Cultural Politics of Post-9/11 American Sport

<p>Much of the writing on the post-9/11 period in the United States has focused on the role of official Government rhetoric about 9/11. Those who have focused on the news media have suggested that they played a key role in (re)defining the nation allowing the citizenry to come to terms with 9/11 in providing ‘official’ understandings and interpretations of the event and setting the terms for a geo-political-military response (the war on terror). However strikingly absent from post-9/11 writing has been discussion on the role of sport in this moment. This text provides the first book-length account of the ways in which the sport media in conjunction with a number of interested parties – sporting state corporate philanthropic and military – operated with a seeming collective affinity to conjure up nation to define nation and its citizenry and to demonize others. Through analysis of a variety of cultural products – film children’s baseball the Super Bowl the Olympics reality television – the book reveals how in the post-9/11 moment the sporting popular operated as a powerful and highly visible pedagogic weapon in the armory of the Bush Administration operating to define ways of being American and thus occlude other ways of being.</p>