The State of Play in Sports History

text of their invention and use to decide who gets to be excluded from the city’s political life. Dirt is an indicator of difference, making it particularly generative in the study of various politics of exclusion. Newell’s book is focused on Lagos and Nigerian history, but its references are wider. It ranges from colonial rule to the exclusion of queer lives from postcolonial states, but also the Rwandan genocide, Nazi anti-Semitism, and the recent spate of xenophobia in South Africa. The book looks at how we go from individual beliefs about the presumed dirtiness of others and end up with ‘life threatening forms of anti-humanism’ (162). In working out the terms for ‘a politics and poetics of dirt’ (12), Histories of Dirt is a helpful manual for how dirt, as a word, an object, and a discourse, can be used to constitute archives, influence public opinion, and spark imagination.