Grant Farred

Long distance love: growing up a Liverpool Football Club fan.

This article explores the peculiar passions of football (soccer) fandom. Autobiographical in tone, it meditates at once on the personal dimension of fandom and larger theoretical concerns—the love for the Liverpool Football Club and postcolonialism belong to the same broad conversation. The article maps the process by which a fan in apartheid South Africa develops a deep and lasting relationship with an English football club; it demonstrates the arbitrariness of fandom and the importance of narrative (sports journalism) to long distance fandom; it explores how race and fandom complicate each other. It shows, most importantly, how fandom overcomes the debilitations of distance, the lack of technology, through a singular kind of imagination.

The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality

She invested a variety of significances in the word ‘‘there,’’ a concatenation of linked associations with space, time, and place too. —Nuruddin Farah, Secrets The argument in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Carl Schmitt’s work that was first translated into English in 2003, is founded upon the title’s central term, nomos. It is salient that, for a concept that is so fundamental to the project, the German political philosopher struggles to define it, to hold it in theoretical place for very long; he is certainly, despite his best efforts, not able to make it mean only one thing. Nomos reveals itself to be a philosophically palimpsestic term, given to eluding the philosopher even as he seeks to pin it down. Deeply grounded in discourses about national sovereignty, about law—and especially international law insofar as it is European, profoundly concerned with colonial history and the ‘‘land appropriation’’ so endemic to that pro-

Cool as the Other Side of the Pillow: How ESPN’s SportsCenter has Changed Television Sports Talk

In this article, the focus is both on sports talk and on the particular variation of that discourse produced by ESPN’s SportsCenter, arguably the most hip and watched show of its kind. SportsCenter blends all the social concerns about race—the raced nature of athletics (and the distribution of talent)—with a uniquely postmodern view of popular culture. Through its hip presenters, SportsCenter refracts hip-hop culture, contemporary politics, and “high art.” This show does not distinguish between the “high” and the “low,” it refuses to privilege the sacred over the profane, and it makes equal use of the ridiculous and the sublime—all the while knowing its (sport’s) stuff, always with an ironic, parodic, even cynical nod, nudge, and wink. SportsCenter, a resonant repository of contemporary life, values “coolness” above all else. This is sports talk, where those on the air know how to talk that talk because they, apparently (if only vicariously), routinely walk that walk.

Back to the borderlines: Thinking race Disgracefully

The border is the site of Derridas erasure : for everything that the border reveals, it leaves several narratives concealed ; even as new public accounts are forged, older, less ideologically consonant ones are rendered historically unspeakable.

The Double Temporality of Lagaan: Cultural Struggle and Postcolonialism:

Using postcolonial, psychoanalytic, sports, and cultural theory, this article explores the ways in which temporality constitutes a crucial element of the 2002 Bollywood movie, Lagaan. In critiquing this film about cricket, the article explicates how the political moment that is the Indian present functions as a problematic backdrop to Lagaan, which is set at the end of the 19th century. The film is read as text that inhabits, and articulates, a double temporality: Lagaan (“tax” in Hindi) is a movie that looks, simultaneously, to the colonized past and the postcolonial present. Cricket is posited as pivotalto the anticolonial project, and Lagaan demonstrates how the imagined “Indian” nation (which includes all of the Asian subcontinent) conflicts with the Indian and Pakistani nations that emerged after the Partition of the Raj. This article shows how these many ideological pressures operated in “Indian” society and affords gender a critical part in that analysis.

Fiaca and Veron‐ismo: Race and Silence in Argentine Football

This paper explores the relationship between race and post‐coloniality in Argentina through the prism of football. More specifically, it does so through a reading of the personage and physiognomy of Juan Sebastian Veron, one of Argentinas most renowned players. The paper uses the metaphor of fiaca, the cultural practice of ‘relaxation’, to discourse about football, and the celebrity that attains to Veron, and the ways in which sport functions as a loaded political intersection. The rendering of Veron as a black footballer facilitates a discussion about race, an anachronistic modernity, the complicated disjuncture between ideology and geography, and resistance to post‐coloniality as it obtains in contemporary Argentine society. Because of the signal role that football plays in Argentina, this paper argues that Veron – and his footballing predecessors and contemporaries – enables a complex engagement with the racial politics of this Latin American country – and its relationship to its neighbours.

The black intellectual's work is never done: a critique of the discourse of reconciliation in South Africa

There may have been some who were less guilty than others, there were definitely those who opposed it courageously, but there were, assuredly, no white South Africans who stood outside the machinations of apartheid. There were none who did not know of its workings, of how it structurally advantaged one group, based exclusively on race, over others. It is one of the African National Congress’s (ANC) greater failures, and here Nelson Mandela is more symbolically culpable than any other of the organisation’s leaders, that it did not call white South Africans to book, did not make them accountable for the atrocities, the exploitations, the violences, the deracinations, the multiple destructions that disenfranchised life suffered at the hands of white South Africans, Anglo, Afrikaner, and others alike. It may be proven historically criminal that the ANC opted instead for appeasement with the apartheid state, that it did not punish the racially enfranchised who worked so dutifully—understandably, given the disproportionate benefits that accrued to them—for the maintenance of apartheid. It is undeniable that white South Africans were not only responsible for the apartheid state but publicly, unapologetically, complicit in it. At issue in this essay is not a quarrel with the importance of the idea of complicity, including black complicity—as I argue below. Rather, the concern here is with the ways in which the concept of complicity is deployed to overwrite—and undermine— other possible ways of remembering, commemorating, and acting in the current conjuncture. In de-racialising and transforming ‘complicity’ into a non-racial category of apartheid experience, the differences between solidarity and collaboration, between sly civility and cooperation with the apartheid regime, between strategies of survival and wilful cooptation by the state, are erased in the name of a politically and ideologically evacuated ‘complicity’. In the anti-apartheid struggle, ‘complicity’ was never a one-size-fits-all experience. It was, instead, textured and complicated by white political nous, black political expedience, unfulfillable desires (for freedom, liberation, sex), literary and cultural ambition, as well as frustration with what appeared until the late 1980s to be the historic dominance of the white South African minority.

Wankerdom: Trainspotting As a Rejection of the Postcolonial?

Long before and long after the ‘‘enforced union’’ of , Scots from across the ideological spectrum have come to recognize that they are— despite occasional pretenses and denials to the contrary—a people ‘‘colonized’’ by the English. From William Wallace’s ‘‘braveheart’’ struggle against Edward I in the early fourteenth century to the Highland chieftain Rob Roy’s quest for honor against the Duke of Montrose some three hundred years later, from Robertson’s critiques to the verse of Jacobite poet laureate Robbie

America's Africa: Barack Obama and the Aporia of Race

There is no thinking of America except as a body politic haunted by the historic presence of the African. The American political cannot be understood without the specter of the African. It has always been impossible to vote in the United States, long before and for a century and a half after the Civil War, long before the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed Jim Crow, without symbolically casting a ballot for or against American racism—against the black African presence (foreshadowing how, in the future that is now, America will think the history of ‘‘illegal immigration’’). In this way, Africa has constituted the essential truth of American politics for the last 300 years. Haunted by that truth, the contemporary American political might now have to confront it viscerally: America may be called upon to vote directly on Africa as an African American challenges for the highest office in the land. Barack Obama is not only the eloquent, articulate Democratic Party Senator for the State of Illinois, he is potentially the Democratic candidate for the American presidency. This son of a black Kenyan father (and a white Kansas mother) represents America’s most localized, public confrontation with Africa, with the African in the American Self, since the inception of slavery. Or, we might say, since the Civil War, since the Civil Rights Movement, since the Black Power Movement; or, since gains of civil rights legislation have been subject to persistent attacks by the American right and, to a lesser extent, American liberals of the Clinton variety—a Democratic presidency that was especially hostile to the ‘‘Welfare Mother,’’ by which it meant the unmarried, perpetually pregnant African-American or Puerto Rican single mother who was, of course, not the primary beneficiary of state support. Single white

Race and Silence in Argentine Football

On the main highway leading from the airport into downtown Buenos Aires, a few miles before you reach the famous Avenida de Julio, the main street that goes through the heart of the city, there is a twenty-story apartment complex. Emblazoned on it in the winter of 2001 was a mural of Juan Sebastian Veron (in the colors of his then new club Manchester United, where he stayed for only two seasons), impeccably manicured goatee and all. Before the disastrous World Cup 2002 campaign, the stylish midfielder was an Argentine national hero. The image on that building is a salient one, both because of who Veron is and who he is not. That mural is a signal accomplishment for the unsettled midfielder; having struggled to put his stamp on Chelsea (the west London club that plays in the English Premier League) as he did at Lazio (of Italy’s Serie A), Veron now seems increasingly likely to head back to Italy to play his club football—Inter Milan is rumored to be his favored destination. Surprisingly, in a nation that loves forwards, especially wayward, inspirational ones, here the Argentine capital chose to honor a midfielder. Moreover, Veron hails from the hinterland city of La Plata, a flat, sprawling garrison town with a strong border ethos—even though it is less than an hour from Buenos Aires. Veron’s attachment to Buenos Aires, or “Baires” as it is more commonly known, is only secondary, a product of his brief stint with the city’s most popular and populist club, Boca Juniors.