| Popis: |
Marshall Smith considers the racially ‘marked body’ and how it is constantly shaped and reconfigured to suit its location and interactions with other bodies, often reduced to corporeality in the Fanonian sense. Given Michel Foucault’s conception of the body as a site of power, Smith proposes to address sports culture’s racialized assumptions about ‘“black” or “marked” dominance.’ He argues that the perceived ‘advantage’ of being black has provoked xenophobic reactions in some native French (‘Français de souche’), given their negative view of the political and cultural phenomenon of multicultural sports. Through a discourse analysis of Thomté Ryam’s Banlieue noire, Rachid Djaïdani’s Viscéral and Mabrouck Rachedi’s Le poids d’une âme, Smith unveils the problematic elements of French Republicanism with regard to ‘markedness’ and how sports act as a metaphor that ‘veils’ the realities of ‘French others’ who are metaphorically stripped down to what Giorgio Agamben refers to as ‘bare life’ or the denial of citizenship. In addition, he demonstrates how the same marked body that is denied disembodiment can constitute a site of protest in the quest for subjectivity in the post-colonial space of contemporary France. |
