World Cups have frequently been venues for outbursts of nationalistic fervor because, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm said, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.” In this talk, Simon Kuper argues that globalization and cosmopolitanism have undermined the World Cup’s capacity to be a vehicle for nationalist sentiment, and Brazil 2014 may be the first post-nationalist, cosmopolitan World Cup.
Simon Kuper writes a column for The Financial Times about all sorts of topics, including sports. Based in Paris, Kuper is the author of several books, including Football Against the Enemy, which won the William Hill prize for Sports Book of the Year. He has won the Manuel Vazquez Montalban prize for sports writing and was named Britain’s Cultural Commentator of the Year. Born in Uganda, Kuper studied at Oxford University and Harvard University.
This talk is the second in a series of events about Brazil and the World Cup sponsored by the Brazil/Latin American Studies Mellon Grant and the Institute for Global/Local Action & Study at Pitzer College.
