Abstract
In the following chapter I aim to engage with sports and creative writing, namely poetry, from a decolonial standpoint. This chapter is the result of my doctoral research, in which I collaborated with ten Afghan youth living in Sweden, within a participatory art-based research paradigm, in order to explore and reveal their engagement with sports. The intention here is to delink sport from Eurocentric thought and the competitive sports cultures of the West (Carrington in Handbook of the Sociology of Sport. Routledge, 105–115, 2015); and instead work to recover otherwise forms of engagement with sports that work to bring about re-existence (Walsh in International Journal of Lifelong Education 34(1):9–21) of lives and ways of knowing that have been historically negated by such Eurocentrism. I have supplemented the chapter with poetry and prose (some written by me) not only to contextualise the themes and illuminate certain personal experiences that have influenced my scholarship, but also to provide the readers with a cartography of the epistemic stand I depart from.
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Notes
- 1.
Molana Jalaloddin Mohammad Balkhi (1207–1273 CE), or as he is known in the Western world Rumi, was born in the province of Balkh in the Khorasan region (Currently in Afghanistan). He was an influential philosopher who argued that only great love can create an ideal world.
- 2.
Mohammad KazemKazemi (1968–) is an influential Afghan literary scholar and poet. He was born in Herat, Afghanistan but in 1984 after the start of the civil war in Afghanistan and the invasion of the Soviet army, he immigrated to Iran as a refugee.
- 3.
Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani (1939) is an Iranian writer, poet and literary critic. He was born in Nishapur, Khorasan. He is currently a professor of literature in Tehran University.
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Acknowledgements
Forever grateful to Yasamin, Ali, Hasan, Mohammad, Baset, Farhad, Shahla and Natalie for opening their hearts and allowing me to be their ally.
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Mashreghi, S. (2023). Gesturing Towards Decolonial Openings: Sports and Poetry. In: McGowan, L., Symons, K. (eds) Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_10
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