Fiaca and Veron‐ismo: Race and Silence in Argentine Football
2004; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0261436042000182317
ISSN1466-4496
Autores Tópico(s)Sports, Gender, and Society
ResumoThis 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 Argentina's 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.
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