This is the first book to focus on race, sport, protest, and the Black Atlantic. It brings together innovative scholarship on African, African-American, Afro-European, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Caribbean sports in a manner that speaks effectively to the diversity of the African diaspora, its history, and culture.
The book explores the history of sports, including baseball, basketball, boxing, football, rugby, cricket, and track-and-field athletics to show athlete and fan protests in sport intersected with discourses of nationalism, self-fashioning, gender and masculinity, leisure and play, challenges of underdevelopment, and the idea of progress. It shows how sport in the African diaspora is a crucially important lens through which to understand the challenges, changes, and continuities of Black Atlantic history, the history of protest, and racism.
This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport history, social and cultural history, post-imperial history and decolonization, or the sociology of sport, race, and political protest.
"Introduction, 1. Sojourning African American Ballplayers in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1920–1950, 2. Sports and African American Emancipation: Edwin Bancroft Henderson’s View on Sports in The Messenger in the 1920s, 3. South African Weightlifting, the International Sports Boycott and Artists and Athletes against Apartheid c. 1948–1990: ""Coincidental, Parallel and Common Struggles"", 4. The Role of Race and Protest in American Professional Basketball: Pro Basketball’s Hidden Fear, 5. Contextualization of Africa’s Historic Boycott of the 1966 World Cup and Its Legacy, 6. Black Power and Student Protest against Uncle Tomism at Grambling College, 7. The War of the Santos Football Club during Its 1969 African Tour, 8. Bill Cain’s ""Scrutiny,"" and His Transformation into an Athlete Ambassador in French Professional Basketball, 9. Feyisa Lilesa and the Transnational Protest of Ethiopia’s Most Enduring Olympian, 10. A Historical Account of Caster Semenya’s Decade-Long Protest of the IAAF and IOC’s Sex Policies and Definition of Femininity"
Michael J. Gennaro is an Associate Professor at Seminole State College of Florida, USA. Brian M. McGowan is the William McIntosh Endowed Professor of Liberal Arts at Grambling State University, USA.
