Part 1

• “Under Constant and Good Leadership”: Football and Masculinity in the Dutch East Indies Michael Miller Cornell University

  By the late nineteenth century, the Dutch colonial state cared little about the exporting of spices from the Maluku Islands. Instead of cultivating and packaging cloves, they tried to package and cultivate men. Dutch colonial culture had long mythologized and racialized the men of the spice islands, namely the men from Ambon, as a “martial race.” According to the Dutch colonial state, the Ambonese, and to a lesser extent the Minahasa, needed to be cultivated as loyal colonial subjects, collaborating soldiers. During the late nineteenth century, and especially during and after the Aceh War, Christian Ambonese men were actively recruited and enlisted in the Dutch colonial army, aiding the Dutch in deepening their empire across the Indonesian archipelago and quelling unrest elsewhere in the East Indies. This paper attempts to unravel the discourse of martialness placed upon these indigenous soldiers and understand how this discourse of masculinity was experienced by the Ambonese outside of their home island in the early twentieth century. Through an analysis of Dutch-language sporting magazines and the Malay-language popular press in cities with a major colonial army presence, I argue that Ambonese loyalty, and indeed Ambonese “martialness” was never fully accepted by Ambonese soldiers, and instead was contingent on the Dutch colonial state’s continued, significant political and economic support of the soldiers and their families. While Dutch reporters constantly praised the fitness, athleticism, and fierceness of Ambonese football teams in Dutch-language magazines, Ambonese men in Malay-language newspapers complained about their station within the Dutch army, keeping one foot tied to the anti-Dutch revolutionary movements of the time. Further, stadium-wide brawls between Ambonese teams and European teams in colonial Batavia undergirded the anxiety the Dutch felt towards these soldiers deciding to become revolutionaries fighting against, not with, the colonial state. Indeed, as one Dutch sporting magazine aptly put it, the Ambonese footballers needed to be “under constant and good leadership” from a European coach. Finally, I also consider what other non-Ambonese future Indonesians wrote about their experiences living alongside Ambonese barracks on the islands of Java and Sumatra and what they thought of Ambonese footballers and Ambonese football teams. The discourse of the manly, martial, Ambonese footballer was a critical site of debate about empire and revolution in colonial Indonesia. Indeed, this racialized discourse of the Ambonese as more fit and athletic than other Indonesian ethnic groups continues in Indonesia today.

• Revitalizing a Newborn Nation: Post-War Policies of the Philippine Amateur Athletic Federation (PAAF), 1946-1954 Micah Jeiel Perez UP Diliman

  In Southeast Asia, the Philippines holds the dual distinction of having the most devastated capital city after World War II (Manila’s destruction was second only to Warsaw) and being the first colonized country in the region to attain its independence. Histories of post-war Philippines mostly focus on the political and economic development of a newly independent country in the context of the Cold War. Few have studied Filipino leisure activities—much less sports. This paper argues that national sports policy in the immediate post-war Philippines betrays the inherited American colonial era attitudes of Filipino sports leaders even as they justify efforts to revitalize athletic activities with nationalistic rhetoric.

  The Philippine Amateur Athletic Federation (PAAF) had to rebuild the country’s sports programs after American liberation saw the destruction of most of its sporting facilities. This national governing organization sought to reignite public interest by inviting foreign teams and coaches to the country as well as reviving “interport” meets between Manila and partner cities like Hong Kong or Singapore. The PAAF also lobbied against post-war economic policies that made it difficult to import sports equipment. It justified its plans and programs by arguing 1) that sports led to the physical and moral revitalization of the Filipino people and 2) that participating in international competitions reinforced the sovereignty of their newly independent nation.

  Permeating these efforts was a desire to return to the pre-war status quo characterized by a vigorous promotion of sports in the provinces and respect for the amateur sports spirit. PAAF officials thus saw sports as an avenue for the revitalization and modernization of their country, as well as earning respectability for the Philippines as it entered the international community of nations.

• Nation-building and Sport Nationalism in Postcolonial Southeast Asia: The Philippine Basketball Teams in the Asian Games, Asian Basketball Championship, and the FIBA World Championship, 1954-1978 Aaron Viernes University of the Philippines

  In his seminal work titled Playing with the Big Boys, Lou Antolihao has already explored the rise of basketball as the preeminent sport of Filipinos. Consequently, building from the said work, this research will attempt to extend Antolihao’s argument on how participation and success in major basketball competitions influenced the formation of national identity and fostered a sense of national pride.

  By and large, this research locates the trajectories of sports development in Southeast Asia between the decades of the 1950s and 1970s. Looking into these formative decades of the region in a postcolonial setting allows one to scrutinize and understand how sports played a crucial role in the making of national identities. Broadly, this paper seeks to place the uniqueness of the development of Philippine sporting culture from the rest of its neighbors in the region. In particular, this research will look into the role of basketball in the making of the postcolonial Filipino nation.

  In such light, this research looks into the history of Philippine basketball in the first three decades after independence and foregrounds it in the development of sports in postcolonial Southeast Asia. To further examine this, the research will highlight the participation of the Philippine national basketball teams in key international basketball competitions hosted by the country – the 1954 Asian Games, the 1960 and 1973 Asian Basketball Championship, and the 1978 FIBA Asia Championship. The research argues that the participation and success of the Philippines in these competitions largely contributed to the preeminence of basketball in the Philippine post-war sporting culture in the same way as it was for other Southeast Asian states in football and badminton. Congruent to this, the research also examines the role of sports and participation in sport-mega events in the making and re-making of the postcolonial national identities.

  This research seeks to contribute to sports history and to the studies on nationalism in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. By examining the participation of the Philippines in the international basketball competitions, the research tries to understand nation-building in the post-war and postcolonial context through the lenses of sports history.

Part 2

• Regional Contests, National Dreams: Sport and Politics in the Southeast Asian Games, 1959-present Simon Creak Nanyang Technological University

  This paper examines key themes in the history and politics of the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, the region’s largest and most prominent sports event. Since being established by Thailand in 1959, this biennial event—originally called the South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games—has changed and grown dramatically, from 6 countries, 500 athletes and 12 sports in 1959, to 11 nations, to 8,000 athletes and over 50 sports more recently. The characteristics and aesthetics of the SEA Games have also undergone profound change, with the gradual inclusion of local sports indigenous to the region distinguishing the event from the larger Olympic and Asian Games. Adopting a broad chronological sweep covering 75 years, this paper introduces key insights from the broader project of which it is part. First, it considers the growth and resilience of the SEA Games—and sport in general—in the context of dramatic historical changes in post-war and post-colonial Southeast Asia, including decolonization, the Cold War, massive urbanization and economic transformation, regional integration and globalization. Second, it considers how the SEA Games has concurrently balanced—and at times presented challenges to—nationalism and regionalism, thus accommodating both cooperation and competition (or: cooperation through competition). Third, it considers the political dynamics of sport in Southeast Asia, both internally (within the SEA Games governing body) and externally (the broader political issues that shape and are shaped by the event).

• Indonesia’s Sports Diplomacy Shift from GANEFO to the SEA Games Friederike Trotier University of Passau

  Throughout the history of modern nation-states, international engagement through sport has been inherently connected to politics and international diplomacy. Governments, as well as other actors, have decided to employ international sport as an instrument of diplomacy. This paper analyses the notable shift in the diplomatic objectives of Indonesia’s involvement in and hosting of sports events from the Sukarno administration in the 1960s to Suharto’s New Order in the late 1960s and 1970s. Indonesia’s joining of the regional Southeast Asian Games and first hosting of the SEA Games in 1979 reflected a complete turnabout from the international diplomacy objectives of the 1962 Asian Games and the 1963 GANEFO, both staged in Jakarta. The focus and the mode of Indonesian sports diplomacy changed dramatically from a global to a regional outreach and from a rapprochement with Communist China to a turn to the country’s anti-communist neighbours. The analytical angle of sports diplomacy promises new insights into the events’ policies as well as Indonesia’s positioning in international and regional politics.

Abstract