The Black Man In Brazilian Soccer

At turns lyrical, ironic, and sympathetic, Mario Filho's chronicle of "the beautiful game" is a classic of Brazilian sports writing. Filho (1908–1966)—a famous Brazilian journalist after whom Rio's Maracana stadium is officially named—tells the Brazilian soccer story as a boundary-busting one of race relations, popular culture, and national identity. Now in English for the first time, the book highlights national debates about the inclusion of African-descended people in the body politic and situates early black footballers as key creators of Brazilian culture. When first introduced to Brazil by British expatriots at the end of the nineteenth century, the game was reserved for elites, excluding poor, working-class, and black Brazilians. Filho, drawing on lively in-depth interviews with coaches, players, and fans, points to the 1920s and 1930s as watershed decades when the gates cracked open. The poor players and players of color entered the game despite virulent discrimination. By the mid-1960s, Brazil had established itself as a global soccer powerhouse, winning two World Cups with the help of star Afro-Brazilians such as Pele and Garrincha. As a story of sport and racism in the world's most popular sport, this book could not be more relevant today.

This book provides an historical overview of the formation of sports media in Latin America and its role in the construction of the political history of Latin American sport. The sports press was a privileged observer of the development of modern sports, but it was also a key factor in the making of professional sports in Latin America. Most of the literature on sport in Latin America treats the sports press as an historical source, rarely taking it as an object of study in itself. However, the development of sports in the region is connected to national and state-building processes and the role of media narratives is crucial to understanding how sports participate in those processes. Spanning the globalization of football in the late nineteenth century to the shift promoted by television in the 1970s, the chapters survey the historical development of sports media in Latin America. Representing ten countries, the contributors follow a framework that presents the press not as a passive narrator of the sports phenomenon, but as a social agent of the sports field. This book is of use to those interested in the history of sports and the media, and it will be a good resource for undergraduates taking courses on Sports History, Latin American History, Sports Management, and Journalism and Communication.

This book presents a kaleidoscopic view of the multidisciplinary field of research developed within Brazilian social sciences to study football as a major cultural and social phenomenon in the country. As a contributed volume, it brings together chapters authored by researchers from different disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, political science, history, geography, economy, communication studies and physical education, who contributed to make Brazilian football a multifaceted object of study for the human and social sciences. The book is divided in four parts. The first two parts are dedicated to the "classic" areas, in which the best known research lines are concentrated: part one focuses on politics and history, while part two is dedicated to sociology and anthropology. The third part brings together studies from other four different areas: communication studies, geography, economy and physical education. The fourth part is organized not by disciplines, but around transversal themes, such as gender, violence, fans and racism. The varied approaches and different interpretations brought together in this book seek to provide an overview of the fertile academic debate that has stimulated the renewal of scientific research on football in Brazil, which makes Football and Social Sciences in Brazil a useful resource for researchers from different disciplines within the human and social sciences interested in the study of football as major cultural and social phenomenon all over the world.

Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, and the Brazilian national team is beloved around the planet for its beautiful playing style, the jogo bonito. With the most successful national soccer team in the history of the World Cup, Brazil is the only country to have played in every competition and the winner of more championships than any other nation. Soccer is perceived, like carnival and samba, to be quintessentially Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian. Yet the practice and history of soccer are also synonymous with conflict and contradiction as Brazil continues its trajectory toward modernity and economic power. The ongoing debate over how Team Brazil should play and positively represent a nation of demanding supporters bears on many crucial facets of a country riven by racial and class tensions. The Country of Football is filled with engaging stories of star players and other key figures, as well as extraordinary research on local, national, and international soccer communities. Soccer fans, scholars, and readers who are interested in the history of sport will emerge with a greater understanding of the complex relationship between Brazilian soccer and the nation’s history.

The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture is the first comprehensive volume to explore the intersections between gender, sexuality, and the creation, consumption, and interpretation of popular culture in the Américas. The chapters seek to enrich our understanding of the role of pop culture in the everyday lives of its creators and consumers, primarily in the 20th and 21st centuries. They reveal how popular culture expresses the historical, social, cultural, and political commonalities that have shaped the lives of peoples that make up the Américas, and also highlight how pop culture can conform to and solidify existing social hierarchies, whilst on other occasions contest and resist the status quo. Front and center in this collection are issues of gender and sexuality, making visible the ways in which subjects who inhabit intersectional identities (sex, gender, race, class) are "othered", as well as demonstrating how these same subjects can, and do, use pop-cultural phenomena in self-affirmative and progressively transformative ways. Topics covered in this volume include TV, film, pop and performance art, hip-hop, dance, slam poetry, gender-fluid religious ritual, theater, stand-up comedy, graffiti, videogames, photography, graphic arts, sports spectacles, comic books, sci-fi and other genre novels, lotería card games, news, web, and digital media.

The essays in this volume use football to create a dialogue between history and other disciplines, including art criticism, philosophy, and political science. The study of football provides fertile ground for interdisciplinary initiatives and this volume explores the disciplinary boundaries that are shifting “beneath our feet.” Traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have come to embrace diverse research methodologies and the increased scholarly attention to football over the past decade reflects both the startling popularity of the sport and the trends in historical scholarship that have been termed the “cultural,” “interpretive,” or “linguistic” turns. This volume includes work on gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, which have challenged disciplinary fault-lines.

Beach Soccer Histories is the first text to consider the sport as a historical, social and cultural phenomenon, to define its traditions, and present leading research on the development and significance of football played on sand. Following a period of expansive, rapid growth, beach soccer is an internationally governed professional sport, which has come a long way from its origins in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s. The sand-based variant is distinguished from football by a range of factors, including the dramatic impact of the playing surface. Yet, the game has undergone very little academic scrutiny. This research adopts and adapts qualitative methods related to oral history and football studies, including extensive archival research, semi-structured interviews, and textual and thematic analyses. As it looks beneath the game’s contemporary reach, it considers origins, organisations – including FIFA’s influence – and the beach cultures that underpin its sporting and historical development. This the most comprehensive exploration of beach soccer and a century of its existence. Beach Soccer Histories examines the game’s historical development, critical moments and movements in its progress, successes and contentions, and its contemporary state of play with a view to deepening and advancing our understanding of the game.