SPAN 597 Sports and Modernity in Latin America

This seminar focuses on the cultural and political function of sport in modern and contemporary Latin America. How do Latin American countries represent/portray themselves through sport? Do Latin American practices and representations of sport help articulate (or respond to) a distinctive idea of Modernity? By analyzing a wide range of cultural productions (literature, popular music, photography, movies, series, and documentaries), and sport practices and events (fútbol and football, boxing, baseball, lucha libre, running, Olympic Games, and World Cups), this course will provide an interpretative framework for understanding the enormous success of sport in Latin America and its larger role in the global economic and geopolitical landscape. Some of the topics that we will study are national formation, totalitarianism, globalization, body politics, heroes and antiheroes, sex, gender, and sexuality, leisure and productivity.