Pan-Africanism and the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa

Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Development Southern Africa, 2011, vol. 28, issue 3, 401-413

Abstract: This article explores how South Africa's 2010 hosting of the FIFA World Cup became an occasion to try to deepen nationalism and pan-Africanism in the midst of contending discourses that emphasised the economic and developmental meaning of the mega-event. The article uses Michael Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’ in combination with the Essex discourse approach to make sense of competing perspectives on the meanings of the World Cup. Its central thesis is that this meaning cannot be understood outside a history of a society emerging from apartheid oppression and racism and aspiring to be a nation and a developed state. The discourse approach makes it possible to read the World Cup as a social and political construction and assists in understanding different subject positions that human agents take up in order to make sense of the event within a society whose national cohesiveness is fragile.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0376835X.2011.595996 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:deveza:v:28:y:2011:i:3:p:401-413

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CDSA20

DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2011.595996

Access Statistics for this article

Development Southern Africa is currently edited by Marie Kirsten

More articles in Development Southern Africa from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().