Sports in African History, Politics, and Identity Formation

"Sports in African History, Politics, and Identity Formation explores how sports can render a window to unlocking complex social, political, economic, and gendered relations across Africa and the Diaspora. Sport holds significant value and has an intricate relationship with many components of African societies throughout history. For many Africans, sports are a way of life, a site of cultural heroes, a way out of poverty and social mobility, and a site for leisurely play. This book focuses on the many ways in which sport uniquely reflects changing cultural trends at diverse levels of African societies. The contributors detail various sports such as football, cricket, ping pong, and rugby across the continent to show how sport lay at the heart of the discourse of nationalism, self-fashioning, gender and masculinity, leisure and play, challenges of underdevelopment, and ideas of progress. Bringing together the newest and most innovative scholarship on African sports, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Contemporary Africa, African history, culture and society, sports history and politics"--