Periscope

World Cup 2010

2010-07-21T00:52:44Z

In this dossier, a series of football enthusiasts (who also happen to be social and cultural critics), offer their reflections upon the meaning and significance of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Much commentary and controversy has already been generated by this global event, the first World Cup, and indeed the first global sporting event of any significance to be held in "Africa". The specific importance of South Africa as a relatively privileged outpost, what some would describe as an "exceptional" civil and political space on the African continent--lends additional weight and distinctiveness to these reflections. World history from the vantage point of South Africa has been represented as a triumph over the legacies of modern white supremacy and settler colonialism. South Africa's World Cup in turn has been touted by its many boosters as a benchmark in post-apartheid nation-building, and as a showcase for African national competence and good governance that will both advertise and provide a leading indicator for a bright new era of continental development.

The facts on ground, of course, have proven to be messier and more conflicted, even as the conventional narratives and imagery that saturate the event often conform to and reanimate older colonial scripts. Pre-World Cup advertisements on Australian television, for example, depicted the national team, "the Socceroos," training with wild animals of the African bush. Laundered by post-apartheid common-sense, the racist bestiary thus regains its old salience for the 'invention of Africa'. What might be called the sounding of the event as several writers discuss, has been an arena of fundamental contestation, as "Waka-Waka" and the vuvuzela offer competing soundtracks and register a contested history of cultural production and material appropriation that has long been central to both scholarly and popular representations of African realities. A stunning commercial and financial success from the standpoint of FIFA (football's world governing body), and its biggest corporate sponsors (McDonalds, Budweiser, Coca Cola, etc...), for South Africans saddled with 'white elephant' stadia, unpaid public wage bills, and masses of underemployed and workless poor who could not afford the price of the ticket, the 'trickle-down benefits' of the event are far from certain.

Africa's first World Cup in this sense at once signifies and promotes the ascendancy of multicultural neo-liberalism in our own time, bundling together its glittering promise of inclusion for all along with its vicious indifference to a host of new enclosures. Yet, for many who write here who have been engaged in the event these past weeks, football's World Cup cannot be grasped in its complexity if it is cast only as a confirmation of dominance (or merely as a guilty pleasure). For the ardent partisans of national teams, the passionate neutrals, as well as those who get drawn in, in different ways, to the public narratives that cohere around the event, the World Cup indexes something more than the unremitting triumph of corporate capitalism in the train of its colonial past and present. Not only is football, (soccer in the US parlance), arguably the only truly global game, its World Cup, a spectacle consumed by billions of people, takes on an interpretive significance for the entire planet, as its serialized, agonistic form engages in both precise and distorted ways the pressing social questions of our time: the allure and failure of nationalism as a cosmopolitan ideal, the risk and promise of innovation weighed down by a stagnant order of things, the limits of formal equality and the inadequacy of the rule of law to demands for justice, the threat that ever widening circles of human affiliation across borders will beat a xenophobic retreat to virulent realities of marginalization and defeat.

Football in this sense encompasses a geopolitics of affiliation, one with an irreducibly modern historical dimension. Viewed in this light, the presiding trope of "Africa's World Cup," retains a decided ambivalence. The tournament has unfolded in such a way that for the first time in 72 years two European teams will meet in back to back finals; the winner will be the first European nation to win a World Cup played outside of that continent. Michel Platini, the head of UEFA, the European soccer federation, explains these developments in a classically Eurocentric idiom: "we are witnessing a triumph for technical education programs, sound management and good governance... Nothing could be more pleasing than this state of affairs." As columnist Richard Williams pointed out in the Guardian and as Peter Alegi documents in his book African Soccerscapes, Platini characteristically ignores how Europe's soccer federations have prospered in recent decades through the ravenous recruitment of African talent at all levels of the game, with very little return given back for local infrastructural development at the source.

One suspects that the collective feeling, cost accounting and narrative framing in South Africa and elsewhere on the African continent is rather different. For despite the failure of most of the African teams, including South Africa (the first host nation to fail) to advance out of the qualifying rounds, one team, the Black Stars from Ghana (notably the first independent, post-colonial African state), did so, eventually reaching the quarter finals. South Africans across colors and communities quickly transferred their allegiances to the Black Stars in ways that seemed unprecedented to many -- a demonstration of horizontal solidarity and pan-African affiliation that appeared to cut against the grain of both South African exceptionalism and the enduring divisions of the apartheid past. At Soccer City stadium outside Soweto, a crowd of 85,000 (excepting approximately 2000 Uruguay supporters) watched in horror as Ghana were cruelly knocked out by Uruguay, as a result of a Uruguayan field player, Luis Suárez saving a ball off the goal-line with his hand, an egregious breech of the rules of the game, but one that despite being punished with a red card and an award of a penalty kick, delivered the match to Uruguay as a consequence of the Ghanaian players subsequent failure to convert the penalty, and a succession of spot kicks in the penalty shoot out. This event, much like Zinedine Zidane's notorious head butt in 2006, or Diego Maradona's 'hand of god' goal in 1986 arguably constituted the central talking point for the event as a whole. For Suarez's handball highlighted an injustice, indeed a form of cheating, for which the laws of the game provided no definitive remedy. In turn, Ghana was prevented from becoming the first African side to reach a World Cup semi-final, (after which who knows what might have happened?). Instead, with the defeat of (the now locally unloved underdog) Uruguay in the semi-final we were left with the novelty of two of Europe's oldest colonial powers Spain and Holland, neither of whom has ever won the World Cup before, contesting for the ultimate prize on African soil.

One South African blogger of note (who also happens to be my brother) thoughtfully considers this outcome, drawing upon the insights of the celebrated Uruguayan leftist writer and soccer enthusiast Eduardo Galeano. "In football," Galeano writes, "rarities occur. In a world organized around the daily confirmation of the power of the powerful, nothing is rarer than the coronation of the humiliated and the humiliation of the crowned. But in football, at times, this rarest of events does happen." Alas, "rare" remains the operative word. More often the games leave fans hard done by and not only because our teams don't win, or because we must return to our mundane existence. Rather we are dogged by a sense of the unfairness of it all. This is not only because we have spent days, weeks (and eventually years) mesmerized by a highly scripted, corporate-dominated, commodity spectacle. For unlike other serialized forms of mass culture whose generic prescriptions frequently offer comforting confirmation and imaginary resolution, football is fatalistic; its results rarely please. And yet this may also help to explain the peculiar unity that an event like this actually engenders among supporters of all sorts. For apposite the nationalist pageantry of flag waving and face-painting, the beautiful game, particularly when played on the global stage, engenders neither partisanship nor triumphalism among the great majority, but the intimate fellowship and humility of the mutually wronged.

The essays here can hardly begin to chart the still proliferating meanings of this global event, particularly as its narrative threads disperse with returning players and fans across four continents. Inside South Africa, the post-mortems on World Cup 2010 have scarcely begun. Charges of corruption, murky money trails, on-going and impending strikes, rumors of resurgent crime and xenophobia are weighed against a justifiable sense of national achievement and near universal praise for South Africa's astonishing ecumenism and hospitality. With its' coffers lined, FIFA ( an organization that seems a bizarre cross between the Vatican and the IMF) has already charted a relatively short path across the Southern hemisphere to 2014 and Brazil, a country still brimming with recrimination for falling short of a wholly unique expectation to win every World Cup it plays. Outside hapless England, whose golden generation finally withered on the vine, Europe looks on with anticipation and complacency. Elsewhere, Catalunya pauses to give two cheers for Spain. While Asia and Africa still await their champion.

Nikhil Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at

NYU. He is the author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished

Struggle for Democracy (Harvard, 2004), and editor of Climun' Jacob's

Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell

(California, 2010).

Photo by Karam Singh.

The World Cup in Pictures

2010-07-20T00:35:02Z

Soweto, South Africa - Fans on a train in Soccer City.

Korogwe, Tanzania - Watching the Game.

Maputo, Mozambique - City Streets.

Lusaka, Zambia - Street Dancer.

Johannesburg, South Africa - Standton City Mall Marionettes

Quissico, Mozambique - Footballers and Fans.

Critiquing What We Love

2010-07-20T00:22:20Z

In the run-up to the World Cup, countless advertisements from around the globe began to build the hype for the 2010 tournament in South Africa. The vast majority of these ads - including some mentioned elsewhere in this dossier - displayed a striking consistency in their reliance on tired stereotypes and discourses barely modified from the colonial roots from which they sprang in their portrayal of "Africa's World Cup." One ad, however, deserves a second look for the way it both surfaced and dismissed the broader social and cultural issues underlying the World Cup: titled "United," it features U2's song "Magnificent" with a voice-over by Bono promoting ESPN's coverage of the event.

"It's not about politics," Bono tells us, "or religion, or the economy. It's not about borders, history, trade, oil, water, gas, mineral rights, human rights, or animal rights." By deploying Bono - at once recognizable as both mega-star and outspoken advocate for a neoliberal orientation to solving global social issues - ESPN made his initial assertions both compelling and counterintuitive. He continues to describe, for nearly the full minute length of the ad, what the World Cup is not about: social issues of great importance. Not until the final 12 seconds does the song itself crescendo along with Bono's voice: "This is about the one month, every four years, when we all agree on one thing," Bono concludes. "32 nations. One world watching. 2010 FIFA World Cup." The ad thus declares at once universality for the sport it celebrates and a symbolic space outside of the global and local struggles faced by supposedly unified human beings in everyday life and politics.

"United" thereby manages to surface an ambivalence that has followed the World Cup, and football more generally, for decades. This ambivalence vacillates between seeing football on the one hand as an indicator of broad social trends and of geopolitical intrigue, and on the other as just another form of entertainment, whether played on neighborhood sandlots or in corporate-controlled stadiums. As the province of good family fun or thuggish hooligans; as a source of innocent joy or criminal and financial manipulation. In recent years, a spate of popular and academic books analyzing the game and its importance - from Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World (2004) to Simon Kuper's and Stefan Szymanski 's Soccernomics (2009) to Peter Alegi's African Soccerscapes (2010) - have further contributed to this ambivalence. Is football an escape from the more challenging elements of daily life, a proxy for those struggles, or both?

Nikhil Singh's description of the authors in this dossier as "football enthusiasts (who also happen to be social and cultural critics)" also exposes these tensions. Do those of us who exist within both of these two social categories - football enthusiasts and social/cultural critics - inhabit that space as a contradiction or as a concurrence, particularly during the hype of the World Cup? For fans of the game, this month represents the most intense fluctuations of our addiction, emotionally and even physically, as we re-arrange lives to accommodate as many as four matches per day, often at odd hours if we live in time zones other than where matches are being played. Yet it also represents the moment when our addiction reaches the height of its commoditization, attracting the greatest number of fellow-travelers into the incessant rehashing of matches, their nuances, and their social and political implications, while we often frame our support for one team or another based on some broader claim of postcolonial, moral or aesthetic politics. This is not to say, of course, that football is not political or big business during the intermittent four years, but rather that the commercialization and politicization of football builds to a crescendo, like Bono's voice, during the tournament.

For those of us with deep ties and personal and political commitments to South Africa, these contradictions and concurrences became especially acute during this particular World Cup. The opportunity to witness the tournament here - whether our affiliation with South Africa is by birth or choice - was an opportunity not to be missed. Yet the impact of the Cup on the politics and economy of the host nation, and particularly on the coffers of a government already struggling to provide basic social infrastructure for its people, from health care to a social wage to economic opportunities, remains undeniable. Likewise, the oft-spoken of "vibe" here in South Africa has been equally undeniable, with excitement surrounding the Cup spreading far beyond the hardcore fan base of the sport or the tourist enclaves, most notably toward women in huge numbers across the social spectrum who are often marginalized by men's focus on football. So while accolades pour in for South Africa's successful hosting of the tournament - by FIFA's and the government's particular standards, which appear to concern primarily commercial and security interests - the ambivalence remains around the long-term social and cultural impact. And this ambivalence is felt deeply, rather than as a passing acknowledgment of the abstract complications of our world.

The dilemma is not that these ambivalences exist; the World Cup can be a simultaneously transcendent and prosaic experience, as well as both inclusive and exclusive, in multiple contexts. Rather, the problem arises when the two sides of this ambivalence are imagined as clearly demarcated spaces of physical being or intellectual labor rather than mutually constitutive. The thrill we feel, along with countless others, watching the World Cup is part of what allows the crazy twists of political economy surrounding the tournament; yet, the joy people feel in experiencing the sport and its flagship event cannot be reduced solely to that political economy, or the social dilemmas it both generates and reflects. In other words, the ambivalence must remain alive, in multiple registers, and open to both critique and pleasure.

More than 20 years before the "United" ad, during the states of emergency in South Africa, U2 released their live album Rattle and Hum. In the middle of a track written for Artists United Against Apartheid, Bono pauses to call for sanctions against the apartheid regime. "Am I bugging you?" Bono sardonically asks his audience at the end of his diatribe. "I don't mean to bug you." Now, in 2010, the sarcasm in his question seems to disappear, giving his (new) audience permission to ignore the deeper implications of the Cup and a way out of the ambivalence. Yet for those of us who care about both football and South Africa, this route - while tempting - is far too easy.

Ron Krabill is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and on the graduate faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of Washington Seattle. He is the author of the Starring Mandela & Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid, due out from the University of Chicago Press in August. Ron is currently in South Africa leading the UW undergraduates in a course titles, "Critical Perspectives on the 2010 Football World Cup," which includes a community media partnership between Cape Town Community Television, 911 Seattle Media Arts Center, Seattle Sounders FC, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at UW, wherein small teams of students and young South African media workers are filming short videos on the local impacts of hosting the World Cup.

Photo by Kwame Nyong'o.

The Pan-African Journey

2010-07-20T00:16:16Z

"...I can see that you are here in the millions and my last warning to you is that you are to stand firm behind us so that we can prove to the world that when the African is given a chance he can show the world that he is somebody." - Kwame Nkrumah, 1957.

There are a myriad of amazing stories surrounding the 2010 World Cup. While the tactical set ups, the weather and lax refereeing stifled beautiful play, the World Cup was not without tremendous drama. Some of that drama surrounded the Ghanaian team that I argue carried the banner of the flag of Pan-Africanism.

As the tournament progressed it became apparent that only the "Black Stars" from Ghana were going to progress to the knock out rounds. In the round of sixteen, Ghana defeated the USA in a tight match. When that draw came through, many African Americans who had after being annoyed with white suburban look of the US team, had begun to embrace the team that is beginning to look more like America, were upset because it became clear their Pan-African sensibilities would have to clash with their excitement for the play of the US National team.

The feeling of Pan-Africanism and its validation by outside viewers became apparent to observers. Hotel staff was reported to be talking about the Ghana team. The South Africans who call their team "Bafana Bafana," began to chant "Ghafana Ghafana." European pundits marveled at the support for Ghana throughout Africa. Many wondered at the concept of Pan-Africanism. England does not celebrate when Spain or Germany win an international tournament, why should South Africans celebrate a win by Ghana?

However, there is a longer history. The shared struggle against colonialism, racism and the intellectual force and organizations related to Pan Africansim provide a basis for explaining why South Africans, Cameroonians, and African Americans all cheered for South Africa (see Singh Von Eschen, Merriwether etc). Former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah and father of the Ghanaian nation built Pan Africanism into the DNA of the Ghanaian nation, borrowing the black star and colors from the Garvey movement.

This is the same spirit of Pan-Africanism and internationalism that caused celebrations throughout African and among African descended peoples in the Americas at the election of President Barack Obama in the fall of 2008. In a world that wants to emphasize post-Racialism the bonds of Pan-Africanism forged in the early part of the 20th century are alive and well and carried around the world via electronic media like sattelite television and the internet.

These feelings were further reinforced when Ghana went out to a bizarre incident that say Luis Suarez of Uruguay cynically batting the ball away from a sure goal for Ghana in the quaterfinal resulting in a penalty as the last kick of open play. Asamoah Gyan of the Black Stars missed the penalty. Ghana went on lose the match to Uruguay in a penalty shoot out. A bizarre and cruel ending for the "Black Stars" and for the African Diaspora who collectively came within a handball and three penalty kicks of going to the semi-final.

As a result, of that drama Luis Suarez was booed in subsequent matches whenever he touched the ball by South African fans. Suarez became the villain of the Cup for spoiling African aspirations, not just for having caused Ghana to go out of the tournament.

One last issue for me demonstrated the centrality of Pan-Africanism in the consciousness surrounding the World Cup and football in general. As the Netherlands moved into the final, many of us wondered how the former colonial power would be treated by South Africans. Of course the descendants of the Dutch became the Afrikaners and the architects of the brutal apartheid regime that still marks the landscape of contemporary South Africa. However, these concerns were dismissed by the revelation by Ruud Gullit an afro-Surinamese immigrant to the Netherlands, that in the 1988 European Championships helped guide the Dutch team to a win. Gullit reported that Nelson Mandela while in prison at Robben island had followed the pursuits of Black Dutchmen like Gullit and Frank Rijkaard as part of the Dutch National team.

Their inclusion in the Dutch team offered Mandela hope, because the Dutch cousins of the Afrikaners had included these men in the Dutch team and embraced them.

It is that kind of hope and a concern or sense of linked fate with people of African descent across the world that is the linchpin of Pan-Africanism.

Mark Sawyer is currently an Associate Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at UCLA and the Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics.

His published work includes a book entitled Racial Politics in Post Revolutionary Cuba that received the DuBois Award for the best book by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association. He has written articles on the intersection between race and gender in modern Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and additional work on the impact of race relations on democratic transition in Cuba. He also has interest in the area of race, immigration and citizenship around the globe. Mark is a fan of Chelsea FC.

Photo by Kwame Nyong'o.

The Tragedy and Farce of French Football Politics

2010-07-20T00:04:12Z

There is something utterly farcical about the social drama that accompanied the French national soccer team's decided under-performance at the World Cup in South Africa -- what American soccer journalists comically dubbed le meltdown and French media, the "fiasco" or "debacle." A farce not simply because a team of prodigious talent failed to win a game or mark more than a single goal. Nor because of the circus of scandal surrounding the campaign: from revelations about players consorting with underage prostitutes; to the junior sports minister Rama Yade questioning the team's expensive hotel while herself being scheduled to stay in one even more posh; to accusations that retired star Zinedine Zidane encouraged players to mutiny against lame-duck coach Raymond Domenech; to the halftime tirade launched against the latter by forward Nicolas Anelka and his subsequent dismissal from the squad; to the training strike led by captain Patrice Evra in solidarity with Anelka; to President Nicolas Sarkozy making the drama a matter of state by summoning veteran team member Thierry Henry to an emergency meeting with his ministers while France was in the midst of a labor strike. Nor does the farce merely lie in the subsequent scapegoating engaged in by the French media and public, alternately pointing the finger at an incompetent and arrogant Domenech, an unprofessional French Football Federation, or the millionaire players who were deemed to care more about their "bling-bling" than the national jersey. Much of this was arguably anticipated by a French spectating public with low expectations, little respect for the team's management, and already inured to rifts between players and coaches. But even supporters came to revel in the sheer absurdity of it all.

But the drama also had a tragic dimension: the recurring racialization of the team - whose members hail largely from immigrant families and many of whom grew up in the same suburban housing projects (les cités) that have witnessed decades of high unemployment and civil unrest - as suspect Frenchmen. As Laurent Dubois has chronicled in his recent Soccer Empire, children of immigrants have sustained French national soccer teams since the invention of the world cup, and they have been the periodic focus of anxieties over national identity particularly during times of crisis. Beginning in 1996, extreme right Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen complained about the multiracial team not representing (his vision of) the French nation, about its Black and North African players not singing the national anthem. In a reversal of the image of the Black colonial soldier saluting the French flag famously discussed by Roland Barthes, media portrayals of the non-singing of the national hymn by French players of color presented a myth of France's post-imperial disunity and an alibi for Le Pen's proposed policies of immigration restrictions and "national preference." Politicians and pundits have returned to this image during each subsequent international tournament, and they do so again today even as French institutions seek to represent the multiracial public and hesitantly adopt affirmative action policies.

Embodying the enduring, if shifting character of French racial discourse is "new philosopher" and public intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, a vocal critic of the "new anti-Semitism" and self-proclaimed defender of French cosmopolitanism. In November 2005, in the wake of the suburban "riots" and in anticipation of the 2006 World Cup, he gave an interview in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in which, like Le Pen, he attributed the violence to the "Islamic radicalization" and the "ethno-religious character" of the housing projects. He further accused the national soccer team of being "Black-Black-Black," as opposed to the "Blue-White-Red" of the national flag, or even the "Black-White-Beur [Arabe]" of French multiculturalism emblematized by the team under Zidane that won the 1998 World Cup. When Finkielkraut returned to these racially-charged themes in a June 20, 2010 radio interview with Europe 1 in the wake of Anelka's dismissal, he further embraced the multiculturalism Le Pen deplored. Contrasting the team with the "Zidane generation" of 1998, he called it a "gangsta [caillera] generation" and a "gang of hooligans [voyous] whose only morality is that of the mafia," thus deploying the same demeaning language as Sarkozy did in the midst of the 2005 violence while avoiding evident racism. Rather than signaling the ethno-racial unity of a new, multicultural France, the team offered a "terrible mirror" of a society divided by "clans," "ethnic and religious divisions" and, above all, "arrogant and unintelligent" individuals.

Finkielkraut's theme of social "disunion and decline (déliquesence)" marks a shift in the framing of the French nation and points to the poverty of a narrow racial analysis for making sense of French postcoloniality. More than ever, older Rousseauian concerns over social cohesion seem to be driving present iterations of the perennial question of "whither France." The 2005 violence, the ongoing internal "war on terror," and the recent economic crisis and labor unrest have signaled for many wide-scale national disunity and encouraged the mythologization of the 1998 victory as a utopian moment of multiracial harmony. The recent world cup "debacle" occurred just as Sarkozy made "national identity" a political priority and the focus of a new ministry, thus fostering a vociferous public debate over what constitutes the fundamental values of Frenchness. It likewise followed shortly after his successful campaign to bring the European soccer championship tournament to France, during which he claimed that sport would be France's response to the global economic crisis, that it would re-unite society.

The French soccer players seemed to challenge this vision of social cohesion and national unity by simultaneously acting too individualist and too collectivist. On the one hand, for many observers, they seemed to behave as a set of "narcissists," of over-paid "mercenaries," of "immature caïds," rather than as a unified, socially-aware "team." They too easily recalled the immoral financial traders with their inflated bonuses, as French sports sociologist Christian Bromberger insightfully noted. On the other hand, they seemed to act too communally, as Finkielkraut's "mafia." Like for financial markets, what was being demanded of both the French team and the French nation was transparency. Sports journalists accused Domenech and the French Federation of running a closed shop. For all the talk of lack of team unity, the players were roundly criticized for not talking to the media, for maintaining a collective silence and for being more concerned about the "traitor" who informed the media of Anelka's screed than the fact that he disrespected his coach. Their remaining in the team bus with the shades drawn during the training strike rather than exposing themselves on the practice field invoked decades-long political fears over the ethnic enclaving and cloistering of young women in the cités; their actions represented, in Finkielkraut's words, the esprit des cités rather than the esprit de la Cité, of enlightened civilization. Pundits portrayed the players as having their "hats pulled down over their ears," and the dismissed Anelka was photographed leaving the airport in a hoodie and dark sunglasses -- images that recalled the very burqa that the Parliament was considering banning from public spaces. To be truly French, in other words, meant to be visible.

We should not be surprised that football calls forth national expectations and anxieties. That the World Cup comes to be politicized and racialized is indeed tragic; that this recurs again and again with lugubrious inevitability is surely nothing less than a farce. But to view this through the sole lens of postcolonial racial politics is to miss some of the broader dilemmas around social cohesion and a transparent public sphere that are of central concern today in a "post-racial" global France.

Paul A. Silverstein is an associate professor of anthropology at Reed College. He is the author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation (2004) and has previously written on French Islam and soccer in the pages of Social Text.

Photo credit: Creative Commons Flickr.com

A World Cup of a 'Special Type'

2010-07-15T01:52:52Z

There have been numerous milestones in South Africa's journey from a pariah state characterized by the most brutal form of settler colonialism and white supremacy to a young democracy struggling to find its rightful place in a the post new world order. The release of Nelson Mandela from Victor Verster prison twenty years ago marked the first chapter in South Africa's new beginning. As the tide turned against apartheid and power was transferred to a democratic majority through elections in 1994 and the adoption of new egalitarian rights based constitution in 1996, South Africa has laid claim to distinguish itself amongst the community of nations as an exceptional nation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that followed, to examine atrocities committed under apartheid and during the liberation struggle, has been held up as a model process for transitional justice.

One of the roots to the notion of South African exceptionalism springs from the notion developed by the former General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) Joe Slovo that South Africa had suffered a colonialism of a 'special type.' Developed in a treatise called, 'The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African Communist Party, published in 1963, colonialism of a special type posed the view that despite the fact that South Africa was an independent republic and not a colonial territory, with power concentrated in the hands of a white minority government, South Africa was for all intents and purposes still a colony. South Africa was an exceptional case and liberation in South Africa was not going to come through the lowering of one colonial flag and the raising of a new democratic flag, handshakes all around. Rather, the unseating of a settler minority government would come through a protracted struggle involving an exile armed struggle, an internal resistance movement, and a growing tide of international condemnation and solidarity.

As the pillars of apartheid began to crumble through the growing internal resistance movement and international sanctions, South Africa retained the moniker of exceptionalism through a negotiated settlement, or what history has represented as a peaceful transfer of power. While the bloody nature, atrocities and gross violations of human rights that took place in the period between 1990 and 1994, were recorded and honored through the TRC, ultimately, it was negotiations as opposed to the barrel of the gun that paved the way for the new South Africa to emerge - exceptional, idealistic and prepared to offer a new vision for Africa and the developing world.

In many ways the gloss of the 1990s had begun to fade as the growing pains of a young democracy began to emerge. While democratic gains have been consolidated through the formations of institutions of democracy such as the Constitutional Court and the provision of basic services such as electricity and housing to tens of thousands previously denied such basic rights, the scale of the problem facing South Africa have been massive including the depths of poverty for the majority of the population, the HIV/Aids pandemic, high violent crime rates and growing corruption across the public and private sector.

16 years on into the new democracy and South Africa's claims to exceptionalism have come under threat, or more pessimistically, in terms of crime and HIV, was the world beginning to understand South Africa as exceptional for the wrong reason? Then the arrival of the FIFA 2010 World Cup and a new milestone in South Africa's narrative of exceptionalism. Ke Nako - now is the time, the first African World Cup. While the first World Cup in Africa was always going to be special and different, what has been one of the most interesting aspects of the tournament has been the impact the global event is having on South Africa's understanding of itself within the context its post-apartheid national identity and consciousness.

In the build up to the tournament, at least since the beginning of this year, the country officially adopted Fridays as 'Football Fridays' wherein people were encouraged to wear bright yellow, Bafana Bafana jerseys to their workplace. As many workplaces made small investments in buying South African soccer jerseys on mass for their employees the emergence of the so-called yellow brigade, came across as an equalizer of sorts, where communities across the race and class barriers adopted Bafana Bafana as their team of affiliation, many despite the fact that they had little or no interest in football prior to the arrival of the World Cup on these shores. There is something about putting on that football top, which binds an individual to a team, through this notion of affiliation creating an emotional bond and has a knock of effect of creating community, where previously it may not have existed. In a context where race, class and gender divide, one wonders if this form of benign nationalism or affiliation can actually create bonds which are real and enduring?

One of the enduring messages being heard on talk radio and around the bars around Johannesburg during the tournament is this sense of unity amongst South Africans not only in their support of the national side Bafana Bafana or the World Cup generally, but also this notion of unity of broader national community that has found purpose through the staging of this event. As South Africa had drifted towards becoming yet another struggling new democracy on the margins on a global economy in crisis, the World Cup provided a national project or focal point which in a new way through this universal cultural unifier or leveler, football or the beautiful game, provided South Africa with a new vision of what it could mean to be an exceptional or winning nation.

With a massive infrastructure spend which has led to a revitalized Bus Rapid Transport system for major centres like Johannesburg and Cape Town, new and upgraded airports, passenger trains, improvements to the road networks not to mention the significant spend of stadiums, the potential exists for a tangible World Cup legacy for the people of South Africa.

What remains less tangible is how the social commitments of affiliation, particularly the massive support across the colour line for the Bafana Bafana and the transference of this affiliation as the tournament progressed to the knock out rounds, to Ghana, adopted locally as BaGhana BaGhana, will settle. For one of the first times in post-democratic South Africa, there seemed to be a genuine privileging by minority group in South Africa of an African identity, as represented through the Black Stars of Ghana. Stories of South Africa's weeping at Ghana's defeat on penalties at the hands an unjust and determined Uruguay side, reveal the depths of the affiliation felt by so many.

In May 2008, South African society was traumatized by xenophobic attacks that left scores of people dead and injured and thousands of others displaced in makeshift refugee camps. During the final week of the World Cup, we have witnessed an increase in unsubstantiated media stories alleging the potential for xenophobic attacks following the World Cup. Such reports and the possibility of new attacks, stand in stark contrast to the warm welcome and hospitality offered by South Africa to the hundreds of thousands of international visitors during the past month. What has been heartening has been the statements and supposed contingency plans being put in place by state actors in response to these threats, contrasted to the neglect and non-responsiveness when the initial attacks to place.

For South Africa to truly ensure a positive legacy to the economic, social and emotional investments made during the build up to the World Cup and during the past four weeks, there needs to be a concerted efforts by leaders, activists an ordinary community members to tap into the pride and unity which has emerged through the World Cup. For South Africa to remain on course to attaining the mantle of a winning nation, the energy, the vitality that has emerged through the World Cup, needs to be captured and channeled into a reinvigorated notion of South African exceptionalism, premised less on an understanding of the past or by looking to the developed world and seeking to mock or mirror achievements within those societies but rather premised on an understanding of the social and developmental needs of the country including job creation, a well functioning educational and health care system, good governance and respect for the rule of law and zero tolerance for corruption.

The naysayers prior to the World Cup, particularly in large sections of the British, Australian and German press questioned South Africa, a developing nation, an African nations ability to host a mega event of the magnitude of the World Cup. Despite a few incidents, including the debacle at the King Shaka Airport in Durban prior to the Semifinal between Germany and Spain, where five full commercial aircraft were sent back to Johannesburg and Cape Town, due to private jets taking up space on the runway, the World Cup on all accounts has been a staggering success - particularly for the organizers and the pockets of their corporate sponsors. With the lack of transparency at the highest levels of international football governing body, locally, we will never know the depths of the corporate profits generated on this African stage.

Interestingly, as Spain and Holland compete to be crown world champion in the Final, the irony is too rich to think about the links between that the middle era global capitalism and the centrality of the corporation, the Dutch East India Company or the VOC, and modern day capitalism and its global corporate footprint in Africa, namely FIFA. The VOC was the advanced articulation of international capital in the 17th century. Today in 2010, as capital surges from crisis to crisis, the ultimate articulation of the cultural expression of modern day neo-liberalism finds expression again at the tip of Africa, through FIFA and the World Cup.

So as Jan van Riebeeck arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 for VOC, so does FIFA arrive today and on its final stage a contest between Spain and Holland - whose early links are intertwined with European settlement in South Africa. Almost 360 years later, we see the conquest of world played out again on this southern African stage between countries and cultures which have a deeply intertwined history in a world historical sense and in a footballing sense.

As the World Cup can claim success as a global commercial and sporting success, the enduring question for South Africa remains the question of legacy. South Africa has proven once again that on numerous levels it remains an exceptional society. South African exceptionalism going forward however should not be judged on its ability to host mega events, or more symbolically by asserting its right to be around the table when the leading powers determine the course of global events be these economic or political. South African exceptionalism going forward must rather be premised on fulfilling the promises made within the post liberation moment, namely that the masses of South Africans who live economically marginal lives with limited access to the realization of basic rights guaranteed by the South African constitution, such as access to basic services, education and health - receive a better life.

One can have few illusions about the direct pay off that the successful hosting of the World Cup can have towards ensuring a better life for all. What remains to be seen however, is how as a society, South Africa can leverage this tremendous positive energy - generated internally and as received from all corners of the globe by those who either visited South Africa, or marveled at its hospitality through the global media coverage - to ensure this revitalized notion of national reconciliation and unity remains and a common purpose to deliver on democratic liberation.

Karam Singh is an anti corruption practitioner, soccer enthusiast and blogger residing in South Africa since 2001. He is the co-founder and co-director of the TriContinental Film Festival, an annual event in South Africa focusing on human rights and social justice documentary, feature and short films from Latin America, Africa and Asia. Karam70@gmail.com

Starry Eyed Black 'Bama

2010-07-15T01:31:07Z

Let me begin with this: I am a Bama: literally, from Alabama. Before I am an intellectual, a diasporic subject, a celebrator of transatlantic blacknesses who carefully sidesteps essentialism and embraces all of humanity, I am a Bama. Granted, these other more academia friendly aspects of myself have been nurtured since birth by the leftist intellectual communities of my parents. But I was a Grandma's (or better yet my Mudeah's) girl, and that means I know who my folk are and what they expect. It is for them I do what I do.  

 So I watched the World Cup as an American of a very particular sort. And as such, when it comes to sports, I have always rooted for Blackfolks. It is a lesson I learned implicitly. I tested it once on my older cousin as we watched a game of Family Feud. I was around 6. It was around 1978. I slyly asked him: "Which family are you rooting for?" without mentioning the blackness of the black one or the whiteness of the white. He looked at me like I was crazy. Test results as expected.   

So when the U.S.-Ghana match approached, and I sat laughing and drinking and carrying on with a group of other Black women professors who were fellow conference attendees, I was stunned, floored, outdone, when the one Ghanaian among us asked "Who is rooting for Ghana tomorrow?!" and only a third of us hooted "me!"  

 "I got to go with the U.S. on this one" one woman, who if not a Bama was something close, perhaps a Georgian, said grimly. 

 Immediately I thought this might be evidence of the delusion of post-racial Obama-nation. Even these smart women were caught up in the rapture of the slim possibility of a Black elite admission to the meat of American citizenship despite evidence of comprehensive and sustained exclusion for the majority of our folks! I sat there and wrote the post-racial jeremiad in my head while trying to remain polite, (I don't imagine the frozen smile was convincing.)   

But when I returned to my hotel room, I considered why I assumed loyalty to Ghana. And why did it come so automatically to me? It had something to do with the history of imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade. It had something to do with the global inequality that remains like the bloodstained walls of murder scene. It had something to do with how soccer is an elite sport, but futbol is a street game. It had something to do with my very American and African American triumph of the little guy, my love of David over Goliath. And of course it had everything to do with race in the Black American sense. One team had all brothers, the other had just a few.  

 My order of loyalty in the World Cup went something like this: African nations over all others. If an African nation is not playing, then I root for the nation that has been colonized, the caveat being if the other team is a colonizer that has a majority presence of people of color with roots in formerly colonized states. Then, I revert to my rooting for Black norm. If the teams are two colonial powers, I root for the team with more people of color. As you can see, I am far from post-racial. 

 But the reality I work from is this: the history of the 19th and much of the 20th century is still with us. It is still framing our economies, our ideologies, our ideals, our assumptions, our values and our faith. As an intellectual I try to work through this landscape and think with justice and clarity. As a sports fan I gut-push back against the legacies of empire with my hope and adoration. And Ghana, oh Ghana! She played for the continent. She maintained her historic role in the vision of a Pan Africanism borne through reverse migrations and rearticulations of a black subjectivity -written as democracy, self determination, and interdependence. Ghana, where the broad cheek-bones and bright eyes look like those of a 'Bama, where aesthetics can function not as mere cynical genealogy but as a symbolics of self love in the face of historic devastation. With Ghana, I never made the calculus of nation vs. nation. The victory holler just sprang fully formed from my heart.

Imani Perry is a Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004) and the forthcoming More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York University Press, 2011). Her articles are available on her website: http://www.imaniperry.com

Photo by Kwame Nyong'o

Vuvuzela: A Loud, Blank Cipher

2010-07-10T19:34:25Z

Locals who had hoped that the rest of the world would take away some useful knowledge about South Africa's current affairs could hardly be faulted for cursing the existence of the vuvuzela. Zealous opinion about the ubiquitous plastic horns has nearly dominated the portion of the World Cup's global media coverage which is reserved for "African content." Not only that, at the rate they are selling abroad, the trumpets may turn out to be South Africa's most distinctive export, and its most enduring contribution to football culture. Move over, songmakers of the Spion Kop, the storied Liverpool fan foundry that originated crowd chants! The low B flat drone of the vuvuzela seems destined to turn your rhymes to sonic dust.

Before you are tempted to join the chorus of contempt, consider what we can learn from the debate about the vuvuzela. The most virulent respondents have called for the horn to be banned from stadia (as it is from South Africa's own elite rugby citadel Newlands). Given the sordid history of banning African drums and other musical forms during colonial and slavery regimes, one might reasonably expect public figures from the global North to think twice before going down a similar road. But this has not restrained a range of commentators--from star players like Spain's Xabi Alonso to national sports officials like Japan Football Association president Motoaki Inukai--from voicing strong support for a ban. On the other hand, some efforts to defend the horn as a quintessential expression of Africa have been just as condescending. "I have always said that Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound," tweeted FIFA president Sepp Blatter, inviting the kind of cringe that often greets his offhand public comments.

More consequential was the response from Danny Jordaan, chief exec of South Africa's World Cup organizing committee, who fought for sixteen years to bring the tournament home. Explaining why he would have rather have had the stadia ringing with crowd chants, he observed: "In the days of the struggle [against apartheid] we were singing, all through our history it's our ability to sing that inspired and drove the emotions." Indeed, this is the backdrop to the anti-apartheid struggles that the world remembers, and it is still echoed in the international recognition accorded to distinctive sounds from South Africa such as the a cappella songs of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

If mellifluent choral phrasing is your standard for representing the nation, the vuvuzela's monotone is likely to be judged harshly. Indeed, those who have jumped to its defense as an instrument of music-making have run the risk of sounding risible. The horns, it has been argued, have the potential to be played in unison, either in support of a song or in a basic melody of their own, and are often used in call and response routines by coordinated fan groups. But, the argument continues, most of the ones used in the World Cup are being blown by foreigners who have no prior experience with them, and in any case, they are of such poor quality-Made in China-that they cannot be made to perform even by the most skillful practitioners.

For the majority of users, the vuvuzela is, first and foremost, a noisemaker, and in this respect, it resembles the traditional wooden rattle that provided a cacophonous, clacking soundtrack to British soccer matches for several decades after the First World War. This rattle had an indelible working-class association, and, as the game gentrified, was phased out in favor of more articulate crowd expressions. More recently, the thunderstick, of Korean provenance, came to global attention during the 2002 World Cup (hosted by Korea and Japan) and has been widely adopted by fans of American sports and by the corporations who brand the sticks. But the impact of the vuvuzela sound (often compared to an elephant in distress, or a megaswarm of angry bees) has reached much further, pushing fan noise beyond the point even of corporate acceptability. It has threatened to negate the visual slickness of the stadium billboard ads and to ruffle the corporate polish of the global TV operation, built around heroic ad spots which depict stars in Olympian profile, performing exploits that far outmatch what they can ever achieve on the actual field. Thus the BBC worked hard to design a "clean" feed that would strip out most of the crowd noise in its broadcasts.

With the home team's dismissal from the tournament in the opening group round, some of the rationale for the vuvuzela as the "12th man" of the home side fell away--the Johannesburg Star had promised that the din would "blow our opponents away, and turn other teams to jelly." But this turn of events has only served to redirect focus on the horn's impact toward the people whose consumer gratification is all but sacrosanct--the remote TV viewers, far from the vuvu-zeal of the stadium crowd, in the atomistic comfort of their homes.

Put more abstractly, the vuvuzela has become a blank cipher in an arena otherwise arranged for complete legibility--a baffling, and to many disturbing, intrusion on the management of their passions. And who or what is its energy source? The fans at these games are well-heeled enough to afford the pricey match tickets, and many of them hail from other continents, but in the global imagination, the sound of the vuvuzela is indelibly that of the African masses--issuing from the long, historical horn of their neglect, insistent now on being heard, and resigned to the knowledge that not being welcomed or understood may be their best shot at getting attention.

Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. His most recent book is Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times.

Listening to the World Cup

2010-07-10T01:40:31Z

With ESPN's broadcast of the World Cup's opening match, my fellow tweeters began to crack jokes about The Lion King. We imagined Rafiki calling the matches, or Mufasa, and half expected the referees to lift up the Jabulani to announce the arrival of the New Ball. Most folks simply observed, "I feel like I am watching The Lion King."

There is a good reason for this. The score used by ESPN to frame its coverage was written by Lisle Moore. The Utah composer gave us muscular music for a sporting event, upbeat music for a media event organized around putting us all in the mood to buy a shirt, a ball, or a Coke. Layered over the orchestral swells are the oddly familiar sounds of African voices, or, I should say, African-sounding voices. Africa is scored here as a noble landscape, peopled by a unified chorus, singing together in a harmonic convergence of tribal cultures.

"With the exception of the African choir," reports the Salt Lake Tribune, "all of the music is performed by Utah musicians." ("ESPN Turns to Utah for World Cup Music") The "African choir" lending this score a sense of location is actually made up with members of The Lion King's Broadway cast. The African-sounding choir from New York City was hired to sonically channel an idea of African authenticity keyed to the ears of ESPN's American audience. This is of course true of all scores produced by the World Cup broadcasting networks as they reach for music their imagined audience will understand. Without a doubt, we are hearing not African music but (to invoke philosopher Valentin Mudimbe) a musical "Idea of Africa."

In the mix of the music draped over the 2010 World Cup are more specific strains--the audible sound of a continent being ripped off. This is nowhere more obvious than "The Official 2010 FIFA World Cup (TM) Song," "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)," sung by Shakira and Freshlyground, a South African Afro-fusion band.

As pointed out by numerous bloggers, the global pop hit has a clear relationship to a Cameroonian military song, Zangaléwa, popularized by Golden Sounds in 1986. "Waka Waka" doesn't just borrow from "Zangaléwa" - listen to the two and you see that the chorus to "Waka Waka" is a direct use of "Zangaléwa."

First, Golden Sounds' 1986 hit (watch Golden Sounds' Youtube video for Zangaléwa).

And Shakira/Freshlyground (watch Shakira's Waka Waka Youtube video.)

In his article "Undermining African Intellectual and Artistic Rights: Shakira, Zangalewa and the World Cup Anthem," Dibussi Tande places this appropriation within a longer history of intellectual theft. He begins with perhaps the most infamous case of an international pop star absorbing the work of an African musician, Michael Jackson's use of a hit song by the Cameroonian makossa master, Manu Dibango. The words and melody of "Soul Makossa" provide the distinctive sound of Thriller's opening track. Dibango sued Jackson and won. Incredibly, given the topic here, Dibango's song was the B-side to Movement Ewondo, a song the artist composed for the 1972 African Cup of Nations (hosted by Cameroon and won by Congo-Brazzaville). It's a frenetic football score in which strings seems to scurry underneath Dibango's expressive and light-footed sax.

Jackson's appropriation of recognizable lyrics and melodies pales in comparison with what Shakira and Sony music pull off with "Waka Waka." Given their use of a song known to a generation of Cameroonians, it's surprising that they thought they could get away with it. (See WFMU's record of their efforts to figure out the song's genealogy.) But, of course, that is how entitlement works--you don't notice the theft of that which you feel is already yours.

Tande, a digital activist, points out that the origins of the song were only acknowledged by FIFA, Shakira, et al. in response to online activism by those who were horrified to see it stolen in this way. Under pressure from the Cameroonian musicians and their advocates, FIFA gingerly inserted a statement declaring that "Waka Waka" is a "remix" of the Golden Sounds hit. This appropriation of African music into a musical idea of Africa is a never-ending story. Tande reminds us that

for decades, African artists have had their works plagiarized by the West with little or no compensation or acknowledgment. The most memorable example of the theft of the intellectual rights of an African artist is that of Solomon Popoli Linda who in 1939 wrote the song "Mbube" and received 10 shillings (less than $US 2) for his efforts. The song which later became the pop hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight was reinterpreted by dozens of American artists without Linda or his family receiving a dime....he died penniless. In 1995, the Lion Sleeps Tonight earned an estimated $15 million dollars just for its use in the movie Lion King - a movie which has since grossed about 800 million USD worldwide. Linda's descendants sued Walt Disney for 1.5 million dollars with the full backing of the South African government. Disney settled for an undisclosed sum just as the trial was about to begin. (Scribbles from the Den)

This is not something the company is eager for its consumers to know--behind that feel-good African sound is the noise of the gear-works of colonial exploitation, turning.

Perhaps more interesting in terms of the spin an artist can put on the same song is K'naan's "Wavin Flag," now ubiquitous as the official song for Coca-Cola's 2010 World Cup advertising campaign, as well as the soundtrack for EA's game 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. The song began as rousing melody tracking fantasies of pre-colonial glory and postcolonial resistance:

So many wars, settling scores,
Bringing us promises, leaving us poor,
I heard them say, love is the way,
Love is the answer, that's what they say,
But look how they treat us,
Make us believers,
We fight their battles, then they deceive us,
Try to control us, they couldn't hold us
Cause we just move forward like Buffalo Soldiers.
But we struggling, fighting to eat
And we wondering, when we'll be free
So we patiently wait for that faithful day
It's not far away...

The song's chorus then repeats the following wistful thought, "when I get older I will be stronger/They'll call me freedom just like a wavin' flag/And then it goes back, and then it goes back, and then it goes back." While supported by anthem-like muscle, the song is hardly the sort of thing one imagines selling Coca-Cola and animated video games. All of the above lines were thus removed from the World Cup song. The refrain "And then it goes back, and then it goes back" remains, however, like a phantom limb. It describes the movement of a flag, literally, but without the context of the song's original words the phrase has lost its sense. For within the original lyrics, the refrain describes the movement of nationalist impulses toward and away from dreams of freedom. Those words promise both that "if we go forward, we also go back" and that power "goes back" to the people from whom it was stolen. We also have the very dense reference to Buffalo Soldiers--to all-black regiments in the US Army. These soldiers supported the federal government in the Indian Wars--the reference perhaps accidentally underscores the colonial twist embedded in that phrase "moving forward." Perhaps I over-read in K'Naan's lyrics a story about settler colonialism, but it does not seem like a stretch to say that in the story of his participation in its revision for (more) commercial use, we see something of the problem of the World Cup interface.

Mumbai-based writer Supriya Nair, in an intervention that nods to "Wavin' Flag" with its title "when I get older," warns liberal American pundits to check their impulses to read African teams an allegory for Africa itself:

Where you see models of correlation between dictators and football victories, others would see the run of play as the rest of the world knows it: of a history of possession dominated by those who wrote the rules, of enforced migrations and unwilling recruitments; of contests that we must always resist seeing as wars, because they are only fought - and won - on the field (Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils)

We would do well to listen other music, music not co-opted by the FIFA and its corporate tentacles. Nomadic Wax produced "World Cup," a 12 minute track in which sixteen emcees from Africa, Europe, and the Americas contribute 16 bars of lyrics speaking to and about the 2010 World Cup. The grimmest lines come from South African emcee Emile YX, who sums up the imperial relation between the FIFA that profits from the World Cup and the South Africa that pays for it:

The attention world gathers for the wrong reason
It's the long cold-hearted capitalist season
Where basic human freedoms violated for money
In the land of gold, we chase a gold cup, that's funny
Suddenly money changes "never & never again"
Never say never, the same money's running everything
Where Khoi & San bodies hung, impaled and battered
Is where they built the stadium & 4 billion got Blattered
But we'll foot the bill, just to foot their ball
On the graces of our ancestors, how can we stand tall?
Here Hegemony erases the memory of the San
And lands send players to get played by the man
This scams like 'Yes we can tans [Obama]' distracting nations
Subduing revolution with media mind occupation
When FIFA's moneymaking machine moves on
Has Africa finally the World's respect won?

Emile YX boils down a critique launched by activists and academics across the country (see World Cup Watch and Patrick Bond's slide show "A Political Economy of the 2010 World Cup.") As MCs toggle between bragging about their skills on the pitch and on the mike, between love for their national team and critical reads like the above, "World Cup" distills both the desire and the danger of looking for redemption in FIFA's tournament.

Perhaps no team bore the burden of redemptive hope more than Ghana. Cheery anthems abound in its stands. Ghana is home to "hiplife," a hybrid movement that combines the sounds of up-tempo Ghanaian highlife, hip hop, and pop. Ghanaian artists working in this genre regularly make use of Jama songs (football chants). In his 2006 survey of hiplife and World Cup music, Chale describes Jama as a form of "public music"--songs known, sung, and, in essence, "owned" by the Ghanaian public (Museke: home of the African music fan). Jama is woven throughout much hiplife, and hiplife feeds back into Jama as fans break into songs that have been recast by their favorite MCs and pop artists. Ghanaian musicians regularly produce new anthems for their national squad, called the Black Stars.

For the 2006 World Cup, the group G-Force produced a whole album celebrating the team (Faith in the Black Star). That year, an all-star lineup of hiplife musicians produced "Oseiye" as the Black Star's official theme song in the lead up to the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations (watch "All Stars" youtube video for "Oseiye"). In "Blackstar 2010," Trosky Blackman sings for the Ghanaian squad over a bouncy synth backdrop, the song coalescing in the familiar "Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé." (Listen to it here: http://ghanamixtapes.com/wordpress/?p=1854)

The genre migrates: London DJ Richy Pitch spent two years in Ghana and has produced a series of tracks with hiplife musicians including the amazing "Football Jama," which mixes the crowd noise, drumming, and whistles of fans with Jama football chants, and rapid-fire football-centered lyrics from UK artists Sway and M3NSA, who imagine life as the captain of the team and its fans. Kwabena Jones and the US-based MC M.anifest produced "Vuvuzela blackstars," yet another celebration of the cruelly eliminated squad, via an appreciation of the unpopular noise trumpet. M.anifest concludes that regardless of the results, "I know they heard us." Maybe.

Currently making the viral rounds is a comic dual, "African Vuvuzela vs Turkish Zurna," produced by the Turkish football fan site 90turk.com. Two stereotyped characters, one African and one Turkish, blow their horns--"Ali"'s Zurna appears hopelessly quaint, until wins a crowd of chanting Turkish football fans swarm around him with drums. Point taken, for the vuvuzela is removed from the world of "public music": the person who plants their lips on it has opted instead for the world of plastic noise. And so unfolds the debate over the authenticity of the vuvuzela as an African sound (as asserted by FIFA's Sepp Blatter). They are manufactured in China, andthe people in the stands of the World Cup don't represent South African football culture. It is unfair to reduce the whole of any fan culture to what has Elina Shatkin aptly described as a "glorified kazoo."

Vuvuzelas have been in US and Mexican stands for years,but in crowds much smaller than are packed into World Cup stadiums, which were scaled up from South Africa's existing, more reasonable facilities. 17,000 people, some with drums, some with vuvuzelas, some with trumpets, makes one kind of aural experience--a cacophony in which song and noise can wrestle playfully. Sounded by audiences of 70,000 or more, however, the vuvuzela is a nightmare, a wasp's nest of sonic anxiety, especially for networks broadcasting the tournament.

The vuvuzela does not communicate support, but affect itself--interest and anxiety, mostly. A team attacks at a tense moment in the match, and the volume goes up. The horns throb when it feels like something important might happen, when it feels like a team might go up or down. It communicates intensity--a sonically disorienting sense of hope and alarm.

Radio and television production of World Cup matches must ride these waves of sonic attack. Sound editors balance the imperative that they communicate the audience's volume (the aural effect of a packed stadium) with the need to create a watchable, listenable broadcast. The vuvuzela is the sound not of resistance, exactly, but of interference-- the noise of a multitude that refuses the desire to hear a pretty African song.

Nair, Supriya. "when i get older." Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils.

Tande, Dibussi. "Undermining African Intellectual and Artistic Rights." Scribbles from the Den.

Chale. "jama-osee, osee, black stars ei, forward ever!" Museke: home of the African music fan

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigblackbox/4760632538/in/photostream/

Jennifer Doyle is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minnesota, 2006) and the queer feminist soccer blog, From A Left Wing. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside and lives (and plays) in Los Angeles.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigblackbox/4760632538/in/photostream/

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World Cup Soccer: Enjoyment and Identification

2010-07-08T19:21:39Z

Football fans can be divided, somewhat crudely, into two categories: those attracted to the game for aesthetic gratification, and those whose fandom is rather driven by feelings of group solidarity. These categories are not mutually exclusive. A beautiful move acquires even greater beauty when performed by a player or team with whom one identifies; feelings of solidarity are emboldened when joined to rare artistry.

In my own life as a football supporter, my principal affinity is to the London club Arsenal. I am drawn to the club's commitment, in recent times, to playing attractive passing soccer, and to the cosmopolitan makeup and bearing of the team. But the depth of my identification is more the result of a year spent living in the North London neighborhood where Arsenal plays. On match days, I could hear the undulating cadence of the crowd from my front stoop. In the pub, I hugged random strangers after important goals.

My relationship to the football played in the World Cup is more detached, and more fluid. I hope, above all, for transcendent moments of skill or invention, and for drama. In synch with local sentiment, I have rooted for this World Cup, the first held in Africa, for an African team to advance far into the tournament. Ghana's "Black Stars" made it to the quarterfinals--becoming the third African side to reach that stage of the competition--before falling, in emotionally devastating fashion, on penalties to Uruguay. Asamoah Gyan, the team's star striker, acknowledged last week that Ghana carried the expectations of a continent: "We have made everybody proud, not only Ghana, but the whole of Africa." Where I watched Ghana's final match, at a bar in the Melville neighborhood of Johannesburg, the DJ began his post-match set with a brief Bob Marley medley--"No Woman, No Cry" transitioning to "Africa Unite"--which nicely captured the evening's layered mood. And from there the Kwaito party took off.

On 20 June, I visited Johannesburg's Soccer City stadium to witness Côte d'Ivoire's encounter with Brazil. My support lay with Côte d'Ivoire, who, though entering the tournament as Africa's greatest hope for glory, failed to make it out of a difficult group. The crowd inside Soccer City was a motley composition of divided or multiple loyalties--Holland shirts were paired with Brazil hats, Germany scarves with Brazil flags. "O jogo bonito" is universal cultural property; Brazil belongs to the world. The majority of the 85,000 people inside the ground--minus the pockets of mourning Côte d'Ivoire supporters--rejoiced as Elano, Robinho, and Luis Fabiano glided around the field with the ball as their tether.

In Brazil, football as enjoyment and football as identification are inextricably bound. To arouse the nation's affections, the team must not only win, but do so with style. The current Brazil side and its manager, the ex-player Dunga, have been criticized back home for their un-Brazilian approach. A rigidity of structure and emphasis on defensive discipline, the critique goes, has blunted creative energies both individual and collective--has alienated, in other words, the essence of Brazilian football culture. This critique will only grow louder given Brazil's early exit from the tournament, after a frankly shambolic performance against Holland in the quarterfinals.

The history of samba-futebol can be traced to the 1930s, when Brazil first brought its radical, playful version of the game to the world stage. "The Brazilians," Gilberto Freyre observed, "play football as if it is a dance." In 1958, a young player named Pelé captivated the world's imagination as Brazil won its first World Cup title. In 1970 Brazil triumphed for a third time, reaching in the process an exalted aesthetic height that remains a footballing ideal.

The universal, Hegel taught, is found in the particular. The football sides that resonate on a planetary, and not just national, scale gesture beyond themselves even as they enact their own singularity. Brazilian football, at its best, is that most precious of things: an expression of national identity that inspires global consciousness. The World Cup is likewise at its best when it occasions such a leap--from identification with the familiar and the past, to identification with the foreign and the yet to come.

Will this World Cup engender such utopian feeling? That depends on where you stand. As yet, despite myriad moments of brilliance, no team or player has conjured anything that might incite global reverence. In any event, we would do well to remember the British historian Tony Mason's sage, if plaintive, words: "Football may indeed be a passion rather than a pleasure and may be better than nothing but it is certainly not enough."

Read Eli Jelly-Shapiro's complete coverage of the World Cup 2010 here:

The World Cup: Will South Africa Shine?

The World Cup II: Bafana Bafana

The World Cup III: In the Stadium's Shadow

Image: Brazil versus Portugal World Cup Match in Durban, South Africa. Photo by Kwame Nyong'o.

Africa's World Cup?

2010-07-08T01:21:32Z

On the eve of Ghana's fateful loss to Uruguay in the quarterfinals, South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, declared them the Black Stars of Africa. Locals joined their compatriots across the continent in willing the Black Stars on. When Uruguayan gamesmanship prevailed in the end, the disappointment seemed genuine. Even Nelson Mandela sent "a message of condolence" to Asamoah Gyan, the Ghana forward, who missed the dramatic penalty at the end of extra time. (Ghana eventually lost on penalties.) 

But that momentary continental unity masks more sinister developments at play in South Africa.

  I was in South Africa for the first week or so of the tournament and one thing that struck me, apart from the fickleness of South African fans in supporting their own national team when its down, was the cold reception for African teams. I can only speak for Cape Town where I traveled to see some first round matches--I scored tickets to 3 matches in the end--but friends and contacts confirmed my observations.In the earlier rounds local fans cared little for continental teams, including Ghana, opting to support the "traditional powerhouse" teams instead. By that I mean the stronger European sides like Germany, France, and Italy with records of success in the World Cup, oreven weaker, over-hyped sides, like England. The same was true for Argentina and Brazil.  

You could argue that local fans--who make up the bulk of those at stadiums--were just being realistic. (Confession: I favored Brazil and Argentina to win the whole thing.) But these loyalties are also a function of television (the English Premier League and European Champions League dominate football broadcasts on local TV) or due to the poor organization of the continental leagues (with the exception of Egypt, Tunisia, and perhaps South Africa, national leagues on the continent are quite weak, players are badly paid, stadiums are dilapidated, and the quality of refereeing is way below even the World Cup standards.) I find no problem with those explanations. 

But I think there are other, more compelling explanations. South Africans are uncomfortable about their continental identity, the "Ghana revenge" moment notwithstanding. As an acquaintance probed: "Do [South Africans] think they belong elsewhere and just happen to be in the wrong continent?"I can't count how many odd looks I got for variously wearing a Ghana or Cameroon beanie hat or jacket in a mall, or for wearing my Algeria scarf to the latter's game with England. Finding paraphernalia of any other African team apart from South Africa proved quite a mission.

  A Cape Town-based writer, in an email to me, suggested a reason for this: 

I perceive an indifference to African [football] stars for certain. I see more Ronaldinho jerseys [Ronaldinho was not even in Brazil's World Cup squad] than I see [Samuel] Eto'o ones and while I do see a fair amount of support for the big powers, its Brazil overwhelmingly. I perceive a color dimension to it as well as a tendency of the poor to support winners. I suspect the idea of brown skinned creolized Brazilians (although many of the current team are dark skinned) is appealing to brown skinned South Africans [he is referring to coloureds] that feel only a tenuous connection to Africa.

  Ekapa, a regular commenter on my blog, Africa is a Country, wrote to me about his recent travels to Johannesburg. He noted the annoyance of middle class black and white South Africans with the idea that this was "Africa's World Cup," despite the fact that this was the basis on which FIFA awarded the competition to South Africa.

 Second, and perhaps more sinister, are the high levels of xenophobia against other Africans displayed by South Africans. Nigerians especially come in for the bulk of the abuse.But what was shocking was the persistent rumors I heard of threatened attacks on African migrants once the World Cup is over. These have been given credence by news reports, the Nelson Mandela Foundation's recent statement, and Desmond Tutu's decision to publicly condemn such potential violence. In some shack settlements armed police have already been deployed to monitor tensions between locals and migrants.Such anxieties are not unfounded. In a frenzy of violence in May 2008 in shack dweller communities and poor black townships around South Africa at least 70 people were murdered and about 100,000 left homeless when locals attacked anyone they perceived of being a foreigner.  

Two examples from my trip: My brother told me colleagues at the suburban factory where he works in Cape Town openly talk about planned attacks against non-South African black Africans once the World Cup is over. When he challenged them about this, they showed no shame.

Likewise, a friend, an anthropologist doing research with Angolan migrants in Cape Town, told me of a number of instances where plans to attack foreigners were discussed--in one case, prompting a series of meetings by refugee/migrant representatives and local community leaders to discuss how best to respond to these threats. In another case, one of the anthropologist's interviewees was told to her face that "we'll get you after the World Cup."

Ekapa also wrote: that I "in the working class and poor suburb of Alexandria [located next to South Africa's richest suburb, Sandton] I heard a lot of resentment expressed about how Nigerian and Zimbabwean hawkers were benefiting from an event that was put on using South African money." Locals spoke of how African migrants were using the World Cup to "stay on after the games were over."

"I overhead several conversations where the speakers felt that they needed to make it clear that after the World Cup was over foreigners from Africa - makwerekwere or 'Nigerians' as migrants are invariably called - were not welcome to stay."

Ekapa concluded:

"... I'm afraid the post World Cup 'morning after' may not be pretty. The event was sold as an occasion that would benefit South Africa economically and in terms of how the world perceives it. No economic benefits have materialized, particularly for the poor and working class, and judging from the World Cup [TV commercials] and the non-football writing [in local newspapers] there hasn't been much of a shift in perception [about African immigrants and refugees]. The party is glamorous and successful but in its aftermath the hard and drab everydayness of life may even seem more depressing and unleash the demons that haunt us all."

  Let's hope this is all just a rumor.

Sean Jacobs, born in South Africa, teaches international affairs at

the New School in Manhattan. He blogs at Africa is a Country.

Photo by Kwame Nyong'o

A Political Economy of the World Cup in South Africa, 6 Red Cards for FIFA

2010-07-04T17:47:10Z

Click here to download a .pdf of Patrick Bond's presentation.

The Utopian in the Everyday

2010-06-25T19:07:24Z

As I sat down to write these comments, I found myself thinking of another time and place, over ten years ago, when I initially encountered José Muñoz's first book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Upon reading the book I felt an immediate sense of queer intellectual kinship, and was struck by how resonant it was with the concerns that were animating my own project on queer diaspora. Indeed, reading Disidentifications at that critical juncture in my own intellectual trajectory emboldened me: it affirmed for me the kind of queer scholarship I wanted to produce. In both Cruising Utopia and Disidentifications, Muñoz traces his queer theoretical genealogy through sources as varied as women-of-color feminism on the one hand, and a certain tradition of Marxian thought on the other. He cruises theory, moving seamlessly from Anzaldúa and Alarcón to Ernst Bloch, CLR James, Adorno, Derrida and Raymond Williams, those figures in leftist thought whose work is not typically mined within queer scholarship. Similarly if we trace the genealogy of what has now come to be known as queer of color and queer diasporic critique, Muñoz's work--with its insistence on the endlessly imaginative modes of being that emerge within queer, and particularly queer of color, subcultures--stands as a crucial milestone. Muñoz's first book gave many of us a sense that we were engaged in a collective enterprise that could radically transform the white normativity of certain strands of queer studies; Muñoz's second book powerfully signals that this transformation has (for the most part at least) come to pass, thanks in large measure to the impact of his work.

My own book, Impossible Desires, opens with an evocation of the Zapatista rallying cry, "Demand the impossible." For me, this call resonated with the ways in which queer South Asian communities in the diaspora were in fact daring to imagine other modes of belonging and affiliation outside of those based on the killing heteronormative logics of both dominant nationalist and diasporic discourses. In theorizing impossibility, I found tremendous sustenance in Muñoz's first book, and we can see in Disidentifications an intimation of the insights that he expands upon with great force in Cruising Utopia. In Disidentifications, he writes, "disidentificatory performances and readings require an active kernel of utopian possibility. Although utopianism has become the bad object of much contemporary political thinking, we nonetheless need to hold on to and even risk utopianism if we are to engage in the labor of making a queer world" (25).

It is precisely this risk that Muñoz takes, boldly and convincingly, in Cruising Utopia. Here Muñoz gives us a gorgeous, moving love song to queer sociality and the queer/punk/of color subcultures of the city. Cruising Utopia challenges us to move beyond the grim diagnoses of the dominant that characterize some forms of contemporary queer scholarship (what Eve Sedgwick would call paranoid reading practices), and instead to identify the utopian in the everyday. Muñoz points to the existence, however fleeting and ephemeral, of alternatives to the deadening strictures of straight time. These alternatives are evident all around us if only we access a queer-sighted vision that brings them into focus; they are on the stage and the street, as he puts it, in the gay Latino club in Queens, in the delicate and fierce gestures of Kevin Aviance, in queer art and poetry, and in the memory of gay public sex. In his readings of Andy Warhol's coke bottle and Frank O'Hara's poem "Having a Coke with You," Muñoz writes that "both queer cultural workers are able to detect an opening and indeterminacy in what for many people is a locked-down dead commodity" (9). Likewise, it is precisely such an opening that we as readers are able to glean through Muñoz's work: through his critical vision we access that sense of astonishment in the everyday, as we see both the gray urban landscape and indeed our own lives anew, filled with the always deferred potentiality that he names as queerness.

In thinking about the continuities between Disidentifications and Cruising Utopia, I am particularly struck by, first, the work and force of the autobiographical in both texts, and secondly, by Muñoz's construction of his archive. Let's start with the place of autobiography in Muñoz's work. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz writes that he uses his own personal experience to "ground historical queer sites as lived experience." He continues, "My intention...is not simply to wax anecdotally but, instead, to reach for other modes of associative argumentation and evidencing" (3-4). The turn to the autobiographical, then, becomes a kind of critical methodology that enables Muñoz to trace the resonances between seemingly disparate texts, those that appear to be discreet in terms of both time and place. The moments of autobiography in his work are also the ones that I find at once most moving and theoretically rich. Both Disidentifications and Cruising Utopia conjure forth the ghosts of the queer children we once were: we see the 11 year old Marga Gomez watching "lady homosexuals" on TV with her mother, and the young James Baldwin entranced by Bette Davis at a Saturday afternoon matinee. But most of all we see Muñoz himself, as a five year old "spy in the house of gender normativity"(68) in South Florida in the 1970s; or Muñoz as a punk kid sitting in a parking lot with his best friend Tony, parsing the lyrics to his favorite songs and imagining a future far removed from the dead-end path of gender and sexual normativity. The queer, and particularly queer of color, childhoods evoked in Muñoz's work thus powerfully counteract the "anti-relational thesis" put forth most famously by Lee Edelman in No Future. As Muñoz writes, "the future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity." Muñoz adamantly refuses to cede all desires and articulations of futurity to "normative white reproductive futurity"; instead he lays claim to futurity on behalf of those for whom it is systematically denied.

The turn to the autobiographical in Muñoz's work speaks to his construction of an alternative archive that is adequate to capturing the texture and richness of queer lives and relationality. This archive is one that, for instance, allows us to read John Giorno's memoir of anonymous sex in the Prince Street subway toilet as an instance of what Muñoz calls queer utopian memory: such remembrances "do the work of letting us critique the present, to see beyond its 'what is' to worlds of political possibility, of 'what might be'" (38). The archive that Muñoz gives us is also one that is determined by the queer intimacies that inform his own life: writing about the work of his friends and intimates speaks to his commitment to an ethics of queer collaboration, one that enacts precisely the webs of relationality and collectivity that he identifies in the queer art and performance practices he theorizes.

Muñoz's final chapter is aptly entitled "Take Ecstasy With Me": the title comes from a Magnetic Fields song that Muñoz reads as articulating "a certain kind of longing for a something else ... a request to step out of the here and now of straight time"(185, 186). As readers we happily accept Muñoz's invitation to take ecstasy with him, and eagerly follow him as he points the way to another, brighter, more expansive world.

Fuller, Vaster, Brighter

2010-06-25T02:03:32Z

For those of you who are concerned about the so-called "Gay Agenda," have no fear. The agenda is alive and well and its chief strategist is usually located in a bunker in the compound known as Washington Square Village. In fact, you'd probably all be welcome there, as long as you show up with a thermos of specialty cocktail and some kind of themed salad.

As his beautiful book makes abundantly clear, José is on a mission to change the world, or at least to imagine (I'm quoting) "a place and time... fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter." That's not to say perfect. Although he's a utopian thinker, it's hard to imagine José being content in a place where one couldn't enjoy the intense pleasure of grousing about the here and now. That's part of the point.

I often advise students to devise research projects which will necessitate their being in the places in the world they want to inhabit. My dissertation required extended "research" periods in Paris and Bahia. José's tactic is arguably smarter still: over the years, he's organized his research around the kind of people he wants to have over to the bunker for specialty cocktails and themed salad -- people who at least temporarily make the world appear fuller, vaster, more sensual, brighter.

Others will address the ramifications of this project in relation to particular political and aesthetic formations, but I'm here to represent one anti-disciplinary context within which we might think about this book: that is, the strange and wonderful little world of Performance Studies. My account will privilege personal narrative perhaps at the expense of a more sustained theoretical elaboration. A truly worthy tribute to Cruising Utopia would manage to keep both those plates spinning. José's is a book which sustains rigor even as it occasionally indulges in the anecdotal. In our strange little world we sometimes refer to this as "performative writing." In more mundane terms, I can simply tell you that hanging around with performance artists can sometimes remind you that people enjoy hearing dirt.

So here is some. Some sixteen years ago, when I was teaching in the English Department at Princeton, I didn't even know that the field of "Performance Studies" existed. One of my colleagues there mentioned something about the journal Women & Performance, and I sent them an article I'd written. May Joseph wrote me back a warm message, and she happened to mention something about a job opening, and something else about her colleague, José Muñoz, whom I'd met through a mutual friend at Duke a couple of years before.

One thing led to another, and I ended up in the lap of luxury, at 721 Broadway, 6th floor, where Richard Schechner, the gray eminence and founder of the field, assumed the lotus position at our faculty meetings. This was a change from Princeton. And Schechner wasn't the only quirkster -- it turned out the whole faculty was composed of characters. But there was a dirty little secret on the 6th floor of 721 Broadway. Despite our turn away from stodgy accounts of dramatic literature, despite our privileging of life and body, the oozy, gooey body, the body without organs, it turned out we were almost all trained in textual analysis: we were a bunch of not-so-closeted close readers of poetry.

This is one of the apparent internal contradictions of the utopian collective project of Performance Studies, and it's manifested very touchingly in Cruising Utopia, a work that unabashedly hearts poetry, and which takes extravagant pleasure in Frank O'Hara and Elizabeth Bishop. José's reading of Bishop's paean to Marianne Moore in the closing pages (with its explicit comparison to a trip on ecstasy) gives me goose bumps each time I read it. He uncovers the queer fugitive exuberance in a poetic voice that is sometimes characterized as having a particularly Northern chill. Some people find Bishop a little uptight.

José himself can, on occasion, surprise you with his propriety. When I arrived in Performance Studies, I understood my new, seemingly limitless curricular possibilities through a course he was teaching, which he references in his book. It was called "Sex in Public." And he was taking his class on field trips! (This was another "Dorothy, you're not in Princeton anymore" moment.) But despite his seemingly outlandish pedagogical projects, it was surprisingly easy to shock him. When, emboldened, I gave a coy reading of my own dirty poems, he remarked (as he is wont to do), "I clutched my pearls." He's also been known to plead earnestly with our MA students as they plan their "performative" final presentations, "Please, no naked!"

While he's suspicious of a too-simple celebration of the liberatory potential of "baring it all," he's also, as I pointed out in regard to his deep love of Bishop's poetry, anxious to find the radical potential in writers sometimes dismissed as limited or flawed in their radical politics. In Cruising Utopia, the most interesting case is his embrace of the utopian theorist Ernst Bloch, who he notes has been scrutinized for his sometimes disappointing sexual politics.

The colloquial description of this kind of theoretical recuperation of a partially flawed figure is: "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater." It's an attitude that marks the political and theoretical positions of a number of my colleagues, and it indicates both a keen sense of strategic political savvy and a genuine generosity of spirit that makes Performance Studies feel like a space of hope.

If there were a baby José might at least claim to want to throw out with the bathwater, it would, in fact, be the literal baby in the bathwater -- or more to the point, the baby in the Maclaren stroller. The insidious privileged child as the sign of futurity, the fruit of a bourgeois family ideal, is frequently skewered in José's critiques both academic and casual. But his bark is worse than his bite, and in truth, one of my fondest memories of him has him steering my then-toddler, Leo, in a stroller to his radical left-wing hippie pre-school. It was shortly after my arrival, in 1995, and, due to some suitably tawdry incident, I was unable to take Leo to school myself, so I called on my stalwart colleague. After the customary clutching of the pearls, José cheerfully helped out, and so began a kind of familial restructuring for both Leo and myself. When the now mannish Leo recently unveiled his freaky new Henry Darger tattoo, José proudly claimed, "He was raised by the Department of Performance Studies," and indeed, that's true.

But futurity is not riding like an army of coddled toddlers in their Maclaren strollers. It's our new way, as we continue to imagine new ways of finding ecstasy, of beckoning one another: please come flying. José, thank you for the specialty cocktails and the weird salads, thank you for the beautiful book, and most of all, thank you for the flight plan.

Perhaps Maurice Chevalier said it best...

If the nightingales could sing like you

They'd sing much sweeter than they do

For you brought a new kind of love to me.

If the sandman brought me dreams of you

I'd want to sleep my whole life through

For you brought a new kind of love to me.

I know that you're the queen, I'm the slave,

Yet you will understand

That underneath it all, you're a maid,

And I am only a man.

I would work and slave the whole day through

If I could hurry home to you

For you brought a new kind of love to me.

"Good as Yesterday"'s Queer Futurity: Muñoz with Muñoze

2010-06-23T14:43:51Z

My title plays with as it traces a number of imbedded citations. First it conjoins the titles of the two texts that will concern, and, in their conjunction, provoke, me here . One echoes the title of José Esteban Muñoz's disarmingly lovely new book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity. The other names an extraordinary short story by the queer Chicano fiction writer Manuel Muñoz, a story which appears in his Zigzagger collection . The uncanny if superficial coincidence of these writers' surnames, their having inherited an identical patronymic signifier (there is in addition an echoing punning of apellido and appellation that I'm resisting here), allows me to exploit a certain opportunity to pervert the logics of familiarity and formality, of kinship and strangeness, of intimacy and anonymity, by referring to the two of them by their first names, respectively and respectfully, José and Manuel, even though I can only claim to know one of them, José, intimately and well, and the other, Manuel, not at all.

Moreover, the conjoining phrase that follows the inevitable colon as subtitle to these remarks in its turn bears explanation: "Muñoz with Muñoz" directly mimes the construction of Jacques Lacan's noted essay "Kant avec Sade," perhaps the psychoanalytic theorist's signature attempt to think philosophy and literature, ethics and aesthetics, together. Through Lacan I hope also to invoke another signature attempt to think literature and philosophy together, Jacques Derrida's still-resonant, tolling and ex-tolling Glas, his interminably columnar dialectic pitting Genet against, and putting him right next to, a decidedly Derridean Hegel. I'll also insist here on making explicit my own turn away from a clearly German/French inter-national dialectic imbedded in the homo-intellectual pairings of Kant with Sade, or Hegel "with" Genet, towards an alternative pairing, this time a trans- rather than inter-national, and in addition trans-diasporic, coupling, Mexican- now "with" Cuban-(American). Finally, pushing as hard as I can on everyone's patience, I'll insist on the perversion of the conceptual logics of ethnicity and sexuality, a dialectic coupling that I stage here as queer with queer, and brown on brown.

First, for philosophy. Cruising Utopia stands here, as Kant's work did for Lacan and Hegel's for Derrida, as one pole in a conceptual force field, the anchoring, orienting ground for a critical-philosophical dynamism that refuses the dispiriting refusal of, on the one hand, an ascendant "queer" critical nihilism that apparently wants to abandon the political as such in the service of its supposedly polemical critique of one admittedly hegemonic iteration of the social, and, on the other, of an activist pragmatism that embraces an easy, assimilating politics of conciliation in order to claim a stable if uncomfortable toe-hold on the forbidding cliff face of that hegemonic iteration of that version of that social. José enlists the support of a bracing genealogy of philosophical and theoretical precursors in the exquisite elaboration of his own critical intervention, one that can begin in a German idealism traveling from Kant and Hegel down a difficult Heideggerean track, then picking up a healthy and varied dose of twentieth-century Frankfurt School critical materialism, thanks to Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and most notably Ernst Bloch, who, José tells us, "found solid grounds for a critique of a totalizing and naturalizing idea of the present in his concept of the no-longer-conscious," which in turn enables for all of us the deployment of a productively, generously "critical hermeneutics attuned to comprehending the not-yet-here"(12). It is in the modality and tempo of the not-yet-here that José's own (great) work begins: "Queerness is not," he tells us, "yet here." And "we," even and perhaps especially the "we" who claim it, here and now, willingly and passionately, "are" ourselves "not yet . . . "(1). Not yet what? Well, queer, for one thing: "We may never touch queerness," José admonishes us, "but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer yet queerness exists for us," we learn, "as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future," now, "is queerness's domain"(1).

Cruising Utopia opens in full song, in a complex contrapuntal (Cuban?) chant, equal parts poetry and counterpolemic, in order to usher in a crowd, a choreographic mass of often queer interlocutors as likely to come from a literary (O'Hara, Schuyler, Myles) as from a critical-philosophical (beyond the Germans, and perhaps too briefly: Butler, Felman, Sedgwick) tradition, as from the worlds of art, pop, and performance. I love that Cruising Utopia can so fully indulge its critical and philosophical predilections in the lush bosom(s) of what we can generally call, as José does, "the aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic," which, he tells us, "frequently contains blueprints and schemata for a forward-dawning futurity" that, in turn, "map[s]" by imagining what we can possibly see, let alone know, here, and now, of "future social relations"(1).

And now, for literature: except, not now, since we've already arrived in, and at, the literary, and even in its more ample bosoming, in the aesthetic, without having departed (much) from the first page, which is also the first paragraph, of an introduction entitled "Feeling Utopia." But as that paragraph invites any movement away from its "now," from the "prison house" of any given "here" and "now" that will insist on its standing for all time(s) and all place(s), I want to move back from it, back far enough into a fairly recent past, to a 2003 that saw the appearance in print of Manuel's Zigzagger, a collection of short stories in the mode of a narrative and literary fiction, a mode that might in some contexts appear to relinquish a certain claim to any queerness, even a literary queerness, for some part of its effect as aesthetic performance. This is, as Jack Halberstam would caution us, no movement we can accomplish in "straight" time. But it will carry us, if we allow it, if we abandon ourselves to it, into the scene of a quite fecund textual coupling: of Muñoz with Muñoz. And with the use of a now-excavated Blochian "critical hermeneutics attuned," we can newly insist on " comprehending the not-yet-here." So we zigzag back from Cruising Utopia's 2010 through the 1950s of Bloch's Principle of Hope, back up to Zigzagger's 2003 to a story in the collection that promises in its title to tell us something about what might still be "Good as Yesterday."

Briefly, then: Manuel Muñoz's story involves Vero, a twenty-year-old woman who shepherds Nicky, her queer sixteen-year-old brother, to his weekly visits with Julián, a man Vero's age and whom Vero's sort of fucked, who is doing short time in a county detention center for, of all things, unpaid tickets for past moving violations. Vero and Nicky still live with their parents in one of the many small, working- and migrant-class rural towns that litter California's great Central Valley and that as settings dominate Manuel's early fiction. The parents, never named, remain married for no better reason than a habituated despair, and have forfeited (to Vero) any responsibility for raising their son, in part out of their own deepening estrangement, but also out of their dawning realization of their son's queerness, and of his intensifying attachment to a man like Julián.

Manuel holds his third-person narration closely tethered to Vero's take on the world. She literally drives the narrative even as she drives her little brother--in the aging Chevy Impala that was once but is no longer her father's proud possession--on his hopeful Sunday visits to the county facility that holds the older man he thinks he loves. Manuel's narrative therefore hinges on the most incongruous of affective economies: Vero's willing embrace of her own humiliation in conceding to her queer little brother any claim she herself had had to Julián, a sublime masochism that never avails itself of the predictable explanatory rubric of a pseudo-maternity founded on self-sacrifice and martyrdom. Manuel never allows us to doubt Vero's own subjective and affective viability, even as he refuses his reader any easy or conventionally sentimental account of that viability. Vero, whose name probably shortens Verónica and thereby simultaneously forestalls an obvious scriptural allusion and invokes a queer "truth" foreign to both English and Spanish, thus serves Manuel well as a vehicle for a performance of a hermeneutic that is at least doubly critical, and hopeful, and queer.

Here she is reading Nicky through what she observes of the sealed greeting cards he brings to the detention center as gifts for Julián: "She can," Manuel tells us, "read Nicky's pretty writing. Julián, and Mi Amor, and Siempre Nicolás, and the intricate hearts he has sketched on the back flaps, brooding and pulsing fleshy hearts with blood dripping like sweat"(123).

These pathetic adolescent offerings bring us, I want to suggest, close to an imaginative manifestation of what José tells us Bloch saw as the critical, anti-canonical aesthetic of the "ornamental" and the "quotidian," and in whose childish, hopeful tracings a queerly loving older sister might recognize her queer little brother's own heart in all its brooding, pulsing, fleshy "intricacy."

Vero's queer love for Nicky sinks, however, into an even deeper, more difficult yet transportive intimacy: Manuel's narrator has Vero remember for us how she first "met Julián at a party" and how "he had invited her to the back yard where there was no light and she had let him come inside of her leg" (124). A bit later readers get the added detail that Julián "had put one, then two fingers in her, and she had let him" (133). Right after that we learn that whatever embarrassment she feels for herself only deepens, through her profound affective attachment to Nicky, an embarrassment she feels for Nicky when she imagines "what Julián and her brother did at the drive-in" and "Julián coming on the inside of her brother's thigh . . . one finger, then two"(133).

I want to suggest that in Vero's veraciously and voraciously queer, and queerly kinned, attachment to her little brother we can glimpse something of a queerness-to-come that is a not-yet-queer in the not-yet-here that José sees, and that he shows us, shining from a proto-Blochian future, from, as he puts it, "the anticipatory illumination of the utopian canceling the relentless shadow play of the absence and presence on which the antirelational thesis rests" (15). That thesis has nothing to say to, and no way to imagine, let alone think, the kinds of registers of the affective that produce the ties, and the bonds that Vero's fierce love for her Nicky allows us, and invites us, to see, and to know, and to reach, and to make. That thesis refuses to allow the possibility that precisely such a self-destroying, ecstatic pleasure as might ensue from that insertion of "one finger, then two" into so rich a variety of places in so rich a variety of bodies might engender the very conditions for an alternative symbolic upon which an alternative socius might find so much stable ground, and any number of viable homes.

"Good as Yesterday" gets its title from a phrase ("You're only as good as yesterday!") scrawled on a poster of Golden Age Hollywood divas in a coffee shop in Fresno where Vero sometimes takes her little brother (137). It is "a coffee shop," we learn, where boys like Nicky "hang out smoking cigarettes and holding their right elbows as they blow smoke into the hot night air " (137). Vero watches them as they "stand around and look pretty . . . teasing each other, acting like girls, . . . their sculpted hair glimmering in the coffee shop light" (137). I wonder, though, if in "straight" Vero's own cruising of the queer boys in the coffee shop, and in her perception of a "sculpted" glimmer shining off their dark hair, we ourselves might discover an expressive, imagined example of what José encourages his readers to look for when he asks us "to cruise the fields of the visual and not so visual in an effort to see ... anticipatory illumination of the utopian" (18). I also wonder how much this coffee shop in Fresno has in common with other queer-provisional, "threshold" or "border" sites where José's work would have us cruising, such as the Los Angeles club spaces photographed by Kevin McCarty, spaces where, in José's words, queer and punk kids could "imagine a time and place where their desires are not toxic." (105)

The threshold where a story like "Good as Yesterday" both meets and envisions its own queer futurity feels like a comfortable place to suspend these remarks. Here, where one encounter between literature and philosophy, and another between aesthetics and politics, and perhaps a third between history and imagination, can all offer us the gift of a hope in a future where queerness might live and thrive, we might in turn begin to think a new "now," one that refuses to concede any ground to all prevailing and dominant versions of the present that claim to or insist on standing in for all possible versions of our present, and our presence, now, and later. Let's not, therefore, concede our own "here" and "now" to anyone else's. But let's also not exclusively translate how we'd like our "here and now" to feel, and to work, into a "there and then" that might offer it some provisional protection. Cruising Utopia, for all of its rhetorical insistence on that bracing futurity, also, and through the performative force of its own not-yet-conscious wish, offers us back the gift of a newly imaginable, a newly knowable, here and now. It is a gift given us by José in two beautifully critical registers, a mostly explicit hope, and an entirely implicit, but always emphatic, grace.

Note: Ricardo Ortíz thanks his colleague Richard T. Rodríguez for introducing him to Manuel Muñoz's literary work.