CULTURES OF SPORT IN LATIN/E AMERICA

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Upper-Level

In this course, students will study some of the most critical twentieth- and twenty-first century books related to the dynamics of sport in Latin American and Latino cultures, which covers a vast hemisphere containing both Latin American and Latino communities, social inequality, oppression, laboratories for neoliberal policies, invasions, occupations, slavery and its legacies, institutionalized sexism, a history of militarization and human rights violations, caudillismo, and economic instability that have created the conditions for a complex yet vibrant sports landscape and allowed for the development of inordinately inventive athletes. In this context, we will focus, in particular, on how our course readings depict the various socioeconomic, racial, misogynistic and political aspects of the hemisphere’s sporting events. Among other topics, we will link the corporatization of baseball to American presence in the Caribbean, examine the waging of anti-migrant campaigns among sports franchises and address salary differentials between male and female soccer players. Students will explore the historical, political, economic, feminist and aesthetic debates on these topics through texts by Roberto González Echevarría, Claudia Piñeiro, David Zirin, Leonardo Padura, Dick Cluster, Osvaldo Soriano, Alan Bairner, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Anna Boden, Isaac Goldemberg, Eduardo Galeano, Brenda Elsey, David Goldblatt, and Juan Villoro, and others. As we will see, sports are an amazing art, but inseparable from the structures of power.