Race, Sport and Politics

Ben Carrington is a sociologist who has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 2004. Prior to that he taught at the University of Brighton in England. Professor Carrington studies a broad range of topics and areas generally concerned with mapping the circulation and reproduction of power within contemporary societies. More specifically, he is interested in how ideologies of race shape - and are themselves shaped by - cultural forms, practices and identities and how popular culture is often a key site of both cultural resistance and domination. His work examines the mass media, music and sport as way to understand key sociological dimensions of everyday life such as personal and communal identity and nationalistic identification and dis-identification. Professor Carrington also teaches various undergraduate and graduate classes on the sociology of race, culture, sport and identity. He supervises doctoral students doing interesting work on a range of politically-relevant topics whatever that topic may be. Professor Carrington currently serves on the editorial boards of Sociological Theory, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, the Sociology of Sport Journal, and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport.

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.

Introduction: Sport, the Black Athlete and the Remaking of RaceSporting Resistance: Thinking Race and Sport DiasporicallySporting Redemption: Violence, Desire and the Politics of FreedomSporting Negritude: Commodity Blackness and the Liberation of FailureSporting Multiculturalism: Nationalism, Belonging and IdentityConclusion: Race, Sport and the Post-Colonial