This project was initiated in July 2015, when Donald J. Trump had only just announced his intention to run for the Republican nomination for the 2016 US presidential election. At the time, few took the Trump campaign seriously, it being widely considered another public relations stunt from an individual preoccupied with building his eponymous brand. As originally imagined, this book was to critically examine high-profile sportās role in normalizing, and thereby corroborating, neoliberalismās position as an epoch-defining economic-political-cultural project that had radically reworked the nature and experience of US society. Trump may have appeared somewhere in the discussion in reference to his golf course developments or failed bid to purchase an NFL franchise, but I doubt it. Derailed by a series of unforeseen personal events, the project re-commenced exactly two years later in a US instant that appeared and certainly felt unrecognizable from that which preceded it.
On its resumption, I anticipated the project would need to be radically revised and updated to reflect the new America and sportās position therein. However, the more I reflected upon and experienced it, the less transformed the Trump nation revealed itself to be. Rather than indicative of some epochal break, the political rise of Donald Trump (and, for that matter, Trumpism: the ideologies and affective investments enacted by the Trump campaign , and subsequently materialized through the pronouncements and policies of the Trump administration) is better explained as the latest iteration of the American reactionary rightās ideological mobilization: a process going back at least to the early 1960s. Americanizing Stuart Hall (1983), the great moving right show of US politics was manifest in the policies, if not the persona , of presidencies from Reagan through Obama . Albeit expressed in a more bombastic and populist register, the Trump regime thus represents more a continuationāif a frequently contradictory and meandering oneārather than a conclusive rupture from the politics which preceded it. Hence, the rationale for this project remained the same: a desire to expose the āpolitical-cultural workā implicating the sport industry in āspreading, installing, universalising and naturalising neoliberalism ā (Clarke, 2016, p. 239), as an iniquitous, divisive, and undemocratic political formation (Brown, 2015; Giroux, 2011). In Braidottiās terms , explicating the relationship between a popular cultural practice (uber-sport ) and the operations of neoliberal power and domination within the contemporary US is impelled by a āradical aspiration to freedom throughā understanding: an āepistemophilic yearning for the empowerment that comes with knowledgeā¦of the specific conditions and relations of power that are imminent to our historical locations ā (Braidotti, 2013, pp. 11ā12). Such is the epistemic yearning motivating this critical contextual undertaking.
The revisited and reworked version of this project is not as radically different as initially anticipated. Yes, the relationship between sport and Trumpās rise to the presidency, and Trumpist practices of governance, demand analysis, but only following an explication of sportās corroborative relationship with neoliberalism , which arguably laid the ideological-affective groundwork for the instinctual and selective mobilization of sport by the Trump agenda. However, before getting to unpack the politicized and politicizing nature of contemporary sport, the first two chapters of the book introduce the conceptual and theoretical approach to uber-sport extended throughout the project, and outline the ontological complexity and in-determinacy of late capitalist uber-sport . Having established this analytical groundwork, it will then be possible to move into discussions (Chapters 3 and 4) illuminating uber-sportās contribution to the instantiation of both US neoliberalism and Trumpās authoritarian populist campaigning and presidential performativity. This unpacking of the politics of contemporary sport culture is followed by a conclusion explicating the points and possibilities for political opposition developed within and through uber-sport, both in response to the machinations of neoliberalism in general, and the orchestrations of the Trump regime in particular. Less an overt contribution to the āteeming shelf of Trump-litā (McCrum, 2018), the book seeks to understand the politicized and politicizing nature and influence of contemporary sport, a brief that, for now, leads unavoidably to a detour through the sporting aspects of Trumpās America .
This project is informed by the work of numerous critical scholars who have examined the role of modern sport in expressing, and reinforcing, prevailing political ideologies (i.e., Brohm, 1978; Brownell, 1995; Gruneau , 1983, 2017; Hargreaves , 1986; Hoberman , 1984; Hoch , 1972; Ingham, 1982; Perelman, 2012; Rigauer, 1969; Whannel , 2008). Albeit with different emphases, each of these scholars scrutinized the institutional and experiential manifestations of modern sport (be they anchored within early, mid, or late capitalist, socialist, or communist formations), as vehicles of the political ideologies that authorize the power and influence of dominant groupings, relations, and hierarchies within specific societies. According to McDonald (2009, p. 43), the collective influence of these works was āwinning the argument that sport is political: that there is a politics of sport and there is politics in sport.ā The politics of/in sport genie has been irrevocably decamped from the bottle in which it previously resided (Burneko, 2018). Even the mainstream US media landscapeāa cultural setting that long exhibited a unilateral and commercially strategic disavowal of any sport-politics relationānow advances its cultural acuity through event-embellishing nods to topical identity politics issues within sport. Oftentimes through the depiction of the personal journeys and struggles of athletes (particularly in regard to challenging raced, classed, abled, gendered , and/or sexed structures of dominance in/through sport), the micro-politics of sport are routinely engaged as part of the popular representation of a sports event, or the focus sports-related news, features, and/or commentaries. Conversely, discussions of sporting macro-politicsāthe relationship between sport and broader systems, forces, and ideologies of societal organization and governanceācontinue to be subsumed under the cultural weight of formulaic and anodyne popular sport discourse. Within the US, if acknowledged at all, the macro-politics of sport is usually only discussed in relation to external sport settings (as in the macro-political contextualization of sporting mega-event host locations, most often when the host nation fails to adhere to the normalized precepts of neoliberal democracy, i.e., Beijing 2008, Sochi 2014, Russia 2018, Beijing 2022, and Qatar 2022). So, there exists a discernible suspension of macro-political sporting consciousness related to the US context, as if sport and macro-politics interpenetrate only on foreign playing fields, and not on the reified gridiron, baseball diamond, ice rink, or hardwood floor.
Through a critical explication of the politics of uber-sportāand informed by a cultural studiesā commitment to attempting to understand, thereby generating knowledge informing interventions into, the relations of popular culture and power (Bennett, 1992; Chen, 1996)...