Passing to India: a Critique of American Football's Expansion

MCS0010.1177/0163443714532982Media, Culture & SocietyPolson and Whiteside 532982research-article2014 Article Media, Culture & Society 2014, Vol. 36(5) 661 –678 Passing to India: a critique of © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: American football’s expansion sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0163443714532982 mcs.sagepub.com Erika Polson University of Denver, USA Erin Whiteside University of Tennessee, USA Abstract Although India has long held a passion for cricket, an organization called the Elite Football League of India (EFLI) is looking to disrupt that sporting nerve center, and introduce the foreign sport of American football to the country’s growing middle class. While it is too soon to assess how Indian audiences will respond to, negotiate and perhaps create new cultural practices around American football, we focus this article on an analysis of efforts made by promoters of the new league to create a cultural context in which this very foreign game might make sense. Drawing from press releases, promotional videos and news coverage, we demonstrate how language of social, economic and individual (male) development is deployed to create American football as a platform for delivering global brands to a vast Indian market. In deconstructing these efforts, we critically explicate how creative practices are implemented to produce an atmosphere within which globalization may occur. Keywords emerging middle class, globalization and sport, India, labor exploitation, neoliberalism, sports and gender In August 2012, eight teams made up of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan athletes gath- ered in a stadium in Sri Lanka to play the first season of the Elite Football League of India (EFLI), a new venture by US investors to bring the virtually unknown sport of Corresponding author: Erika Polson, University of Denver, 2490 S. Gaylord St., Denver, CO 80208, USA. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from mcs.sagepub.com at Northeastern University on February 8, 2016 662 Media, Culture & Society 36(5) American football to televisions across the Indian subcontinent. Founders tout the league’s financial potential, as India is the site of an emerging leisure economy and, due to recent changes to regulations on foreign direct investment, has become more open to foreign brands. Globalizing commercial enterprises increasingly leverage ‘sport’s cultural capital to raise the global profile and appeal of corporate brands and to expand the global market for their products’(Smart, 2007: 6); indeed, Rupert Murdoch sees the ‘uni- versal appeal’of sport as a ‘battering ram’ to open new television markets (Miller et al., 2001: 64). However, as Thussu points out, ‘US-led Western media conglomerates have regionalized and localized their content’ (2010: 222, emphasis added) in a process of glocalization that sees media tailored for specific audiences, not necessarily out of respect for national cultures but rather for commercial necessity (2010: 229). In this process, Thussu says that television audiences are reimagined as consumers, rather than citizens. Such practices have been most marked in the emergent economies of globalization, where nascent middle classes present a new throng of consumers for whose loyal- ties global brands may now compete. In this article, we analyze promotional and media discourse around the expansion of American football into India, demonstrating how a new site of cultural production is marked out through a paternalistic development rhetoric which, we argue, masks a highly exploitative and potentially dangerous venture (particularly considering that the sport is introduced to India at a time when its safety is an increasing topic of concern within the US football establishment). Season one’s debut was less than spectacular, and while it is too soon to assess whether the sport will take hold, and how Indian audiences will respond to, negotiate, and perhaps create new cultural practices around American football, we focus this article on an analysis of efforts made by promoters of the new league to create a cultural context in which this very foreign game might make sense. Scholars have long discussed the need to understand the actual practices that make up economic globalization (e.g. Sassen, 2001), noting that it is no longer adequate to simply invoke globalization as a master trope (e.g. Chakravartty and Zhao, 2007). Drawing from press releases, promotional videos and news coverage, we demonstrate how language of social, economic and individual (male) development is deployed in an effort to create American football as a platform for delivering global brands to a vast Indian market. In deconstructing these efforts, we critically explicate how creative practices are implemented to produce an atmosphere within which globalization can occur. Sport, globalization and culture The global spread of ‘modern sport’ can be traced via 18th-century colonial trajecto- ries, with the British leading the regulation and diffusion of sport until the mid 1900s (Guttman, 1994). With established standards around rules, roles, playing fields and equipment, British sports such as cricket and soccer became ‘cultural forms’ that were exported throughout the expanding empire (Bairner, 2001). Through these cultural forms, the bodies of colonized men were disciplined to support the needs of colonial administration, and organized sport is now understood as having been ‘utilized in order to “civilize” and control populations’ (Miller et al., 2001: 99). Miller et al. (2001: 10) stress that this instrumental use of sport developed and expanded along with empires, Downloaded from mcs.sagepub.com at Northeastern University on February 8, 2016 Polson and Whiteside 663 pointing out that the modern Olympics, as well as global governing bodies for soccer, cricket and tennis, all emerged during the height of European colonization during the late 1800s to early 1900s. However, homegrown games such as baseball and American football (in the case of the United States) were invented as a part of creating new national traditions distinct from those of the former colonizers (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007). The later rise of the US and its supplanting of Great Britain as the world’s most promi- nent empire may be understood partly through the lens of national sport. Guttman (1994: 2) argues that after the Second World War, Americans took over as ‘primary agents in the diffusion of modern sports’, and sees National Football League (NFL) expansion efforts as an attempt to ‘displace firmly rooted British sports’ (1994: 112) in Europe. This new mode of imperial contest comes about in a neoliberal context in which nation-states have increasingly dropped barriers to flows of foreign products and media; such shifts have opened the door for the creation of what some have lamented is an Americanized global popular culture, including sport (Crothers, 2007). Although the way sports are produced and packaged as commodities to be sold through television and merchandising reflects this process of the Americanization of sport, Bairner (2001) claims these trends point more generally to the encroachment of global capitalism. Goldman and Johns (2009) refer to such productions as ‘sportainment’, in that they focus as much on creating an entertaining package as on broadcasting the actual athletic contest. Over the past several decades, scholars have increasingly turned their attention toward relationships between sports and society, pointing out the powerful ways that sport functions as a space for the display and celebration of normative behavior and ways of knowing (e.g. Coakley, 2000; Messner, 2002). Sports are lauded in US public discourse, for instance, because of their presumed ability to transcend race, class and gender lines, as well as for their ability to teach such cornerstone capitalistic values as hard work, teamwork and obeying authority. Assumptions about sports as a pro-social force are often used as justification for funneling resources to sports-based programs; the United Nations, for example, touts sports’ positive values as justification for the inclusion of sports programs in its mission (Hartmann and Kwauk, 2011). Similarly, American universities often point to such benefits to justify dedicating an overwhelm- ing amount of resources to an increasingly commercialized version of amateur sports (Clotfelter, 2011). In the United States, sport is often described as a hegemonic institution because of the ways its discursive frameworks justify male authority and naturalize normative gender roles (Duncan, 2006). Sports featuring visible displays of power, such as football or baseball, enjoy cultural primacy in the US because they showcase an ideal, or hegemonic form of masculinity. American football features bodily contact, vicious but sanctioned brutality, and is only formally sponsored as a male sport at US academic institutions. Players are praised for playing through pain and sacrificing their bodies for the team – in doing so, showing no fear or weakness (Anderson and Kian, 2012). Emblematic of these standards is the abundance of war metaphors used in sporting discourse, where sport becomes analogous to military and battle, with action described by terms such as ‘kill … weapons … taking aim, fighting, shot in his arsenal, reloading’, etc. (Messner et al., 2004: 239). Such terminology invites spectators to view sports as a space in which Downloaded from mcs.sagepub.com at Northeastern University on February 8, 2016 664 Media, Culture & Society

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