Playing the Games: Diasporic Identity, Athletic Entrepreneurialism
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PLAYING THE GAMES: DIASPORIC IDENTITY, ATHLETIC ENTREPRENEURIALISM, AND ELODIE LI YUK LO’S JOURNEY TO THE OLYMPICS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN STUDIES AUGUST 2018 By Yuka Jokura Polovina Dissertation Committee: Elizabeth Colwill, Chairperson Mari Yoshihara Kathleen Sands Yuka Nakamura Craig Howes Keywords: Elodie Li Yuk Lo, Olympics, Beach Volleyball, Diasporic Athletes, Life Writing, Athletic Entrepreneurialism Acknowledgements Many have supported my personal and intellectual paths that have led to the making of this dissertation. I am deeply grateful to Elizabeth Colwill who not only agreed to chair this complex and unconventional project but stood as my creative and intellectual lighthouse along the way. She opened my eyes to a world of writers and scholars who pushed the bounds of convention, inspiring me to consider possibilities within my own work. Her guidance and feedback through numerous drafts have helped me realize my ambitious vision for this dissertation. More, she has deepened this work in ways I had not imagined possible and has gifted me with a project I will forever cherish. I could not have asked for a better chair or mentor through this academic journey. I am also grateful for my committee members who have supported this dissertation and my intellectual growth over the years. Mari Yoshihara played an instrumental role in helping me understand the American Studies discipline and more broadly the humanities, as I first came to this department with a vastly different set of skills and knowledge. Her writing workshop and early feedback on this dissertation also helped lift the project off the ground in meaningful and necessary ways. I am also thankful for Kathleen Sands who constantly asked me about the moral dimensions of my thoughts and conclusions, in class discussions as well as in my writing. Her feedback on this project encouraged me to think more broadly about the meaning of our lives and choices. Thank you to Yuka Nakamura who serendipitously ended up on this committee. During my undergrad years, she was a PhD student in my department at the University of Toronto and she mentored me through my senior thesis project. Then and now, she has offered encouragement and substantive critique of my work, and has been a role model. It was in Craig Howes’s biography seminar that I first experimented with Elodie’s journey to the Olympics as i academic inquiry. His class provided a foundational understanding of the auto/biographical genre that ignited in me a personal and scholastic fascination with life narratives. I credit him for the launch of this project. In addition to this dissertation, he has guided me through another more personal writing project, helping me hone my craft, to which I am truly appreciative. I owe many thanks to the professors, staff, and students of the American Studies department at the University of Hawai‘i. Professors with whom I have taken courses have exposed me to inspirational and interdisciplinary scholarship that have in one way or another influenced this dissertation. Thank you to my peers Sanae Nakatani, Yu-Jung Lee, Yohei Sekiguchi, Keiko Fukunishi, Kevin Lim, Eriza Bareng, and Yanli Luo who have given me valuable feedback on chapters and drafts. I am especially grateful for the intellectual and personal support of Billie Lee, Pahole Sookkasikon, Stacy Nojima, and Jeanette Hall who have expanded my thinking, helped me stay on track, and in one way or another held my hand through difficult moments. I am also indebted to the staff who have ushered me through each administrative landmark and procedure. Last, I reserve my deepest gratitude for my immediate, extended, and hānai family. I cannot give enough thanks to my husband Justin Polovina and son Lucas Polovina. I would not have managed any of this without their love and patience. I am touched by my brother Kentaro Jokura’s love and support; he has stood present at all my life’s milestones in the absence of our late mother, this dissertation included. Finally, my greatest respect and sincerest appreciation go to Eddy, Hélène, Kimmy and especially Elodie Li Yuk Lo. They have all shown me such generosity and love over the decades, and with this dissertation they have extended themselves even further in my support. I dedicate this dissertation to them. ii Abstract This dissertation is a life writing project that examines the international career of Elodie Nioun Chin Li Yuk Lo—a Chinese Mauritian Canadian immigrant who represented a small African nation, Mauritius, at the 2012 Olympics in beach volleyball. Elodie’s journey to the Games serves as a window into how diasporic athletes negotiate their identities in international competitions organized around singular conceptions of citizenship and nation. Elodie’s personal reflections on her family's complex migratory experience and her own athletic career lie at the heart of this project—a co-constructed story that blurs the boundaries of life writing genres and individual authorship. It opens with Elodie’s ancestral ties to Mauritius, positioning Africa and the Chinese diaspora at the center of a historical trajectory spanning slavery to indenture, colony to nation- state, and colonial subjects to independent citizens, in which cultural change was intimately related to political and familial transformation. The family’s identification as migrants—from China to Mauritius in the nineteenth century, and from Mauritius to Canada in the late- twentieth—illustrates how cultural identity evolves through an ongoing diasporic experience. In Canada, where Elodie found herself both insider and outsider in a predominantly Cantonese-speaking immigrant community, volleyball represented a complex nexus of opportunity and Othering. Elodie’s success as an indoor volleyball player in Canada demonstrate how her investment in sport both entangled and served her as a racial minority and recent immigrant. After university, Elodie switched to beach volleyball and entered international competition through diversity policies intended to stimulate global participation. But as a diversity entrant to the Games, the industry reduced Elodie to an actor in an international spectacle of nations that embodied an unequal globalized world through corporate consumption. iii Indeed, the ideals of sport promoted by the Olympics were rife with paradox: a harmonious global community rooted in competitive nationalisms, cohesive national identities based on fictions of multicultural harmony, and a "meritocracy" in the interest of global marketing. This dissertation thus provides an intimate, diasporic, multiethnic perspective on international sport—a perspective that highlights the issues inherent in the nation-based structure of the Olympics that conflates ethnicity, nation, and culture. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...........................................................................................................i Abstract .............................................................................................................................iii List of Figures ...................................................................................................................vi List of Abbreviations .........................................................................................................viii Introduction .......................................................................................................................1 Prologue: Same Difference ................................................................................................32 Chapter 1: The Intimacies of “Home” ................................................................................47 Chapter 2: Competing Identities.........................................................................................100 Chapter 3: Unromantic Homecoming .................................................................................152 Chapter 4: Embodying the Olympics .................................................................................205 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................258 Appendices ........................................................................................................................273 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................278 v List of Figures Figure 1.1 Elodie Li Yuk Lo’s great-great-grandparents family tree on her 57 paternal side Figure 1.2 Rosemay Ah Cham’s family tree 58 Figure 1.3 Hélène Li Yuk Lo’s paternal grandfather’s Certificate of Registration 62 upon arrival to Mauritius Figure 1.4 Mauritius Times front cover Friday, June 23, 1967 73 Figure 1.5 Mauritius Times front cover Friday, June 30, 1967 73 Figure 1.6 Le Mauricien front cover Wednesday, August 7, 1967 75 Figure 1.7 Li Yuk Lo family at Canadian naturalization ceremony, 1993 87 Figure 2.1 Harbord Collegiate’s junior volleyball team, 2000 113 Figure 2.2 Connex club at the “New York mini” tournament, 1998 125 Figure 2.3 Connex women’s B team at the “New York mini” tournament, 1997 126 Figure 2.4 Elodie Li Yuk Lo playing libero for the University of Toronto’s 148 women’s volleyball team, 2004 Figure 3.1 Mauritian women’s national team at training camp in China, 2007 167 Figure 3.2 Team