Cricket in Pakistan. A Means to Assert its National Identity

Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Health - Sport - Miscellaneous, Lille Catholic University, course: Sport and Politics, language: English, abstract: This essay will employ the discipline of cricket in Pakistan as a lens of analysis to better understand the one-to-one correlation between sport and national identity. In the post-colonial scheme, the sentiment of nationalism has been strongly enhanced and influenced by the rehabilitation of the country’s sovereignty. Pakistan has historically been subject to intense vectors such as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, decolonization etc. which has been reflected in the game of cricket. Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation relies on its imaginary character. A nation is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. In the light of that statement, a nation is manufactured by cultural, political, and psychological factors in which the role of language as well as discourse has a predominant impact on its construction. Indeed, Wodak, De Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart shine a spotlight on the fact that uniqueness and distinctness of a community and its values are influenced by discourse. Since language and discourse appear as a key instrument in the social construction of an imagined community that one creates, new narratives can, thus, modify citizens’ perceptions of what constitutes their feeling of their national identity. It will therefore be necessary to observe sport as a form of discourse and thus as a factor of national identification capable of counting its narrative to draw up the portrait of an answer to the following question: What role does sport play in forming and shaping national identity? Sports are linked to political socialization, formation of the political culture and development of national identity.