Gridiron Capital

“In this powerful and engaging book, Lisa Uperesa shines a spotlight on the importance of the voices, movement, and labor, of Samoan athletes within the history of football, asking readers to consider whose stories are told and whose futures are denied as we celebrate yet another touchdown. As Uperesa makes clear, the story of Samoan football is one of complexity and contradiction, one that offers a window into a world of dreams and defeats, movement and stagnation, triumph and despair.” - David J. Leonard, author of Playing While White: Privilege and Power on and off the Field

“Grounded in the burgeoning traditions of critical Indigenous studies, Lisa Uperesa’s Gridiron Capital animates and navigates through what was, up until the publication of this compelling and cogent book, the largely abstract subfield of Pacific sport and masculinities. Uperesa draws from a deeply personal research methodology to enliven and interrogate current sociohistorical understandings of Samoan migration and mobility in the United States in relation to sport and specifically American football as a political and contested space.” - Brendan Hokowhitu, Professor of Indigenous Research, The University of Queensland

"Uperesa’s book should not only appeal to anthropologists but also to general readers. She engagingly explains what football has come to mean to a whole range of Samoan players — in college programs and the NFL, as well as on youth and high school teams back home — and gives a compelling account of how dual systems of stratification, one based in Indigenous values and the other in capitalist imperatives, combine, for better and worse. . . . Readers interested in sports and culture in a transnational world will no doubt find Gridiron Capital engrossing." - David Lipset, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals." - J. A. Badics, Choice

"Uperesa’s informed research and skillful writing allows Gridiron Capital to remain both relevant and accessible to a wide range of readers both within and outside of academia and sport studies, and will likely enable these readers to place the Samoan names they know so well, other names they may not, and perhaps even American Samoa itself into appropriate and nuanced historical and contemporary contexts." - Garrett Hillyer, Journal of Sport History

“Gridiron Capital is written well and provides an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon that is accessible to a wide audience, resulting in a greater understanding of Samoa, sport, transnational movement.” - Bliss Wong, International Review for the Sociology of Sport