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In this episode of TGU podcast host Frank Risorto speaks with Michigan State University Professor of history, Calcio fan and author Peter Alegi. Frank sits down with Peter to discuss his early days in Rome, making the move to the United States as a teenager, following Juventus and the Azzurri, his work in South Africa and its legacy, moving between continents and the perspective it continues to give him on life and football, his love of Subbuteo, the Global Soccer class he runs at MSU and its origins, Roberto Baggio and much more. **Please don't forget to follow, share and rate and review the podcast. It all helps to spread the word of the podcast and is greatly appreciated.** Enjoy the conversation and enjoy your Calcio! You can find Peter on Twitter at @_futbolprof You can find Frank on Twitter at @SerieA_Aust. You can find The Gentleman Ultra on Twitter @GentlemanUltra and at https://gentlemanultra.com
In a new episode of The Gentleman Ultra podcast series '3 World Cup Questions' host Frank Risorto asks the same three World Cup related questions to our friends in and around the world of Calcio. The three questions? What's your favourite World Cup moment? What's your favourite World Cup game? Who's your favourite World Cup team? Todays guest is Peter Alegi, an author, professor and Roman-American historian. Please don't forget to rate, share and review the podcast and thanks for listening. You can find more of Peter on Twitter @_futbolprof as well as at https://history.msu.edu/people/faculty/peter-alegi/ You can find Frank @SerieA_Aust on Twitter. You can find The Gentleman Ultra @GentlemanUltra on Twitter and at https://gentlemanultra.com.
Professor, author and historian Peter Alegi joins CURVA MUNDIAL to discuss his love of Juventus, Italian soccer, South African soccer and more. Alegi talks about his books "Laduma!: Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa," and "South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond," his time living in South Africa and growing up in Italy before moving to America. A fascinating interview about watching the world's game from all corners of the globe. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
We spoke to Peter Alegi is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University and the author of Laduma! Soccer, Politics, and Society in South Africa.
For most football enthusiasts, the last year of matches and competition bore the stamp of something most people think should be kept out of the sport: politics. But as former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson once said, “There is more politics in football than in politics.” Rather than separate from society, sports are often a mirror of it—a testament to the prevailing attitudes, to the evolving social and economic relations. If our society has become more globalized, commercialized and unequal, then the nature of sport will develop this way too. It is in the interests of the footballing world to project an image of itself as both separate from politics, while simultaneously also being ahead of it. For example, sports boycotts are widely lauded as an effective tool against oppressive regimes, and something which sports players, organizations and their investors are historically inclined to do. In the final analysis, sports emerge in divided societies as a “great unifier.” Describing how this narrative plays out in South Africa, the historian Peter Alegi writes: In the opening act, the consolidation of apartheid in the 1950s inspires sport activists to build an antiracist network seeking to racially integrate national teams, thereby casting sport in the political spotlight. The second act is set in the 1960s and 1970s as the sport boycott ostracizes white South Africa from the Olympic movement, world football, and nearly every other major sport—important symbolic victories in the larger quest for freedom. The third and final act unfolds against the backdrop of apartheid giving way to democracy in the early 1990s. Segregated sport federations merge into unified, nonracial institutions and South Africa's re-entry into global sport is celebrated with home victories in the 1995 Rugby World Cup and 1996 African Cup of Nations, unleashing a wave of rainbow nationalist euphoria throughout the sports-mad nation. But what would be the more complicated story? What if, rather than simply being made by politics, football itself was something that made politics too. Writing about the history of white football in South Africa, Chris Bolsmann observes that during apartheid, “white football players, organizations, and administrators maintained close links with Britain, the Commonwealth and the notion of Empire and were at the forefront of globalizing football.” Chris joins us on AIAC Talk this week to discuss the forgotten entanglement of South African football with English football at the nexus of empire. His most recent journal article is on the great English footballer, Stanley Matthews' long association with South African football. Together with Peter Alegi, Chris co-edited South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond (2010) as well as Africa's World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space and South Africa (2013).
We talk to historian Peter Alegi about Africa's football journey. It's a story of colonialism, national awakening, emigration, controversy, politics and much more. We look also explore the future of the women's game.
In the newswrap this week, we talk about Ethiopian politics, Zambia's third term debate, elections in Namibia, and more. This week is another African podcast mashup special — featuring a conversation with Ufahamu Africa's own Kim Yi Dionne (@dadakim) in commemoration of World AIDS Day this weekend. Kim is a professor of political science at UC Riverside and an editor of The Monkey Cage, a blog on politics and political science at The Washington Post. She is also the author of Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. This week's conversation with Kim is shared courtesy of the Africa Past and Present Podcast, hosted by Michigan State University historian Peter Alegi (@futbolprof), who was a guest on Ufahamu Africa in Episode 3. Peter talks to Kim about her book on AIDS in Africa, the role of village headmen in AIDS interventions, what turns Malawians out to vote, podcasting, and more. Their segment begins at 9:11. … More Ep81. Another Africa Podcast Mashup: Kim Yi Dionne on AIDS interventions in Africa, podcasting, and more
This week on Ufahamu Africa, we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the African Cup of Nations (AFCON). We talk about football, politics, and more with Dr. Peter Alegi (aka @futbolprof), a professor of history at Michigan State University. He literally wrote the book on football in Africa. Our conversation with Dr. Peter Alegi begins at 5:25. We … More Ep3. A Conversation with Dr. Peter Alegi on football and politics
Peter Alegi (@futbolprof) joined me to look at Group D Italy England Uruguay Costa Rica ------ Intro/Outro Music is "Hasta Que Salga el Sol" (English: "Until Sunrise"), a Latin tropical pop song written by Don Omar.
In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic land. In fact, though, the African-ness of the South African World Cup was pretty thin, when not wholly... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic land. In fact, though, the African-ness of the South African World Cup was pretty thin, when not wholly fabricated. For example, the music that introduced ESPN’s World Cup coverage sounded very African, as it opened with the sounding of an ox horn (the promo showed a bare-chested tribesman blowing the horn atop a mountain, silhouetted against the setting sun) and then built with pulsing drums and a choir singing layered refrains. But the piece had been written by a composer from Utah, the musicians had recorded it in Utah, and the choir consisted of members of the Broadway cast of The Lion King. At least Shakira’s ubiquitous song “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” had a more substantial African connection. It had been lifted, initially without credit, from a Cameroonian military song made popular in the 1980s by the group Golden Sounds. The ironies of the 2010 tournament in South Africa are revealed in a number of essays in Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space (University of Michigan Press, 2013), edited by Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann. In the interview with Peter, we learn of the findings and observations of the volume’s contributors: an international collection of anthropologists, architectural critics, bloggers, geographers, sociologists, journalists, photographers, and former players who all attended matches in South Africa. They make sharp criticisms of class divides at the venues, the nationalism and commercialism, and, of course, the imperial reach of FIFA. But as we hear from Peter, the book’s authors were also fans. When mixing with other fans outside the stadiums, and then cheering their teams when the matches began, even normally skeptical academics and journalists were caught up in the event. Their experiences show that, for all its faults, the FIFA World Cup is still an incomparable event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic land. In fact, though, the African-ness of the South African World Cup was pretty thin, when not wholly fabricated. For example, the music that introduced ESPN’s World Cup coverage sounded very African, as it opened with the sounding of an ox horn (the promo showed a bare-chested tribesman blowing the horn atop a mountain, silhouetted against the setting sun) and then built with pulsing drums and a choir singing layered refrains. But the piece had been written by a composer from Utah, the musicians had recorded it in Utah, and the choir consisted of members of the Broadway cast of The Lion King. At least Shakira’s ubiquitous song “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” had a more substantial African connection. It had been lifted, initially without credit, from a Cameroonian military song made popular in the 1980s by the group Golden Sounds. The ironies of the 2010 tournament in South Africa are revealed in a number of essays in Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space (University of Michigan Press, 2013), edited by Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann. In the interview with Peter, we learn of the findings and observations of the volume’s contributors: an international collection of anthropologists, architectural critics, bloggers, geographers, sociologists, journalists, photographers, and former players who all attended matches in South Africa. They make sharp criticisms of class divides at the venues, the nationalism and commercialism, and, of course, the imperial reach of FIFA. But as we hear from Peter, the book’s authors were also fans. When mixing with other fans outside the stadiums, and then cheering their teams when the matches began, even normally skeptical academics and journalists were caught up in the event. Their experiences show that, for all its faults, the FIFA World Cup is still an incomparable event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices