Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game
Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game
by Lisa Uperesa
Duke University Press, 2022 Paper: 978-1-4780-1809-4 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-2270-1 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1546-8 Library of Congress Classification GV959.54.A46U647 2022
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels. In Gridiron Capital Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural and social dynamics that have made football so central to Samoan communities. For Samoan athletes, football is not just an opportunity for upward mobility; it is a way to contribute to, support, and represent their family, village, and nation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and media analysis, Uperesa shows how the Samoan ascendancy in football is underpinned by the legacies of US empire and a set of imperial formations that mark Indigenous Pacific peoples as racialized subjects of US economic aid and development. Samoan players succeed by becoming entrepreneurs: building and commodifying their bodies and brands to enhance their football stock and market value. Uperesa offers insights into the social and physical costs of pursuing a football career, the structures that compel Pacific Islander youth toward athletic labor, and the possibilities for safeguarding their health and wellbeing in the future.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Lisa Uperesa is Senior Lecturer in Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland.
REVIEWS
"Uperesa’s book should not only appeal to anthropologists but also to general readers. She engagingly explains what football has come to mean to a whole range of Samoan players — in college programs and the NFL, as well as on youth and high school teams back home — and gives a compelling account of how dual systems of stratification, one based in Indigenous values and the other in capitalist imperatives, combine, for better and worse. . . . Readers interested in sports and culture in a transnational world will no doubt find Gridiron Capital engrossing."
-- David Lipset Los Angeles Review of Books
"Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals."
-- J. A. Badics Choice
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction. Fabled Futures and Gridiron Dreams 1 1. Malaga: Forging New Pathways in Sport and Beyond 23 2. Football, Tautua, and Faʻasāmoa 48 3. Producing the Gridiron Warrior 71 4. Gridiron Capital 103 5. “Faʻmālosi!”: Strength, Injury, and Sacrifice 123 Conclusion. Niu Futures 151 Glossary 155 Notes 159 Bibliography 185 Index 211
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