliye, 2014, p. 6). Sarah Ahmed opined about the spaces women of color occupy, where whiteness dominates and she is expected to expose the change that is needed. Ahmed (2009, p. 41) describes a situation familiar to me: I was appointed to teach âthe race courseâ ⊠[challenging whiteness] becomes too personal. The argument is too much to sustain when your body is so exposed, when you feel so noticeable.ââŠâWhen our appointments and promotion are taken up as signs of organisational commitment to equality and diversity, we are in trouble. Any success is read as a sign of an overcoming of institutional whiteness. âLook, youâre here!â ⊠If only our arrival could be their undoing.
A commitment to justice in sport (research) demands that we do more than include. We must center epistemic disobedience. The inclusion of (the works of) a few Black scholars or thinkers from the Global South is only the beginning. Superficial inclusion is not enough.
I am suggesting here that physical cultural studies embrace Black and decolonial Studies and, specifically, storytelling as a fully fledged, epistemologically valid, and valuable knowledge system that opens us to alternate ways of seeing the world, rather than a ânicheâ topic, methodology, or representation strategy. Chicana tejana-lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer Gloria AnzaldĂșa (1999) refers to delinking through âborder stories,â art, dreams, and a sensuous act with words as âblades of grass, pushing past the obstacles, sprouting on the page; the spirit of the words moving in the body is as concrete as flesh and as palpable; the hunger to create is as substantial as fingers and handâ (p. 93). From the position of the embodied border storyteller, multiple-intersectional-oppression-experiences are navigated âby developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity ⊠learn[ing] to juggle cultures ⊠turn[ing] the ambivalence into something elseâ (p. 101). Within sports and physical cultures, people who are deemed infrahuman have the power to offer easy access to alternate versions of reality, to understand the falsehoods of colonial narratives of linearity, progress, enlightenment, fairness, universal and university education, and the simplified binaries and hierarchies of modernity.
Drawing from Black feminist, African diaspora, and decolonial border-story knowledge systems, communities, and embodied traditions, below I demonstrate the ways stories offer us a means of epistemic decolonization (Mignolo, 2011) desperately needed to think through the cultural politics of sport. As a scholar in Black Canada who is committed to developing Black Canadian Studies, I theorize ongoing struggles of becoming and curating otherwise possibilities by drawing from many Black storytellers, griots, healers, novelists, documentarians, journalists, singers, artists, dancers, performers, coaches, and athletes who helpâthrough their polyphonic, antiphonic, and cacophonic stories of self and otherâto understand ancestral, historical, contemporary and land-based politics in our (re)creation and the âfactsâ of our realities. 2 Given the historical colonial basis of physical cultural studies within the academy, situating these stories within decolonial praxis is a critical challenge to the vestiges of colonial dominance in physical cultural studies. Engaging with complex histories, methodologies, and epistemologies related to storytelling from Black and decolonial cultural and scholarly traditions will enable the next generation of transformative scholarship related to the cultural politics of sport. The following sections highlight several areas of Black and decolonial studies that will be essential to efforts at transformative justice in sport and sport scholarship: interdisciplinarity, the biosâmythoi relationship, counter-storytelling, and creation stories.
Interdisciplinarity in Black and Decolonial Storytelling
My knowledge of the ways that Black Studies can demonstrate efforts for transformative justice in sport comes from efforts at data collection and mobilization during my research on capoeira (Brazilian martial arts) with Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian instructors. Later published as studies to elucidate conceptual tools in physical cultural studies such as transnationalism (Joseph, 2008a), authenticity (Joseph, 2008b), intersectionality (Joseph, 2012a), and diaspora (Joseph, 2012b), this research was grounded in physical cultural studies ethnographic traditions. I was fortunate to interview my instructor, a Jamaican Canadian who, at that time, had 10 yearsâ experience. Our first interview was conducted before class and a story later came together in my fieldnotes: We met up on a Friday on the sidewalk of a Toronto side street. We arranged to have the interview one hour before class time and arrived simultaneously at the three-story building. Chatting as we climbed the stairs together, we noted we were both coming directly to class from busy work days. The stair climb signaled a transition from work to play, a uniting of our bodyminds as we pushed onward and upward. Upon arriving at the third-floor dance studio, the door was open to our surprise. Usually, the instructors are first to arrive and we unlock the door. Because we were early, another group was still practicing and we couldnât enter. To maximize time, we decided to stay right where we were for the interview. We sat uncomfortably on the dirty, cold stairs outside the studio to dive into my interview questions. I asked my instructor to describe his main motivation to teach this martial art. He could easily make a living performing and even touring internationally by sharing his embodied knowledge, musical talents, and histories of Afro-Brazilian culture with capoeira groups around the world. Instead, he was in Toronto, Canada, teaching three classes each week. He stiffened, sitting upright and leaning slightly into the bannister. âWork, work, work, work, work,â he responded, well before Rihanna made the phrase famous. He described the challenges he faced recruiting students, securing a space for training, and importing instruments and uniforms at a low costâjobs that fell on his broad shoulders alone. A main motivator for teaching was that he had already invested so much time and money in this academy that he feared he could not walk away. Out of a sense of loyalty to his students and with a hope that this business would one day be profitable enough for him to reap the fruits of his labor, he stuck with it. Our interview became interrupted just 15â
min in as students began to file out of the dance studio, their voices bouncing off the stairwell walls as they chatted with the excitement of people who had just sweated together. We paused the interview and stood up to allow them to pass us, walking down the stairs excitedly. Just then a few of our own students began to arrive up the stairs, early for class. We decided to end the interview prematurely but reconvene a few days later. We agreed to meet on a nonclass day, on a grassy hill in a park close to our class location. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon when we eased into conversation, speaking together in a semistructured manner for 2 hr, not interrupted by anything but our tangential ideas, chirping birds, and smells of fresh soil and nearby flowers. Before we ended the interview, I returned to a similar question Iâd asked before about his main motivation to continue to teach the martial art. His face lit up as he listed the pleasures that accrue from teaching Brazilian martial arts in a city like Toronto. âIt is pure joyâ he said, going on to describe the joy he sees in his studentsâ faces when they learn a new concept or song, the joy he gets from moving his body in playful unchoreographed union with his students, the joy inspired by the instrumentation and vocalizations provided by the group of capoeira musicians, the joy of training with others to push his body to new limits and sometimes to exhaustion for learning a new skill, and the joy that comes from building a legacy in a multicultural city like Toronto, a place outsiders are excited to visit to teach and perform. In other words: joy, joy, joy, joy, joy. In ending our interview, he stood up only after executing a rolĂȘ, a rolling movement where hands stay on the ground, and eye contact is maintained upside down until the person is standing. When he righted himself he grinned as he clapped his hands, seemingly putting an embodied exclamation point on the stories he had shared.
Of course, âworkâ can be âjoy,â but initially I had trouble reconciling these seemingly opposite responses to the same question. In reflecting upon the contrast between the interviews, I couldnât help but recall his comportment, posture, body language and attitude during the two events. I remember watching him twiddling blades of grass between his fingers, listening to him as he reclined so that the sun could strike his face, and letting the breeze wash over us on that second interview day. A stark contrast from the dark, dank, staircase we had huddled on previously. The lesson learned from this experience is what I have come to call the interdisciplinary fact and fiction of transformative qualitative research.
Literary nonfiction writers, historical novelists, and what is sometimes referred to as âscience fictionâ writers have generously shown for over a century that narrative inquiry holds the power to convey seemingly contradictory meanings and that drawing from multiple disciplines simultaneously enables and extends the analysis and (re-)presentation of findings. Indeed, it is the blending of fact and fiction in a wide range of Black physical cultures, capoeira, calypso, cricket, and carnival to name a few, where we can come to see the importance of inter and intrapersonal dialog and human and more-than-human sense-making to âdiscover and play with the identifications of ourselves ⊠not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message but to ourselves for the first timeâ (Hall, 1992, p. 113). When we invite people to speak from their experience, they will always bring their multiple selves which can be held through narratives that easily refuse either/or binaries. They can recount their cultures as work and joy, they can tell stories with stiffness and ease, and they can be motivated by fear or pleasure. They will âspeak in a plurality of voices as well as in a multiplicity of discourses,â to offer an authoritative testimony that is at once personal, familial, public, âhegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic (Henderson, 2013, p. 262) narrative offers âboth/and.â Can we see their deep, simultaneous pleasure and anguish? Can we understand their varied experiences and the aspects of privilege and oppression that put pressure on their decisions, shape their emotions, and determine their inclusion and exclusions? Can we account for the differences and similarities between the stairs and the grass (i.e., the land) in our data collection? In physical cultural studies, it is our job to translate those multiple selves and to listen to and tell/show those stories in ways that can motivate, inspire, evoke emotions, and move bodies to action. It is useful to consider narrative as a tool of self-realization to frame individual and collective stories to expose hidden biases and fictions within colonial perspectives. Thus, storytelling allows researchers to affirm their own identities and community traditions and also has potential as liberatory praxis. Every individual story is lived at the intersection of the interpersonal and intrapersonal, social and cultural, and human and nonhuman (Archibald, 2008; Bell, 1987; King, 2003, McGuire Adams et al., 2022). Stories make us whole.
Black feminist theorist S. R. Toliver's (2022) methodology is instructive for the next era of physical cultural studies that must reconcile with the traditions of Western scholarship. Drawing from West African traditions of griots who told stories to comfort, teach, document history, bear witness, maintain intergenerational connections, sustain communities, and remember homelands. Toliver (2022) argues that âEndarkened storyworkâ is sacredânot a luxury or a trendy methodologyâit is key to survival for those whose cultures and very humanity have been compromised by colonial knowledge and governance. Within physical cultural studies, our imperative is to understand âthe existence, operation, and effects of power and power relations as they are manifest within, and through, the complex and contextual field of physical cultureâ (Silk et al., 2017, p. 2). Toliver's Afrofuturist semifictionalized qualitative research method draws from three important epistemologies that teach about power relations. First, Indigenous storywork (Archibald, 2008) centers on deep relationships with research partners, synergies between the storytellersâ and listenersâ personal life experiences, and the cultural and spiritual understandings necessary to make meanings from stories. Second, endarkened feminist epistemology demands accountability to people and communities engaged in research and centers peace, justice, spirituality, and healing all while rejecting âenlightenedâ eurocentric positivist science (Dillard, 2012). Third, Afrofuturism (Dery, 1994) offers a description of scholarship, music, and science fiction that addresses Black concerns through 20th-century technoculture. All three forms of speculative texts imagine otherwise futures by refusing what is deemed âimpossibleâ and reclaiming and recovering past knowledge, different truths, and the spiritual as scientific thought through varied interdisciplinary leanings. All research is speculative because research tells a story about that which we do not yet know. Drawing from these three forms of storytelling can allow us to imagine ways by which we might engage the power of our/participantsâ creativity and dreams.
The humanities offer various forms of literary analysis, and certain forms of qualitative analysis offer storytelling as a component of various tools to enrich epistemology, but what I am suggesting here is that storytelling is science. Since a listener must engage, observe, decode, and apply an endarkened story to imagine new ways of sustaining our communities, storytelling is science. In one story of Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research, Toliver (2022, p. 30) captures the essence of a research participant's ambitions: I want to be a dreamer. I donât mean I want to take the position of the Dreamers and resituate myself as an authoritarian being in this world. I want to actually dream, to see what it's like to harness the dreamscape and imagine something different. I want to be able to see darkness when I close my eyes, rather than the whiteness I currently see. I want to know what it feels like to be an Endarkened dreamer, someone who can use their imagination to put Endarkened people into dream spaces. I want to know what it feels like to see myself in spaces beyond this reality.
Toliver (2022) tells tales of Dreamers and Endarkened people and adds to the work of Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand, Zora Neal Hurston, and many other Black feminist storytellers and poets who have explicated how the power dynamics of Western culture operate. Their storytelling is both universal and culturally specific. Black feminist storytellers have long demonstrated that storytelling is a way to connect across multiple disciplines and with a wide range of people while also being deeply personal. Storytelling is not merely representative, it can be collective and healing.
Inspired by Endarkened story work that âconsiders the ethical responsibility of researchers to focus upon the storied lives of our research partners and engage with them as story listenersâ as a critical imperative (Toliver, 2022, xxxvii), I see storytelling in multiple forms as a decolonial research approach to, in the words of Toliver (2022, xxxvii), âbetter understand our historic and current world and better situate inquiry for what the future world and future research could look like.â When interviewing my instructor indoors and then outdoors, I too was changed. As a listener, I shifted, taking up space differently in both settings. With the hot sun providing the energy to fuel our conversation, nudging across the sky with our hopes for the future in tow, I leaned in, understood the jokes on offer, and reflected on my own joys as a student nudged by my instructor in class and by his stories on the grass. This is a methodology worth exploring in depth elsewhere. It should suffice to say here, however, as a Black, Caribbean, Canadian, cisgender, big body, woman researcher, I feel a sense of responsibility to listen to and tell stories that implicate and amplify âmyâ people as well as stories that started many decades and centuries before the contemporary characters shared their experiences, bodies, space, and time with me and vice versa. Beyond âwhoâ is included, getting at âwhatâ the story is about in relation to otherwise knowing requires epistemological guidance from Black and decolonial studies. Through the stories I share, every reader will see our/their roles, families, identities, and experiences represented and reflected. Hopefully, we will all see a way that we can think, act, and be different to improve this world for ourselves and people like us. After all, isnât everyone like us?
Specifically drawing attention to the propensity within Black and decolonial studies toward storying that is âan ongoing method of gathering multifariously textured tales, narratives, fictions, whispers, songs, grooves,â Katherine McKittrick (2021) opines that âblack people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world, because thinking and writing and imagining across a range of texts, disciplines, histories, and genres unsettles suffocating and dismal and insular racial logicsâ (p. 4). These logics include the genre of traditional Western scholarship that uses data for capturing, quantifying, and defining communities with so-called evidence as living in/outside normalcy. Interdisciplinary methodologies and storytelling can be used to demonstrate the realities of living interdisciplinary worlds with creative and fictive precision. This could replace, augment, or supplement more positivist approaches to research to offer a fuller and more rigorous picture. An example from communities of enslaved and free Blacks in the nineteenth century is instructive. Black Americans used quilts as a form of coded storytelling and resistance. Those who were not afforded the rights of formal education or privacy used quilts, with scraps of cloth sewn adjacent to and on top of each other to communicate messages for planning resistance and escape (Lavender, 2019; Tobin & Dobard 2000), documenting history (Freeman, 1996), and building kinship (Cash, 1995). Quilting is an interdisciplinary story. Thus, interdisciplinarity in storytelling is contained in the many diverse modes of communication in Black communities and, as McKittrick (2021) states, these modes âoffer an aesthetic relationality that relies on the dynamics of creating-narrating-listening-hearing-reading-and-sometimes-unhearing. The stories do not offer lucid tales or answers; rather, they signal ways of living in a world that denies black humanityâ (pp. 6â7). Therefore, storytelling is essential as a methodology to extend ways of knowing sport and physical culture experiences. These modes can be applied within physical cultural studies to document livingness among all who are denied humanity.
Counter-Storytelling and Homo Narrans
Centering storytelling as a research method and as a narrative means of epistemological inquiry can enable a cultural politics of sport that is not merely descriptive, but is theoretically grounded, theory producing, and inquiry toward what Fricker (2007) refers to as âepistemic justiceâ related to honoring the knowledge of all communities. The shared realities of ingroups and outgroups which rely on a variety of epistemologies, traumas, forms of work and joys, signal the need for a reordering of knowledge.
Critical race theorists have written of the civil rights era that the dominant culture's or ingroup's âstories, parables, chronicles, and narratives are powerful means for destroying mindset â the bundle of presuppositions, received wisdoms, and shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes placeâ (Bell, 1987; Delgado, 1989, p. 2413). Counterstories are a tool used to deconstruct universalist ideas and unstick dominant stories from their hold on subaltern peoples. Counterstories are also constructed, by creating other ways of thinking, perceiving, knowing, and telling. This is how outgroups shatter complacency and challenge the status quo, however, this process is neither easy nor automatic. Axiological shifts take place over extended periods of time and with careful consideration of what Joseph and Kriger (2021) point out are the relationships and context in which weâpeople who perform, play, coach, and research sport and physical culturesâare embedded.
How can we solve the ills of sports, recreation, and leisure systems that consistently and methodically diminish certain community knowledge and exclude particular bodies? The remedy is absorbed, according to Delgado (1989), through âcounterstoriesâ of a group: whose marginality defines the boundaries of the mainstream, whose voice and perspective â whose consciousness - has been suppressed, devalued, and abnormalizedââŠâcreates its own stories, which circulate within the group as a kind of counter-reality ⊠[to] create their own bonds, represent cohesion, [and build] shared understandings, and meanings. The cohesiveness that stories bring is part of the strength of the outgroup. (p. 2412)
The counterstories of children, environmental activists, abolitionists, survivors, dancers, coaches, and athletes whose proximity to pain and loss sparks rage and action ought to be our guide for making change. Their/our counterstories will enable us, as Maynard and Simpson (2022) state, âto build livable lives together in the wreckageâ (p. 10). This is the same âunkind worldâ or âwreckageâ McKittrick (2021, p. 7) refers to in the epigraph, in which âSharing can be uneasy and terrifying, but our stories of black worlds and black ways of being can, in part, breach the heavy weight of dispossession and lossââŠâ[because they] are embedded with all sorts of liberatory clues and resistancesâ (McKittrick, 2021, p. 7).
Counterstorytelling has roots in the biosâmythoi relationship described by Wynter (2001), highlighting the inherent connection between the bodymind and the story. Materialist feminist disability studies scholar Dr Margaret Price (2015) used the term âbodymindâ building from Rothschild (2000) to signal the ways âmental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each otherâthat is, because they tend to act as oneâ (Price, 2015, p. 269). A body is never fully âat rest.â The body moves in terms of all of its internal systems, including the cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, emotional, and cognitive. The body moves within regions and across borders for labor, escape, work, migration, tourismâand even if it doesnât move far, it will interact with other bodies from afar. As I have stated elsewhere (Joseph, 2008a, 2012b), human bodies move and the narration of their movements in recreation spaces (re)creates meaning. Stories, likewise, have the capacity to move us emotionally, move us to action, and are never fully at rest (King, 2003). For example, we tell and feel stories in our broken hearts, injured tendons, sweaty palms, and clenched muscles. If stories are considered as narratives, songs, sounds, dances, poems, photographs, paintings, quilts, collages, sculptures, questions, conversations, theories, debates, memories, and more (McKittrick, 2021), it becomes clear that our biophysiological, moving bodies are part of our stories. We fight back and let flow our tears of joy and sorrow. We may think, remember, express, imagine, and ruminate on our stories, but they are more than cognitive and definitely not static. Our moving bodies are not outside of our storytelling.
Biosâmythoi conjoins the bodymind and story for communities that bear histories of unfair exclusion, excision, removal, dispossession, punishment, and loss; bodymind stories are essential rites of passage and tales of survival and critiques of imposed, unjust, and fictitious European colonial hierarchies. In an interview with David Scott (2000) in âThe Re-enchantment of Humanism,â Small Axe, Sylvia Wynter reimagines what it means to be human away from the âuniversalâ subject written through Europe's liberal autobiography that positioned itself as synonymous with humanism. Wynter draws from the anticolonial critique of Frantz Fanon (1968), who identified the ceremonial panoply of colonialism that included âa celebrated concept of Man [that] depended on degradation of non-European men and womenâ (Scott, 2000, p. 120). This degradation arose as religious and then scientific stories of European men's embodiment of humanity's ideal. Wynter reconceptualizes the human as homo narrans by drawing from three interdisciplinary areas (Wynter, 2001; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). First, Fanon's observations that each human as bios (body) and mythoi (stories) draws attention to the connection between our storiesâespecially our ontology origin storiesâand our sociogeny, the ways we are created by the social structures in which we are embedded. Second, brain scientists Andrew Newberg, Eugene DâAquili, and Vince Rause's study of the mythmaking center of the human brain laid a foundation for Wynter to know the importance of delinking through decolonial stories. Third, Wynter was inspired by paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga's proposal âthat the human is not only a languaging being but also a storytelling speciesâ (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015, p. 25). Wynter notes that we feel stories in our guts and hearts, and we tell stories of self and other that have biological, physiological and geographical impacts and outcomes.
In 1947 Wynter moved from Jamaica to London and attended the University of London, Kingsâ College to study modern languages. However, rather than focus on anticolonial writing or politics in the context of the anticolonial movement, the decolonial scholar became connected with the arts, especially dance, and the resurrection of movement based on bodymind stories as political acts. Wynter shares of the 1950s: the idea of the dance at that time was so powerful because I think it bridged the divide in the Caribbean between the literate written tradition and the stigmatized yet powerful undertow of African religions and their cultural seedbed that had transformed itself into a current that was now neoindigenous to the Caribbean. And this was what was being resurrected. (Scott, 2000, p. 130)
Until that era, the stories Wynter knew of Jamaica were those that reinforced being a British subject and exalted European ways of knowing and moving. Thus, counterstorytelling in, through, and about dance was an essential element in the process of bringing together the whole bodymind because stories help us to constitute newly envisioned worldmaking, a more just future. Framed as resurrection, resurgence, reclamation and/or revitalization Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous peoples including the Garifuna in Honduras (Anderson, 2007), Africadians in Canada (Clarke, 2017), and Aboriginal Australians and Torres Straight Islanders (Aboagye, 2018) enact politics of resistance through their folktales, oral histories, and embodied practices of community building. Anticolonial political uprisings, art, and activism of the mid-20th century enabled storytelling of a different kind, constituting new selves as fully human defined from within, while dominant groups and the colonial structures they created maintained hierarchies of who is fit, who fits, who is welcomed, and who is excised. These definitions are directly tied to biology and scientific/aesthetic ideas of selection and dysselection (Scott, 2000; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). Wynter wrote plays, novels and academic texts, all of which engage stories to challenge the central belief system on which our societies were founded that some human beings are superior to others and some are not considered human at all.
Physical cultural studies are fueled by examining access to âlife chancesâ through exploration of consequences of power relationships within what hooks (1984) calls an âimperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchyâ (p. 51) that systemically grants power and privilege to some while disproportionately disadvantaging others. Physical cultural studies also identify potential sites of intervention, by homing in on the means of creating the material conditions and community solidarities that lead to shifts in current hierarchies and interlocking oppressions toward peace, joy, and justice for all. This transgressive, transformational, and transdisciplinary praxis has a core conundrum: How do we bridge the gaps between the experiences of marginalized communities and the knowledge of groups in power? What conceptual tools are necessary for understanding where changes are needed? Following McKittrick (2021, p. 7), I suggest we need to understand âa series of stories as a way to hold on to the rebellious.â My intuitive desire, some might say, my compulsion, is to resolve the conundrum through stories. Counterstorytelling is simultaneously a defense against injustice and a means of righting wrongs through a broadened imagination of what âright(s)â could be like. Certain people have been threatened with violence and death but have kept telling stories because their/our stories are the only means of documenting history, feelings, and thoughts to lay a foundation for the changes that are to come, even if the seeds planted now will not be reaped for many generations. I look for ways to make positive change through connecting stories of self and other. The counter-story I have is in my bodymind.
Creation Storytelling Traditions
A long line of storytellers taught me to draw from mythical characters and to center my communities, particularly in literature where stories like ours have previously not been told. Sports, recreation, and leisure organizations are beginning to acknowledge the marginalization of people facing intersectional oppressions, ongoing colonial injustice, and structural racism. As research participants and as scholars, honoring non-Western storytelling modalities resists colonial culture's binary structures and hierarchies, centers other experiences, introduces alternate theorizations and injects other ways of knowing.
The deities of the Yoruba tradition offer an alternative example to Western binary knowledge. Yoruba tradition has been as influential in West Africa and the African diaspora as Greek mythology has been in Europe and the Global North (Cosentino, 1987). Both mythologies survive in folk practices, everyday knowledge, high theater, and sports traditions. In the Yoruba tradition, the androgynous high god, Mawu-Lisa is one of the primary deities of the creation story of Heaven and Earth. Mawu-Lisa is considered sacred because of the ĂšjĂŹwĂ pĂČ (twoness) the god embodies that is apparent in many aspects of nature (Lawal, 2008). Mawu corresponds to the moon and is associated with night, fertility, motherhood, gentleness, forgiveness, rest, and joy, while Lisa, the other twin, corresponds to the sun and is associated with day, heat, work, power, war, strength, toughness, and intransigence. To reflect on the Mawu-Lisa in all of us is not to emphasize binaries. Rather it is to consider the power within to create, sow, grow, and reap seeds, to cultivate people, plants, and ideas. Rather than a hierarchy or duality, Mawu-Lisa represents a binary fusion. They can make something from nothing. They can work with joy. Mawu-Lisa is a creation story that can be used to situate the qualitative research encounter and show the fusion of the personal-political.
My own physical culture creation story has a beginning, end, and new beginning. For some readers, it is possible that my physical culture creation story âlacks narrative coherence.â I have been told worse. It may also leave readers with the feeling that they wanted more, or had to fill in the gaps. I would take that as a compliment. That would mean the story evoked new thoughts and feelings. McKittrick (2021, p. 7) reminds us, âThe story asks that we live with what cannot be explained and live with unexplained cues.â But what if a reader took in my physical culture creation story a different way. If someone can believe one character has three namesâSavior, Jesus, and Christâthey might also believe that my capoeira instructor trained me, abused me, and loved me. They might believe such simultaneity neither negates nor nullifies any singular axis of experience. They might believe in the value of a thickened story. They might believe it would be desirable to not be taken off the hook of that story through flattened oversimplification. According to my first aid training, it is not recommended to drag a person to a new location seconds after theyâve been kicked in the head. Checking for breathing, carefully rolling the person on their side, and/or contacting emergency medical services would have been my instincts. However, I was unable to activate these steps because I was unconscious. Framed as care for me, the instructor, who had kicked me, told my peers to drag me away, as he did not want me to be trampled by the next two capoeira players entering the roda, the circle in which we play our dance-fight-game, capoeira. The game must go on. I was hauled unconscious by my armpits, dumped at the side of the room, and slapped awake. That awakening was the beginning of the rest of my life. As a capoeira student, sometimes instructor, and recent mother (my 4-month-old witnessed the event from her car seat positioned a safe-ish distance from the roda), I saw myself transformed from someone who could sometimes, selectively, and insincerely tout the importance of safety in my capoeira group to someone who could not abide the ablebodied assumptions that were core to our practice. Suddenly I questioned why each student should attend every class even if they are injured, should try every maneuver even if it doesnât suit their strength or flexibility, or should push themselves to exhaustion during every roda replacing water and food with clapping and singing. The lack of necessary care in those first critical moments of injury led to a trajectory of recovery, coping, and integration I am still working hard to support within my system. First came months of recuperation from whiplash, then years of chronic neck pain and threats to my mental well-being. Today, a mass near my C4 vertebraâone that doctors (and my instructor) insist is ânothingââcontinues to grow. âNothingâ remains unacknowledged. âNothingâ causes pain. I left the group after this incident that I came to refer to as The Betrayal. My instructor, my peers, who, at the time I considered not merely research participants, but my chosen family, my fictive kin, my âride-or-dies,â carried on with the game, their classes, and their lives. They neglected to check up on me and refused to acknowledge their responsibility for my ongoing suffering. They expressed their love verbally but could not bear to identify with, be in solidarity with, or consciously join me. It is possible that proximity to me, even over the phone, reminded them of their own any-time-but-not-yet fully injured/disabled status. So, I simultaneously lost a social community, an exercise outlet, and a physical culture. They had no need to practice the discomforts of accountability when liability was already evaded. The waiver must be signed. Ultimately, however, those who remained loyal to the instructor continued classes with him, training their rolĂȘs, kicks, and escape techniques to convince themselves of their ability to maintain control, to escape, and to dominate. Ongoing training offered the other students disciplinary techniques of pushing through pain and not listening to their bodies, and they also practiced showing up for each other and feeling the power of fidelity. These were philosophies and epistemologies I had espoused when I taught the class. A sense of strength and empowerment arose from feeling like an invincible or impervious part of a team. Teamwork makes the dream work. Learning to execute the small backflip movement, macaco, remained elusive to many of us through my 13 years of training with this group, but as I heard of my peers mastering the maneuver after I left, I knew they had continued to tell themselves higher, faster, stronger stories, narratives of winners and losers, leaving the realities of broken, hurt, and resilient tales of people like me out. I could have returned, learning to accept the things/people I cannot change. However I could not reconcile training again when, âShe just couldnât take itâ was the dangerous single story that had replaced my spot on the training sequences, enabling the group to maintain narrow stories of success and excellence as part of their lore. The game must go on.
This is a recreation story because the injury I sustained prompted the birth of new physical culture practices, new research on capoeira, and new perspectives on the role of the bodymind in storytelling. The rest of my life includes an examination of masculinities within Afro-Brazilian culture and the ways the constant performance and reproving of tough, stoic, and aloof attitudes in transnational capoeira spaces play out on and in the (care of) bodies of non-Brazilians and nonmen. Talking about the betrayal with others who witnessed the event enabled me to see my experience as a Mawu-Lisa story and my desire for capoeira and martial arts practice as emerging from my inclination toward self-protection of the seeds I have sowed. This martial art is a clear example of the virility, strength, commitment, and fatherhood values we learned and prioritized as capoeira students alongside the authoritarianism, colorism, sexism, and domestic violence we came to embody. Mawu and Lisa remain side by side, integrated, and whole. Black and decolonial praxis enables this storytelling.
Conclusion
Within physical cultural studies, if we want to innovate our research, we must attune our listening to the stories of those who do not fit, are (thought of as) unfit, cannot fit, or refuse to fit. Their/our stories help to understand how bodies and participation in sports and physical cultures are born of yet also resist colonial norms. Included to teach âthe race courseâ or excluded to avoid reminders of the ablebodied assumptions of a group, a storyteller from the margins can elucidate the tensions between the individual and the structure, the one and the many. We learned from AnzaldĂșa, Toliver, Mawu-Lisa, McKittrick, and Wynter, that when a person finds themselves stuck in a hopeless place, in an in-between place, simultaneously living in the dominant and other culture, held in past and current events, and/or between social systems and hierarchies, that individual is gifted to speak from the coexistence and convergence of multiple realities. That person and their community members have opportunities to hear and tell different stories to promote cultural changes that can enable their full being. As McGuire Adams et al. (2022) who extend Simpson (2011) elucidate, our dream spaces and community stories are valuable data even, or especially when they counter dominant philosophies and epistemologies.
My curiosity about the future of physical cultural studies lies in the varied ways of knowing and how, along with our text-dominant journal and book (chapter) publication culture, physical cultural studies can create textiles, moving images, performances, music, and storied memories as part of our data collection with potentially different outcomes with respect to cultural politics. We need to learn to read/listen to what is said and unsaid when an athlete tells a story related to harms or to actions taken for their own protection. It is only by telling one's authentic story including stories of refusals (such as those told by Caster Semenya, Naomi Osaka, and Simone Biles) that the broader public will come to another way of understanding the world, a perspective that is most often silenced and erased.
Our hegemonic understandings of time, space, self, and being continue to be encumbered by colonial legacies. Within Black studies, the aesthetics, movements, physical cultures, and stories about them from people who experience the structural and cultural oppressions underpinned by colonial logicsâthe most foundational of which is the assignation of prime value to those who are âfittestâ and are welcomed (and able) to go higherâfasterâstronger. Black studies and decolonial praxis invite a retelling of these experiences in a manner that counters dominant narratives, embraces interdisciplinarity, and centers the bodymind as a storyteller.
Whether we are engaging in interviews, focus groups, informal meetings, or long-term ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative researchers are collecting stories from research participants. Which participants do we include? What work do their stories do? Or more precisely what work can we do honoring these stories as receipts? The telling is not only disclosure. While stories may involve vulnerability and seem to be a solo endeavor, they are inherently collective because our stories involve all our relations explicitly or implicitly in poloyphonic, antiphonic, and cacophonic patterns. No matter how the neoliberal drive toward celebrating novel scholarship and individual scholars seem to captivate academia at this time, stories are always in response to old questions and involve fact-sharing, persuasion, incomplete fiction, ancestral knowledge, and impartial knowledge requiring imagination and scientific curiosity to decipher.
Feminist activist scholar Gayatri Spivak (1988) is well known for a decolonial essay, âCan the Subaltern Speak?,â in which Spivak notes that if elites do not want/are unable to see or hear the subaltern, subaltern ideas simply do not/cannot exist. Upper Caste, Western, and Northern men consistently speak to each other, for and about the âunderclassesâ even in physical cultural studies. They allow/limit/listen to the speech of the underclasses predominantly when it is in a dominant language and aligned with dominant ideas. The dominant group created its Global South, its Middle East, its Dalits, Blackfullas, Indigenous, and Enslaved. A framework for new construction will emerge from ending the refusal or marginalization of alternative epistemologies and communication strategies. The stories, music, and art of those previously and currently constructed as subalterns must be heard. This is a call for thickening our listening to deeply know the dreamscapes as represented within Black and decolonial studies traditions. We need more stories from those who move their bodyminds for sport and recreation; those who move across borders and engage in sport; those whose movements are surveilled, measured, and mined for their athletic potential; those who align social and epistemic justice activist movements with their physical culture movements, and those whose (storytelling about) physical culture is central to their livingness. Our stories matter.
