Black Teamwork: Football, Diaspora, Politics

Scott, Jermaine

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-caav-rd21

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Black Teamwork: Football, Diaspora, Politics

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This dissertation analyses the ways in which football, known as soccer in the United States, has historically served as a diasporic space for the articulation of black politics in the second half of the twentieth century. While modern sport is characterized as an apolitical cultural practice, I am interested in the ways it is constituted by the political regimes of race, gender, and the nation-state. This is what I am calling the “coloniality of sport”—the establishment of sporting hierarchies that privileges whiteness through the subordination and disciplining of blackness. Following the global decolonization struggles from the 1950s-1970s, black athletes engaged in a postcolonial practice I have termed “black teamwork”—diasporic formations of black sporting subjects (players and administrators) that critique, unsettle, and reveal the colonial constitution of modern sport. Football’s significance as a (de)colonial cultural practice underscores how Western nations sought to construct narratives of national strength and cohesion by the assimilation and repression of racial and cultural differences. Black athletes, however, transformed the sport from a tool of colonial discipline to a site of political and cultural contestation. By interrogating a variety of diasporic spaces during a range of post-colonial contexts—the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in the 1960s, Howard University soccer team in the 1970s, Corinthian Democracy Football Club in 1980s Brazil, and the Dutch National football team during the 1990s—I suggest that black subjects have used football as a vehicle to make political claims against colonial practices of exclusion, and create fields of diasporic conviviality that exceed the anti-black sensibilities of the nation-state.

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