Embodied Citizenship: Track and Field and the Politics of Belonging in Postcolonial Barbados

Track and field has shaped national belonging in Barbados from independence in 1966 to the present. While Caribbean sport historiography has largely centred cricket as the primary arena of anticolonial expression, athletics has instead performed a different but equally significant nation-making function in a small postcolonial state. Embedded in the expansion of secondary education, annual school championships, regional competitions such as CARIFTA, and the contested politics of sporting infrastructure, track and field became a recurring civic ritual through which citizenship was enacted and measured. Barbadian athletics is situated within broader debates on sport and decolonization, nationalism in small states, gender reform and stadium politics. School competitions produced national visibility, how women’s participation intersected with legal reform and labour restructuring, how migration pathways converted local performance into global representation, and how the rise and decline of the National Stadium materialized the tensions. Repositioning athletics alongside, rather than beneath, cricket in Caribbean sport history demonstrates how postcolonial belonging in Barbados was not only proclaimed in moments of international spectacle but reproduced annually through institutional repetition. The track emerged as one of the central sites where independence was made visible, embodied and historically remembered.