1st Edition
Sport and Protest in the Black Atlantic
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
Michael J. Gennaro and Brian M. McGowan
1. Sojourning African American Ballplayers in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1920–1950
Brian Campbell
2. Sports and African American Emancipation: Edwin Bancroft Henderson’s View on Sports in The Messenger in the 1920s
Frank Jacob
3. South African Weightlifting, the International Sports Boycott and Artists and Athletes against Apartheid c. 1948–1990: "Coincidental, Parallel and Common Struggles"
Hendrik Snyders
4. The Role of Race and Protest in American Professional Basketball: Pro Basketball’s Hidden Fear
Thomas Aiello
5. Contextualization of Africa’s Historic Boycott of the 1966 World Cup and Its Legacy
Wycliffe W. Simiyu Njororai
6. Black Power and Student Protest against Uncle Tomism at Grambling College
Brian M. McGowan
7. The War of the Santos Football Club during Its 1969 African Tour
José Paulo Florenzano
8. Bill Cain’s "Scrutiny," and His Transformation into an Athlete Ambassador in French Professional Basketball
Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff
9. Feyisa Lilesa and the Transnational Protest of Ethiopia’s Most Enduring Olympian
Hannah Borenstein
10. A Historical Account of Caster Semenya’s Decade-Long Protest of the IAAF and IOC’s Sex Policies and Definition of Femininity
Mandisi Majavu
Biography
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.
