Race, ethnicity and ‘African-ness’ in football discourse : perspectives in the age of superdiversity

Abstract

Globalization, mass mobility, and economic and transcultural flows are changing the experience of diversity in many contemporary societies and communities. This is encapsulated in the notion of ‘superdiversity’, the growing complexity of what ‘diversity’ means, when new combinations of ethnicity and other variables, mobility, belonging, and identification intersect in complex, less predictable ways (see Creese & Blackledge 2010: 550–552; Blommaert & Rampton 2011). Also, the world of association football (soccer, henceforth ‘football’) is radically transformed by such processes of globalization (Giulianotti 1999; Giulianotti & Robertson 2009; Kytölä 2013). The mobility of ‘actors-in-the-field’ – professional and amateur football players, coaches, media, audiences, fans, and the like – has always been essential to football culture, but recent decades have accelerated such mobilities, leading to a complexity of patterns and outcomes of ‘diversities’ unparalleled before. Discussions of such issues in the context of football culture from the perspectives offered by superdiversity research are therefore timely and justified (Kytölä 2017).