Speaking Back to Power:
Collisions, Connections,
and Sporting Conviviality

Sepandarmaz Mashreghi
Dept. of Sport Sciences, Malmö University

Sometimes, a book comes along that not only resonates deeply on a personal level but also serves as a rich and thought-provoking resource for analytical exploration. A Nation of Family and Friends? by Aarti Ratna is one such work—a poignant exploration of identities, belongings, and the intricate ties that bind and/or divide South Asian women in the diasporic sporting spaces. With profound insights and a sharp sociological lens, Ratna crafts a narrative that is both deeply personal and globally relevant, leaving the reader questioning their role and complicities in challenging and/or upholding the social inequalities in the worlds of sports and the academy. Grounded in the traditions of Black, Brown and ethnic other feminisms, Ratna offers novel methodological and analytical concepts to scrutinise the potential of sporting spaces for contesting and reproducing intersecting forms of discrimination and inequalities.

A Nation of Family and Friends? Sport and the Leisure Cultures of British Asian Girls and Women, published in 2024 by Rutgers University Press, is a collection of personal stories, academic essays, poetry and a manifesto.  The aim of the book is to explore how perceptions of gender and race are interpreted through the movements of British South Asian girls and women, as well as how they perceive and navigate their connections or disconnections with England. As such, Ratna examines how sports and leisure activities can create both inclusive and exclusive spaces for identity and belonging. In the preface and introduction, Ratna grounds her analytical approach, as well as her methodology of writing, in the works of ethnic other feminist scholars such as Audré Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and Maria Lugones, to name a few. She argues for the use of different autobiographical vignettes as a method of challenging “academic intersectionality”—a form of intersectional writing that stays at a theoretical level without engaging the erotic that is very heart of Black feminism. Erotic according to Lorde (2007) is the deep embodied creative force that allow us to feel deeply and connect to others. By making her private self public, Ratna not only reclaims her erotic but also challenges the systems of oppressions, in this case within the academy, that thrive on disconnection and apathy, or as she calls it by “being professional”.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this chapter is how the women in the study claimed England as their home, solidifying this connection through various walking practices both in England and during their long stays in India.

The book consists of four analytical chapters, with chapters two and four standing out as the most interesting for me. Chapter two is the study of the walking practices of a group of first-generation Gujarati Indian migrants, which includes Ranta’s own parents as coresearchers and participants. Focusing on the women participants, this study highlights their historical, diasporic, and evolving sense of identity, which they interpret and define through their experiences of class, caste, ethnicity, and religion, as well as in relation to racialised others. One of the most fascinating aspects of this chapter is how the women in the study claimed England as their home, solidifying this connection through various walking practices both in England and during their long stays in India. For instance, they viewed themselves as more deserving of being British compared to other racialised and more recently arrived migrants, or how, even while on holidays in India, they often walked together as a group without much interaction with the local residents.

In chapter four, Ratna introduces the concept of sporting conviviality which, she argues, highlights the paradox of sporting spaces both as sites of unity and division. Continuing her theme of family and friends where togetherness and belonging exist simultaneously alongside tension, conflict and exclusion, she analyses the sporting experiences of a group of British South Asian girls and women (second to third generation) who play football. She argues that experiences of playing football together “can create bonds of friendship that at the moment, [allow] us to see (in loving perception) commonalities despite entrenched spatial, social, religious, and political differences that are inscribed in participants’ everyday lives and realities” (p. 90). Yet, this shared “common” is fractured, as class, race, ethnicity, and geography give rise to intricate alliances and points of divergence. In a sense, the sporting conviviality is both liberating and limiting.

In her exploration and portrayal of the sporting narratives of British South Asian women, Ratna re/presents them as multifaceted individuals—mothers, workers, lovers, wives, football players, sports fans, family members, and friends. This approach offers a broader, heterogenous and more nuanced understanding of their identities, moving beyond the limiting and singular category of the “South Asian woman.” In addition, her analytical concept of sporting conviviality portrays sporting spaces as intricate arenas of both belonging and tension, where the possibility of coming together in difference can be rendered, transcending the pervasive forces of division and discrimination. Ratna finishes the book with a tongue-in-cheek manifesto where she says “what needs to be said as a form of speaking truth to power” (p. 115). This satirical manifesto resonated with me the most, as I had previously found myself internally shouting many of its statements: “Don’t write sophisticated critiques about power and social justice and then walk around with your eyes closed to your own complicity and abuse of the system” (p. 116). Overall, I found the book both stimulating and inspiring as Ratna’s methodology and empirical analysis encourage readers—whether students of sports or feminist scholars—to see and do sports and academy differently; and in ways that work to challenge the colonial, racialised, gendered, able-bodied and hetero-patriarchal institutions of sports and university.

Finding points of convergence with the book, however, does not mean I do not have any critique for the book. In fact, I found Ratna’s straightforward treatment of religion as only a cultural and communal practice rather limiting. From my own lived experience, I am acutely aware of the dangers, divisions, and systemic oppressions that institutionalised religion, when wielded as an ideological tool of governance, can perpetuate. Yet, this “blind spot” (as Ratna herself expresses), is not a closure but rather an invitation (or so I hope) for enacting our sporting conviviality by “coming together in difference” (p. 110). Reading Ratna’s work, I am reminded of Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2012) concept of choque(crash), where conflicting subjectivities and perspectives collide. These collisions, however, are not merely disruptive—they can serve as transformative experiences that transcend binary thinking and illuminate the multiplicity of our beings and struggles. As Ratna states in her manifesto, “there are many ways to skin a cat…The antiracist [anticolonial, anti-heteropatriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-necropolitical] practice must be a pluralized one” (p. 116); sometimes with conflicting visions that cannot be aligned or reconciled (see ethical incommensurability as introduced by Tuck & Yang, 2012). Yet, as she acknowledges, speaking truth to power is exhausting, often defeating, and always fraught with danger so “…looking out for each other’s back is just how it should be.” (p. 116). Only then can the possibilities of a utopian future be reimagined and rendered.

Copyright © Sepandarmaz Mashreghi 2025

References

Anzaldúa, G. (2012). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new Mestiza (4th ed.). aunt lute books (Original work published 1987).

Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider: Essay and speaches. Crossing Press (Original work published 1984).

Tuck, E., & Yang, W. K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1(1), 1–40