With the summer Olympic Games going on in Paris, France, Ohio University Press in Athens, US, has announced that it will be a book set to be published this August titled Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium by Todd Cleveland.
Here is a link to the book’s introduction.
Description
At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the 54 African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Reflecting this relative lack of sporting success, African Olympians – aside from elite Kenyan distance runners – rarely register in the minds of even the most dedicated followers of the Games. Yet for all their seeming invisibility on the Olympic landscape, African states, athletes, and officials have long been “winning” at the Olympics, albeit often far removed from the medal podium.
Africa and the Olympics shows how African actors have achieved these non-sporting victories and examines how they have used the Olympics to engage in transformative political activity, realise social mobility, and enhance the quality of life for individuals, communities, and entire nations. In tracing these historical and contemporary processes and the motivations that underlie them, the book complicates reductive notions of the Olympics as solely a sporting competition and instead considers Africa’s engagement with the Games as a series of opportunities to improve personal, communal, ethnic, national, and even continental plights.
If few sports fans have thought extensively about Africa and the Olympics, scholars have been only slightly more engaged with the subject. Most of this scholarship focuses on the International Olympic Committee’s ban of apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1988. Other works that consider the Olympics more broadly tend to deal with Africa only summarily, further reducing its already low profile. As a result, the academic literature resembles a patchwork of circumscribed studies dispersed in a range of fields and disciplines. Not since the publication of Africa at the Olympics almost 50 years ago has a single volume featured a comprehensive history of the continent and the Games. This book both updates and expands previous work and, most importantly, reframes the analytical engagement with this topic.
Those interested in using Africa and the Olympics in a course, can request an examination copy – see the menu item on the web page below the book cover image for request form. Complimentary PDFs to instructors interested in considering books for course use will be send.
Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium by Todd Cleveland.
208 pages, 16 B&W photos
$34.95 paperback, ISBN 9780896803527 (hardcover and ebook editions also available)
