Princeton University Press
Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture
Key Metrics
- Andrei S Markovits
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691162034
- 9.2 X 6 X 1 inches
- 1.2 pounds
- Social Science > Popular Culture
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
The globalizing influence of professional sports
Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice.
Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global--and globalizing--sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones.
Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.
Author Bio
Andrei Markovits is currently an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies in the Political Science Department. He is the author and editor of many books, scholarly articles, conference papers, book reviews and newspaper contributions in English and many foreign languages on topics as varied as German and Austrian politics, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, social democracy, social movements, the European right and the European left.
Markovits has also worked extensively on comparative sports culture in Europe and North America. His latest book is Sportista: Female Fandom in the United States, co-authored with Emily Albertson. (Temple University Press, 2012). The typical female sports fan remains very different from her male counterparts. In Sportista, Andrei S. Markovits and Emily Albertson examine the significant ways many women have become fully conversant with sports—acquiring a knowledge of and passion for them as a way of forging identities that until recently were quite alien to women.
Sportista chronicles the relationship that women have developed with sports in the wake of the second wave of feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The changes women athletes have achieved have been nothing short of revolutionary. But, as Markovits and Albertson argue, women’s identity as sports fans, though also changed in recent decades, remains notably different from that of men. Sportista highlights the impediments to these changes that women have faced and the reality that, even as bona fide fans, they “speak” sports differently from and remain largely unaccepted by men.
Professor Markovits is also the recipient of the Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse, the Cross of the Order of Merit, First Class, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Federal Republic of Germany on a civilian, German or foreign. It was awarded on behalf of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany by the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Chicago in March 2012.
Source: University of Michigan
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