Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Futebol/Fútbol, Identity, and Politics in Latin America

2015; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lar.2015.0037

1542-4278

Kirk Bowman,

Sports and Physical Education Studies

Futebol/Fútbol, Identity, and Politics in Latin America Kirk Bowman (bio) Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile. By Brenda Elsey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Pp. ix + 315. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9780292743939. The Country of Football: Politics, Popular Culture and the Beautiful Game in Brazil. Edited by Paulo Fontes and Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda. London: Hurst and Company, 2014. Pp. xvii + 274. $16.99 paper. ISBN: 9781849044172. Futebol Nation: The Story of Brazil through Soccer. By David Goldblatt. New York: Nation Books, 2014. Pp. xxiii + 290. $16.99 paper. ISBN: 9781568584676. The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil. By Roger Kittleson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 328. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520279094. Fútbol!: Why Soccer Matters in Latin America. Joshua H. Nadel. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. Pp. 288. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780813049380. Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina. By Raanan Rein. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 226. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780804793414. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil and the rather sudden emergence of soccer as a popular and effective lens to explore identity and politics resulted in an abundance of recent academic books on the beautiful game in Latin America.1 Journalists, general writers, and biographers, such as Alex Bello, Eduardo Galeano, Mário Rodrigues Filho, and Chris Taylor, examined the sport over many decades to illuminate such issues as identity, race, passion, joy, corruption, genius, and political manipulation.2 In the past decade, sociologists, geographers, and historians in the Southern Cone embraced soccer as an inspiration for systematic academic inquiry, including academic centers involving such scholars as Pablo Alabarces in Buenos Aires and Ronaldo Helal in Rio de Janeiro. While it was largely ignored initially in the English-language press and scholarship, this academic movement [End Page 254] nonetheless generated momentum and contributed to a burst of English-language academic research. This essay examines six books, five of which were published in 2014, utilizing three principal foci to gauge the collective value of scholarship in this emerging field. First, does the research inform and help us explain current manifestations of soccer, society, and politics in the region? For example, in 2013 national governments in both Argentina and Brazil unsuccessfully attempted to use soccer as a distraction—bread and circuses—from criticism of unpopular policies. Argentina enshrined the television viewing of club soccer almost as a human right in 2009, expropriating the broadcast rights from the private sector and showing all first-division games on public television’s Fútbol para todos (Soccer for All) transmissions. This gave Cristina Kirchner’s government the power to reach into almost all homes with an onslaught of official propaganda during the matches. In May 2013 the government manipulated the national game, scheduling the most popular teams opposite the Jorge Lanata–hosted television show (Journalism for All), which is highly critical of the government. This maneuver became a public-relations disaster as more viewers tuned into Lanata than to the Boca Juniors and River Plate games, in part as a form of popular protest. And in Brazil, the government of Dilma Rousseff postponed two highly unpopular policy issues, the increase in bus fares and a constitutional amendment to weaken the investigation and prosecution of corrupt officials (PEC-37), from January 2013 to June 2013. Brazil was hosting and winning the Confederations Cup in June 2013, and many thought that watching Neymar and his teammates would consume the attention of soccer-crazy Brazilians and the government could simultaneously implement unpopular measures under the radar. In a complete shock to the Brazilian government and to FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), Brazilians staged enormous protests throughout the country, leading to a retreat on the fare hikes and the PEC-37, embarrassing the government and FIFA, and initiating a protest movement and demands for greater accountability that have endured until today. Does this new burst of scholarship assist us in understanding and analyzing these events? The second important focus is to gauge the collective analytical value of this collection of books. Is there scholarly leverage in this body of literature...