The Cultural Politics of Post-9/11 American Sport: Power, Pedagogy and the Popular

Alongside the glib treatment of 9/11 in popular culture in television shows such as 24 or films like United 93 , it has become 'normalised' for the kick off of the National Football League to be presented live from the national monument in Washington; for ESPN to present Sportscenter live from Camp Arifjan, Kuwait; for the Olympic coverage of Iraq's first soccer game to be framed through a US 'liberation' narrative; or for para-military fitness instructors to publicly refine the bodies of the obese on The Biggest Loser . In this book, Silk critically interrogates these mediated sport spectacles, arguing that events such as the Super Bowl, the Olympic Games, and the Little League World Series appropriate and mobilise US corporo-political needs, opining a myopic expression of American jingoism, international and domestic war cries, militarism and geo-political domination. The book thus uncovers how political, economic and military trajectories in the post 9/11 era have been normalized, reduced to the affective realm of popular culture, and nurtured and expressed in, and through, commercial media sporting spectacles.