Cultural Politics of Sport

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Description

This course explores the relationships between race and sport. In contrast with many popular interpretations, which render athletics as merely playful diversion, profitable enterprise, or level playing field, it conceives of sport as complex and contradictory, social worlds created by historical forces and cultural categories, and hence, marked by pronounced inequities and profound significance. Sport affords a unique and exciting context in which to think critically about the centrality of race to identities, ideologies, and experiences. Throughout, we put race into motion, thinking of it as a construct, process, relationship, and project.

Our specific focus will be white supremacist and white nationalist engagements with sport. We will endeavor to outline how extreme racial ideologies make sense of multi-racial, mass-mediated sporting world in the contemporary United States. Of equal importance, we will be interested to clarify the ways in which extreme and mainstream racisms converge with and diverge from one another.

Class discussions, readings, and activities push students to ask questions about the ways in which race and racism have shaped the play of sport, while probing how the organization and representation of sporting worlds, in turn, advance and enforce the means and meanings of race. Our attention pivots around stereotypes, stories, and structures, that is, the interplay of difference and power within sport as manifested in social relations and cultural institutions, symbols and rituals, media coverage and fan discourse.

We begin with a definition of race before discussing the changing contours of racism over the past 100 years discernible in the staging of the 1936 Olympics, the writings of David Duke, and current debates, including controversies over mascots and the age limit in professional sport. Against this background, we compare and contrast the presumptions and preoccupations of racial ideologies.