Description
Book SynopsisThis edited volume shows how the function of sport as a historical and cultural marker is particularly relevant in Latin America.
Trade Review“This collection showcases an impressive array of scholarship that employs new and traditional sources to highlight the importance of athletes, who often find themselves at the intersection of discussions about race, gender, nation, civic identity, and public space. Seamlessly weaves national identity, gendered discourse, civic life, and ethnicity from one chapter to the next. This volume privileges the human body over organized sports and presents physicality as a connective tissue. Across eight chapters, authors imbue athletes with symbolic and social significance as mediators of longstanding dichotomies across the region. This compilation will be welcomed by Latin Americanists searching for an accessible and varied collection to use in undergraduate courses on popular culture, as well as by sports scholars seeking to deepen their breadth of coverage of sports in the Global South.”
—Journal of Social History|
“Sports Culture in Latin American History captured my attention and expanded my sense of Latinidad by exposing under-analyzed, vastly hybrid histories and sporting practices. Extending key works in sport studies, each chapter offers a broad geopolitical lens on the role of sport in nation building, settlement, community activism, and social hierarchies. The collection offers a much-needed corrective to a U.S. practice of over-reliance on European-centered historical and cultural landscape for theorizing sport.”
—Katherine Jamieson, University of North Carolina-Greensboro|“For those looking to expand their knowledge of sports as social phenomena, this book exposes the complex and diverse foundations of physical culture in today's Latin America. From the
cholitas luchadoras bringing their indigenous roots to wrestling rings in Bolivia to the transformation of once repressed Afro-Brazilian
capoeira into a highlighted national sport, the chapters in this collection illustrate the ever emerging connection between sports and culture.”
—Jay Coakley, professor emeritus of sociology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs|“Sport offers a window to examine different aspects of identity. This multidisciplinary collection helps us understand the complexity and gray zones of Latin American sports as more than a simple diffusion, assimilation, and adoption of European sports. These thought-provoking essays raise new questions about the definition of sports in relation to the body, culture, and space.”
—Jose Alamillo, California State University Channel Islands
