The Making of Sporting Cultures

The Making of Sporting Cultures PDF

Author: John Hughson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1317990684

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The Making of Sporting Cultures presents an analysis of western sport by examining how the collective passions and feelings of people have contributed to the making of sport as a ‘way of life’. The popularity of sport is so pronounced in some cases that we speak of certain sports as ‘national pastimes’. Baseball in the United States, soccer in Britain and cricket in the Caribbean are among the relevant examples discussed. Rather than regarding the historical development of sport as the outcome of passive spectator reception, this work is interested in how sporting cultures have been made and developed over time through the active engagement of its enthusiasts. This is to study the history of sport not only ‘from below’, but also ‘from within’, as a means to understanding the ‘deep relationship’ between sport and people within class contexts – the middle class as well as the working class. Contestation over the making of sport along axes of race, gender and class are discussed where relevant. A range of cultural writers and theorists are examined in regard to both how their writing can help us understand the making of sport and as to how sport might be located within an overall cultural context – in different places and times. The book will appeal to students and academics within humanities disciplines such as cultural studies, history and sociology and to those in sport studies programmes interested in the historical, cultural and social aspects of sport. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Asian American Sporting Cultures

Asian American Sporting Cultures PDF

Author: Stanley I. Thangaraj

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1479840165

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Delves into the long history of Asian American sporting cultures, considering how identities and communities are negotiated on sporting fields Through a close examination of Asian American sporting cultures ranging from boxing and basketball to spelling bees and wrestling, the contributors reveal the intimate connection between sport and identity formation. Sport plays a special role in the processes of citizen-making and of the policing of national and diasporic bodies. It is thus one key area in which Asian American stereotypes may be challenged, negotiated, and destroyed as athletic performances create multiple opportunities for claiming American identities. This volume incorporates work on Pacific Islander, South Asian, and Southeast Asian Americans as well as East Asian Americans, and explores how sports are gendered, including examinations of Asian American men’s attempts to claim masculinity through sporting cultures as well as the “Orientalism” evident in discussions of mixed martial arts as practiced by Asian American female fighters. This American story illuminates how marginalized communities perform their American-ness through co-ethnic and co-racial sporting spaces.

They Will Have Their Game

They Will Have Their Game PDF

Author: Kenneth Cohen

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-12-15

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1501714201

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In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others. They Will Have Their Game tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how its roots in masculine competition and risk-taking gradually developed gendered and racial limits and then spread from leisure activities to the consideration of elections as "races" and business as a "game." The result reorients the standard narrative about the rise of commercial popular culture to question the influence of ideas such as "gentility" and "respectability," and to put men like P. T. Barnum at the end instead of the beginning of the process, unveiling a new take on the creation of the white male republic of the early nineteenth century in which sporting activities lie at the center and not the margins of economic and political history.

The Making of Sporting Cultures

The Making of Sporting Cultures PDF

Author: John Hughson

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This text examines the centrality of baseball in the construction and contestation of Cuba's nationalist self-image during the chronic economic shortages and emergent social disparities of the current 'special period' in Cuban socialism.

Sports Culture

Sports Culture PDF

Author: Ellis Cashmore

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-10-04

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 113467581X

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We live in a culture in which sports play an important role. The growth in broadcasting, merchandising, iconography and the commercialization of sports has led to an increasing interest in the emerging field of sports culture. This book examines individual issues, people, artefacts, events and organizations in their historical, social and cultural contexts. Coverage is wide-ranging with more than 170 entries including: aggression Bosman Case corruption drugs eating disorders Fever Pitch Field of Dreams Michael Jordan Don King left-handedness nationalism paternity racism Raging Bull rivalries tobacco The book also includes suggestions for further reading to help with further study, and a comprehensive index.

Race, Sport and Politics

Race, Sport and Politics PDF

Author: Ben Carrington

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2010-08-01

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1849204292

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Written by one of the leading international authorities on the sociology of race and sport, this is the first book to address sport′s role in ′the making of race′, the place of sport within black diasporic struggles for freedom and equality, and the contested location of sport in relation to the politics of recognition within contemporary multicultural societies. Race, Sport and Politics shows how, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea of ′the natural black athlete′ was invented in order to make sense of and curtail the political impact and cultural achievements of black sportswomen and men. More recently, ′the black athlete′ as sign has become a highly commodified object within contemporary hyper-commercialized sports-media culture thus limiting the transformative potential of critically conscious black athleticism to re-imagine what it means to be both black and human in the twenty-first century. Race, Sport and Politics will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology of culture and sport, the sociology of race and diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, cultural theory and cultural studies.

Making the American Team

Making the American Team PDF

Author: Mark Dyreson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780252066542

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One day in front of the television would convince any alien that the entirety of American culture is built around sports. Politics and business are abustle with sports metaphors and endorsements by athletes. "Home runs," "bottom of the ninth," "fourth and ten," "slam dunk," and similar phrases litter the daily vocabulary. No matter how dire the news, sports will be reported as usual. How did this single-minded fascination come to be? Mark Dyreson locates the invasion of sport at the heart of American culture at the turn of the century. It was then that social reformers and political leaders believed that sport could revitalize the "republican experiment," that a new sense of national identity could forge a new sense of community and a healthy political order as it would serve to link America's thinking classes with the experiences of the masses. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in American accounts of the Olympic Games held between 1896 and 1912. In connecting sport to American history and culture, Dyreson has stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. A volume in the series Sport and Society, edited by Benjamin G. Rader and Randy Roberts

Gaming the World

Gaming the World PDF

Author: Andrei S. Markovits

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-12

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0691162034

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The globalizing influence of professional sports Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global—and globalizing—sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

Who Da Man?

Who Da Man? PDF

Author: Gamal Abdel-Shehid

Publisher: Canadian Scholars’ Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1551302616

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This book offers a highly original approach to Black masculinities and sport in Canada. The book will be especially exciting for those interested in decolonisation, culture, and the intersection of identity, sport, and politics. Who Da Man attempts to account for the ways that Black Diasporic identifications intersect with the dominant misogyny and homophobia in contemporary men's sporting cultures. Abdel-Shehid suggests that thinking about Diaspora in the making of contemporary Black sporting cultures provides a more comprehensive framework than that which looks at sport solely within the framework of nations and nationalism. He further argues that Canadian hegemonic ideas and practices typically marginalise blackness and Black peoples. Thus, the author suggests, Black masculinities in sport are often connected to Diasporic locations. These connections can be either empowering or disempowering, requiring careful analysis to achieve full understanding of how things are being perceived, projected, and therefore implemented. "Who Da Man" offers a feminist and queer reading of Black masculinity, and suggests that thinking about Black sporting masculinities means paying attention to the ways that these larger discourses of racism, exclusion, and Diaspora shape Black masculinities. Moreover, the book asks to what extent homophobia and misogyny within men's sporting cultures influence contemporary understandings of Black masculinity.