The Field of Play In

BETWEEN THESE LINES: THE FIELD OF PLAY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE by MATTHEW SCOTT TETTLETON Bachelor of Arts, 2010 University of Texas at Arlington Arlington, Texas Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May, 2015 Copyright by Matthew Scott Tettleton 2015 With special thanks to my wife, Meghan, whose love and support are incomparable, with thanks to my graduate student colleagues and friends in the TCU English Department, and with thanks to my committee—Dr. David Colón, Dr. Neil Easterbrook, and Dr. Jason Helms—I dedicate this thesis in memory of Dr. David Vanderwerken, who showed me that this whole thing was possible. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction: Between These Lines 1 1 United Loyalties: Basketball in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 14 2 Telling Moments: The Kairos of Baseball’s Segregation and the Chronotopes of August Wilson’s Fences 38 3 “Bourgeois Nationalism”: The Strange Bedfellows of American Soccer Fandom 63 Works Cited 90 Vita Abstract iii Introduction: Between These Lines In a recent speaking engagement at the University of Texas at Arlington, noted sports broadcaster Bob Costas spoke about his favorite moment broadcasting the Olympic Games. The moment Costas identified was at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta; as Costas described the events of the opening ceremony that day, the producers kept from Costas the identity of the final person in the torch relay who would officially light the Olympic flame. When Muhammad Ali was revealed as the torch lighter, the Costas on the 1996 broadcast exclaimed, “What a moment!” The Costas sitting on the stage in 2015 reliving the moment remarked that he was proud of his spontaneous reaction right up until he said “What a moment!” Costas felt that the special quality of the moment was self-evident, and that that his pronouncement cheapened it. But what was remarkable to Costas about that event was the way Ali became a unifying figure in that moment. In the prime of his career, Ali’s stand against conscription in the Vietnam War made him a reviled figure for many Americans; though as Costas pointed out, many respected his anti-establishment stance at the time. In 1996, however, the crowd in Atlanta collectively celebrated Ali. They respected that Ali had the courage of his convictions and that he was willing to represent the nation that had treated him harshly in the past. The Olympics, Costas said, can have a unifying effect like this. Unlike big sporting events such as the NCAA’s Final Four or the Super Bowl, the whole crowd at the Olympics is rooting for the same side. Since the Games were held in the Atlanta that year, the crowd was united in its support of Ali and the United States. The moment that Costas described was one of many that Costas relived on that University of Texas at Arlington stage that evening. From Michael Jordan’s legendary final shot in the 1998 NBA Finals to Derek Jeter’s dramatic final at-bat in Yankees Stadium in 1 2014, Costas’s recorded voice accompanied some of the most memorable moments in recent sports history, and Costas’s poetic descriptions of these moments are now part of their legacy. Jordan’s shot and Jeter’s walk-off single stay with us because sport reaches us in ways that other cultural objects do not. Sport is a drama without a script, and its spontaneity makes the drama more compelling to its audience. Sport unifies people behind a common cause of supporting a team even as it divides clan from clan. It can be shared across the generations from parent to child, and it cuts across lines of age, race, nationality, and culture. Yet sport at times reflects or reinforces the national, racial, and class boundaries that exist in the culture at large. In this project, I ask questions about the cultural boundaries that persist in the construction of American identities. Among those questions are: How does sport construct and reflect an American identity that constellates the diverse populations that reside within the geopolitical boundaries of the United States of America? How does sport help Americans navigate the divisions that exist within such an identity—namely, race, nation, and class? How does contemporary literature reveal the tensions present in defining an American identity that is complicated by those divisions within our borders? The concepts of race, nation, and class are neither exhaustive nor discrete. On the contrary, they are entwined and incomplete. If American identity can ever be defined, such a definition would also be contingent on gender, sexuality, geography, economics, and empire; moreover, such a definition would be unfixed temporally. I do not attempt to create a definition of American identity through sports; rather, I argue that a cultural struggle over the definitions of American identity is in fact the most consistent component of American identity, and that drawing boundaries has always been a part of that struggle. In short, the most “American” 2 things we can do are to contemplate, discuss, debate, and negotiate what it means to be American. Part and parcel to those discussions has been a preoccupation with creating, supporting, and destroying boundaries of exclusion. On our way to determining what it means to be American, we have struggled to determine who “qualifies” as American. Sport renders these struggles visible, and the intersection of literature and sport crystallizes moments and places of conflict in which American identity politics play out on and around the field of play. Identifying and constructing what it means to be an American is an enterprise that precedes the existence of the United States as a political entity. One of the central concerns of the American Revolution, from the American perspective, was the plausibility of uniting the colonies into one political entity against the British. Unity was vital in standing against the might of the British Empire, but the early American struggles to construct a federal government demonstrates that a cohesive structure was difficult to produce in peoples who felt connections at times to both their colonizers and to their discrete colonies. The ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781 gave the United States legitimacy in the international community, and it provided valuable tools for Americans to establish self-rule. Moreover, the framers of the Articles—later to be branded “Antifederalists”—were, as Donald Lutz demonstrates, “working from a coherent, positive view of politics that stressed liberty, popular sovereignty, majority rule, deliberative processes, localism, and a whole host of ideas and commitments central to what we would recognize as American political theory” (55). According to Lutz, while the Articles are widely viewed as a failed attempt to create an effective American government, they in fact had a significant influence on the rule of law established in the Constitution of the United States (ibid). 3 The originally ratified U.S. Constitution tells an even clearer picture of the difficulties in establishing a national identity. With the Constitution came the “three-fifths compromise,” the nation took up, and in fact institutionalized, one of the questions that has been the among most problematic in the project of American identity-making: Who is included in, and who is left out of, this newly formed American identity? That particular piece of redacted constitutional law reads as follows: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (US Const. Art. I, Sec. 2) In this passage lives the unfortunate spirit of discrimination that pervades the national consciousness of the United States. The notion that southern states wanted to benefit in terms of congressional representation from their slave populations, despite withholding their unalienable rights, strikes the contemporary reader as a particularly crass and opportunistic maneuver. Moreover, the compromise blithely names Native Americans as excluded from the populations that would comprise the United States. The Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution both evince the notion that American national identity was very much under construction in the early United States, and the fact that this construction was troubled by the presence of African Americans and Native Americans, neither of whom fit neatly within those early notions of American identity. Such questions—what is it to be an American, and who belongs in that conversation—pervade the oeuvre one of the foremost examples of purely American 4 literature, Walt Whitman. Critics have long named Whitman as a formative figure in the literary notions of American identity. As Roland Hagenbüchle argues, “for Walt Whitman, the tabula rasa quality of the United States affords ‘Modern Man’ the unique chance to re- create the world—a better world this time—thus offering him the privilege to assume in the creative act a new, properly speaking, American identity” (430). The clean-slate aspect of American culture in which Whitman believes marks American identity as something that needs construction and identification. Moreover, Whitman speaks to “the division between whites and blacks” in America; according to Ed Folsom, Whitman “addressed [this division] with compassion but ultimately failed to address [it] forcefully when it became most pressing, in those first years after emancipation” (97). Dana Phillips has a similar reading of Whitman’s racial dynamics, arguing “that Whitman’s racial politics are far more complicated, more conflicted, and considerably less admirable than his reputation for a broad and easy tolerance for others suggests” (290).

Load more