The African American Athlete (Commodity, Image, and Narrative)

Item

Title

The African American Athlete (Commodity, Image, and Narrative)

Description

African American athletes occupy various social and cultural spaces within American imagination. Our research explores careers and configurations of African American athletes drawn from American sports. Identifying patterns that cast African American athletes as freedom fighters, angry brutes, buffoons, we contextualize spaces African American sporting figures claim within the United States and beyond. These patterns are original categories created by the students themselves with some categories in relation to theoretical works by other scholars. Some of these scholars that will be discussed include Thabiti Lewis, David L. Andrews, Rob Ruck, Leola Johnson and David Roediger. Students from the American Studies capstone course will summarize their individual projects and discuss their interdisciplinary explorations of the construction, commodification, and representation of African American athletes in the United States. There will be an in depth look into the African American athlete's reflection on society as well as American culture as whole. These impacts will show a change over time and the evolution of the role of the African American athlete. Figures such as Bill Russell, Jackie Robinson, Michael Jordan, the University of Michigan's Fab Five and others will be examined throughout the student's work. The student's research will explore the ways in which African Americans have been marked, marketed, and remarked upon within their roles as athletes. African American contributions to the social and political discourse concerning race, identity, and opportunity in the United States will underscore these student research projects.

Michael Antonucci

Contributor

Keene State College

Creator

Mitchell Salisbury

Hersch Rothmel

Marion Pagios

Philippa Naugle

Devin Martin

Avery Mansfield

Sean Knox

Date

2015-04-11

Identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12088/7539

Language

en_US

Subject

American Studies

Arts and Humanities

Type

Presentation

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Item sets

AEC 2015 Humanities

Site pages

Humanities