Marxism, cultural studies and sport , edited by Carrington, B. and McDonald, I (original) (raw)

2011, International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics

's anthology Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport-the eighth volume in Routledge's admirable Critical Studies in Sport seriessuccessfully addresses all three of the aims outlined in the Series Editors' Preface. The introduction, which provides 'a brief historical overview of the development of Marxist approaches within Sport Studies and the subsequent growth of a Marxist inflected Cultural Studies of Sport' (p1), along with Part One, which comprises a chapter each by Carrington and McDonald arguing for the relative merits of orthodox (but not reductive, economist) Marxist and Cultural Studies approaches, in the words of the editors, 'attempt to sketch the broad parameters of the debates (the thesis and the antithesis, we might suggest) between and within Marxist and Cultural Studies approaches to sport, which the following chapters then, and in true dialectical fashion, work through' (p7). Even on their own, they are enough to satisfy the first aim: 'to introduce students to the richness and relevance of Marxist and Marxist-inflected Cultural Studies approaches to studying contemporary sporting cultures' (pxii). The subsequent chaptersdivided into three further sections: Part Two ('Political Economy, Commodification and Sport'), Part Three ('The Sporting Poetics of Class, Race and Gender'), and Part Four ('Key Concepts, Critical Theorists')-successfully address another aim: to 'advance discussions on critical social theory within Sport Studies and to attempt to insert sport as an object of study into mainstream debates within Marxist scholarship and Cultural Studies' (pxii). Each chapter is written by an established academic (some from within Sport Studies, some from other disciplines), and provides authoritative analysis alongside a wealth of footnotes. These include: Anouk Bélanger's examination of 'The Urban Sport Spectacle' and the importance of large-scale sporting events to the political economies of nation-states in a chapter that is extremely timely in light of the London 2012 Olympics and England's unsuccessful bid for the 2018 Fifa