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This article examines the career of the Indian physical culturist, K.V. Iyer, and situates his writings from the 1920s and 1930s within a transnational community between India and the United States. Iyer ran several gymnasiums, offered health advice, and sold books and mail-order courses across India and internationally. Previous studies have focused on his yogic practices and anti-colonial thinking, with less attention given to his place in the global bodybuilding community. While his writings were sometimes suffused with political rhetoric, his vision of the ideal citizen was derived from his immersion in Western scientific ideas around physiology and anatomy and his ongoing communication with American physical culturists. Studying a global health community between India and the United States, which first found expression through yoga and the Young Men Christian Association, this article positions Iyer as a leading figure in a global exchange of Indian and American ideas concerning the muscular body.

This paper analyzes how professional wrestling expanded stereotyped race, national, and class images toward the Spanish public in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The professional wrestling circuit of music halls, theaters, and circuses helped connect a myriad of grappling practices spanning different national traditions. Nonetheless, it also helped convey different racial, ethnic, and national images within a frame of social class divide at a time of rampant imperialism and colonial domination. In this context, Spain experimented with a short-lived wrestling mania, with several international wrestling tournaments and jujutsu exhibitions before World War I. In these tournaments, both fighters and patrons exploited racial stereotypes as a way to better sell the activity to the paying audience, connecting with, but also reinforcing, the perceptions that populated the collective imagination about different people, due to ethnicity or nationality linked also to social class.

From the onset, South African amateur wrestling, under the auspices of the SA Amateur Wrestling Union and its successors, was organized along racial lines and, under apartheid, it continued to cater exclusively to white amateurs. By 1970, it was suspended from the International Amateur Wrestling Federation. Denied participation in international competition, it resorted to rebel and boycott-busting tours involving a number of sympathetic countries and individuals in Europe, the Americas, and the Far East. Organized mostly clandestinely, it succeeded in offering international competition to the South African national wrestling team for almost two decades. One program, the Oregon Wrestling Cultural Exchange, was particularly strong. This US-based program generated strong opposition from the Amateur Athletics Association, the International Wrestling Federation, and several anti-apartheid organizations. It survived until the end of the 1980s, when the USA Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986) and the campaigns of the anti-apartheid movement closed it down.

Cette recherche se propose d'éclairer la renaissance d’une fédération affinitaire sous la Quatrième République française, l’UFOLEP. Elle met l’accent sur les difficultés de reconstruction, puis sur la réussite à trouver un espace de développement. Celui-ci prend la voie de l'école élémentaire, par le biais de son ancienne commission scolaire : l’USEP. Dans ce cadre parascolaire, qui rayonne peu à peu à l’enseignement de l’EPS lui-même, l’USEP développe des innovations conformes à son éthique en faveur d’une éducation physique et d’un sport éducatif protégé des voies fédérales classiques. Cette orientation sportive (et non voie) s’accorde bien avec le registre doctrinal de la Ligue de l’Enseignement qui héberge ce mouvement sportif, autour d’une idée laïque repensée dans cette France d’après-guerre. En revanche l’UFOLEP peine à développer sa voie postscolaire qui, après s'être redressée, stagne.

The struggle against apartheid was fought on many fronts. Internationally, the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) across a number of countries engaged in a range of activities that highlighted the atrocities of the Pretoria regime and the plight of the majority in South Africa. An important site of struggle against apartheid was in the sports sphere. Ireland and the Irish AAM played a significant role in this regard. The AAMs in Australia, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States, among others, recorded victories against apartheid through demonstrations, boycotts, and the ban on participation of South African teams in international tours, tournaments, and events. A number of scholars have highlighted the role of the international AAM and its campaigns against apartheid sport. To date, historical studies of the anti-apartheid struggle and South African sport have primarily focused on Britain and New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Irish sporting contacts with South Africa extend back over a century. Thus, focusing on the case study of Irish AAM activism against segregated sport further adds to the literature on the sports boycott and the struggle against apartheid. This article draws on Jacob Dlamini’s notion of “moral agents” in understanding players’, teams’, and sports associations’ decisions to continue to play with apartheid, despite international opposition. Drawing from archives in Ireland and South Africa, this article adds new details to the struggle against apartheid rugby in South African sport between 1964 and 1989.