Making Sport Great Again

Book excerpt: Blending critical theory, conjunctural cultural studies, and assemblage theory, Making Sport Great Again introduces and develops the concept of uber-sport: the sporting expression of late capitalism’s conjoined corporatizing, commercializing, spectacularizing, and celebritizing forces. On different scales and in varying spaces, the uber-sport assemblage is revealed both to surreptitiously reinscribe the neoliberal preoccupation with consumption and to nurture the individualized consumer subject. Andrews further probes how uber-sport normalizes the ideological orientations and associate affective investments of the Trump assemblage’s authoritarian populism. Even as it articulates the regressive politicization of sport, Making Sport Great Again serves also as a call to action: how might progressives rearticulate uber-sport in emancipatory and actualizing political formations?