Thomas F. Carter

In Foreign Fields: The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration

In Foreign Fields examines the lives, decisions and challenges faced by transnational sport migrants - those professionals working in the sports industry who cross borders as part of their professional lives. Despite a great deal of romance surrounding international celebrity athletes, the vast majority of transnational sport migrants - players, journalists, coaches, administrators and medical personnel - toil far away from the limelight. Based on twelve years of ethnographic research conducted on three continents, Thomas F. Carter traces their lives, routes and experiences, documenting their travels and travails. He argues that far from the ease of mobility that celebrity sports stars enjoy, the vast majority of transnational sports migrants make huge sacrifices and labour under political restrictions, often enforced by sports governing bodies. This unique and clearly written study will make fascinating reading for anthropologists, sociologists and anyone interested in the lives of those who follow their sporting dreams.

Re-placing sport migrants: Moving beyond the institutional structures informing international sport migration:

Interest in international sport migration has been burgeoning recently. This article considers the dominant theoretical models used to explore these movements and suggests that it is time to rethink some of our theoretical presumptions. Recent permutations of these theoretical models, shifting from globalization to network theoretical models, make this reconsideration of migration-related theories necessary. Drawing on the groundbreaking work done in the 1990s and on Rafaelle Poli’s rapidly expanding body of work, it becomes apparent that a more flexible, open-ended theoretical model is necessary. This article reviews these theoretical models before making a suggestion of how international sport migration might be better framed for understanding how migration is structured and experienced in multiple locations around the world. Considering that migrants are bodies moving through space, it seems crucial to return migrants to space-based models of movement thereby advocating a theoretical model that takes into account the complexly dynamic relationships between migrants, institutions, and places.

Of spectacular phantasmal desire: tourism and the Cuban state's complicity in the commodification of its citizens

Tourism is a multibillion dollar industry worldwide that has transformed apparently marginalised locations into hotspots of consumerism. Governments seeking low investment, high‐yield industries have turned to this service industry to facilitate the generation of income for state coffers. In doing so, states have become integral players in the selling of their own citizenry. This article uses the emergence of the Cuban tourism industry to explore how Cubas socialist state, ideologically existing for the emancipation of its people, works to commodify and, through that commodification, control its populace. This article makes use of a decades worth of ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate how Cubans engage and negotiate these processes with foreigners, adapting and adopting the states attempts to commodify their bodies, for their own advantage rather than the states. The production of these illusionary desires ultimately results in the creation of Cuban phantasms that undermine the states own selling of the Revolution and ultimately, its control over its citizenry.

What happens while the official looks the other way? Citizenship, transnational sports migrants and the circumvention of the state

The era of transnational sport migration (TSM) has been one of heady celebration, seemingly free movement across borders, and lucrative business. The predominant (and outmoded) models of sport migration currently ignore state controls of migration. This paper brings the state back into analyses of TSM and looks at strategies migrants have used to skirt governmental attempts to control their movements. Understanding the issues surrounding state constructions of national citizenship is essential – both for this paper but also for migrants themselves in order to manipulate these controlling mechanisms to work in their favour. After identifying classificatory themes for determining national and professional status, this paper draws on examples that highlight states’ attempts to control the movements of sport professionals. Using a combination of ethnographic material gathered over the past decade along with interviews and investigative reports, this article argues that an updated theory for understanding transnational sport migration must incorporate and reflect the actual experiences, routes and roots of TSM and the multiple forces that contour these processes.

The USA and Sporting Diplomacy: Comparing and Contrasting the Cases of Table Tennis with China and Baseball with Cuba in the 1970s

When Beijing hosted the Olympic Games in 2008 we were reminded that almost four decades earlier the People’s Republic of China’s road back to international recognition and acceptance had begun with a chance sporting encounter between two members of the US and Chinese table tennis teams in Japan in 1971. It is less well known that not long after this successful ‘ping pong’ diplomatic episode, attempts were made by various parties to use baseball in a similar way to try and repair international ties between Cuba and the United States. In this article the circumstances through which the former succeeded whereas the latter failed miserably are subject to detailed examination. Drawing upon existing literature and unclassified material gleaned from the National Security Archive (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Archive we argue that for a number of historically specific reasons, and because of the different balances of interest and asymmetric power relations, ‘ping pong’ diplomacy was able to help broker rapprochement between the United States and China, whereas ‘baseball diplomacy’ could do little or nothing to stimulate diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana.

Human rights abuses at the Rio 2016 Olympics: activism and the media

Abstract This article examines activists’ use of human rights as a discourse to contest the impacts of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games by drawing on a wider ethnographic project examining activism at Rio 2016. Focusing on two areas of contention, forced evictions and police brutality, the article considers the way activists framed their grievances and how mainstream international media outlets reported those grievances. While activists fighting against forced evictions explicitly used the language of rights in their activism, media accounts tended not to discuss these issues using this lexicon. Conversely, grassroots activists protesting around the issue of police brutality did not tend to frame their grievances in terms of rights, but these issues were discussed as human rights abuses in the media. This points to a dual role played by activists fighting forced evictions: while they are fighting to keep their own homes, they are also part of a wider discursive battle for the right to housing to be recognised and respected.

¿Hasta la victoria siempre? The Evolution and Future of Revolutionary Sport

Abstract Sport has played an important role throughout the Cuban Revolution. It has fulfilled a number of social and political junctions while serving symbolically as one of the main ‘triumphs’ of the Revolution. As an institutionalised practice, however, sport in Cuba has not remained static but has evolved over the previous five decades, undergoing significant structural changes as both domestic and international circumstances dictated. This article surveys those material and social changes in Cuban Sport to consider how sport has been harnessed throughout the Revolution, how the emphasis of Cuban sport changed from grassroots, or masividad, to elite talent production as part of the economic necessity engendered by the Special Period, and what the neoliberal threats are to Cuban sport irrespective of what government exists in the foreseeable future.

The Manifesto of a Baseball-playing Country: Cuba, Baseball, and Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century

Baseball is the national sport in Cuba, not because of American imperialism or colonialism, but because criollos, nineteenth-century island elites, made deliberate efforts to equate the game with a nascent Cuban nationalism. The game represented one of a set of civilized practices that criollos used to distinguish themselves from the Spanish. As a distinctive practice, baseball provided a symbolic discourse for an independent Cuba, evident not only in its physical expression on the field but in other forms of expression as well. One particularly prominent form of expression that linked baseball to Cuban nationalism was poetry. As members of elite social clubs, the playing of the game and recital of poetry were two forms of expressive performance that expressed the desires, values and beliefs of Havanas social elite. This essay examines the relationship between the emergence of Cuban identity, the nascent nation and its expression in the playing of a game by examining a late-nineteenth-century poem that makes these passionate linkages.

Cuba's Challenges Hosting the 1991 Pan-American Games and the Spectacle of the Revolution's "'Soft" Power'

Abstract This paper examines the confluence of global, regional, and national politics in the lead up to the 1991 Pan-American Games hosted by Cuba. Cuba’s contentious selection as host was wholly underpinned by the international politics of the time. Once selected, the preparations for the Games in Havana were surrounded by an unprecedented domestic economic crisis fueled by shifts in global politics. This paper analyzes how international politics informed the hosting of the 1991 Pan-American Games, and shaped the political challenge the Cuban government faced in hosting such an event. The Revolution’s use of sport domestically and internationally came to the forefront in its efforts as host and the results of those efforts proved to be providential given the emerging political economic contexts during and in the ensuing years after the Games.

Game Changer: The Role of Sport in Revolution

Sport is generally understood as a conservative social institution that reaffirms the established values and norms of a society. It is not seen as a mechanism for radical political or social change but a means for individual transformation within a society. This article explores that notion by examining how sport has been used by twentieth-century political revolutions. While considering twentieth-century revolutions, it takes the Cuban Revolution as a particular case study to illuminate the use of sport in remaking of society and persons. The article begins with a general discussion of revolution and sports relationships to it before briefly considering the two most prominent twentieth-century revolutions, the Russian and Chinese. The thrust then focuses on how the idea of revolution was understood in Cuba prior to the success of 1959 as well as immediately after. The article then examines the Cuban revolutionary states explicit emphasis on sport as a means for producing the New Man. In all, the article argues that contrary to the common assumption that sport and revolution do not mix, sport can play an important role in the major social and political transformations.