Africa and the Olympics

Winning Away from the Podium

Todd Cleveland (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

208 Seiten

2024
Ohio University Press (Verlag)
978-0-89680-351-0 (ISBN)

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At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Reflecting this relative lack of sporting success, African Olympians-aside from elite Kenyan distance runners-rarely register in the minds of even the most dedicated followers of the Games. Yet for all their seeming invisibility on the Olympic landscape, African states, athletes, and officials have long been “winning” at the Olympics, albeit often far removed from the medal podium.
Africa and the Olympics shows how African actors have achieved these nonsporting victories and examines how they have used the Olympics to engage in transformative political activity, realize social mobility, and enhance the quality of life for individuals, communities, and entire nations. In tracing these historical and contemporary processes and the motivations that underlie them, the book complicates reductive notions of the Olympics as solely a sporting competition and instead considers Africa’s engagement with the Games as a series of opportunities to improve personal, communal, ethnic, national, and even continental plights.
If few sports fans have thought extensively about Africa and the Olympics, scholars have been only slightly more engaged with the subject. Most of this scholarship focuses on the International Olympic Committee’s ban of apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1988. Other works that consider the Olympics more broadly tend to deal with Africa only summarily, further reducing its already low profile. As a result, the academic literature resembles a patchwork of circumscribed studies dispersed in a range of fields and disciplines. Not since the publication of Africa at the Olympics almost fifty years ago has a single volume featured a comprehensive history of the continent and the Games. This book both updates and expands previous work and, most importantly, reframes the analytical engagement with this topic.

Todd Cleveland is a distinguished professor of history at the University of Arkansas. His books include these Ohio University Press titles: Sports in Africa, Past and Present (2020), Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975 (2017), Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975 (2015), and Stones of Contention: A History of Africa's Diamonds (2014).

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments
Summer Olympic Games by Year and Location
Introduction
Africa’s Engagement with the Olympic Games
1
African Colonies and Newly Independent Countries at the Olympic Games
Simulating Independence and Fostering National Unity, 1920–1968
2
Isolating Racism
African Contributions to South Africa’s Olympic Ban
3
Africa Protests
Combatting Racial Injustice via Olympic Boycotts
4
Parlaying Individual Olympic Success into Positive Change on the Continent
5
The Olympic Games and Personal Improvement Strategies
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	22.08.2024
Reihe/Serie	Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies
Zusatzinfo	16 black-and-white illustrations
Verlagsort	Athens
Sprache	englisch
Maße	140 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-89680-351-1 / 0896803511
ISBN-13	978-0-89680-351-0 / 9780896803510
Zustand	Neuware