Abstract
Analyzing Kaepernick’s kneeling body as an event, using Badiou’s (1988/2007) three subjective response categories, a typology for interrogating the civil discourses inscribed onto Kaepernick’s body is created. Public responses to the event are analysed highlighting that the Black body is subject to the authority of the (US) nation in the form of state-sanctioned violence, while concurrently remaining deprived of the rights the nation provides its citizens. Black bodies are subject to Political power but deprived of political power, indicating an experience of American citizenry that is liminal (Thomassen in International Political Anthropology 2:5–27, 2009). Excavating the embodied politics and discussing the reverberations at the nexus of the sport–nation complex demonstrates the affinities that work across the denigration of Kaepernick’s [Black] body, and, considering future analysis, the veneration of [White] bodies.
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Notes
- 1.
Similar statements can and have been made about the flag of the United States, arguably the most widely known and most venerated symbol in, and of, the United States (Hopkins, 1991). Though the meaning of the flag is assumed to be universal, it is not (Chan, 2017; Kertzer, 1988; Shanafelt, 2008). Marmo (2010) has shown how the flag discourse is bound up with power, specific versions of American history, and an imagined unified American body politic. The discourse around the flag thus operates as a “regime of truth” (Foucault, 1997) imbuing the flag with particularly powerful, dominant, and seemingly irrefutable qualities (Shanafelt, 2008). Thus, the significance of articulating Kaepernick’s kneeling body as a protest against the flag comes into view.
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Bernstein, S.B., Smith, Z.T., Montez de Oca, J. (2020). ‘Sit in the Shadows’: The Black Body as American Event. In: Lamond, I., Moss, J. (eds) Liminality and Critical Event Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40256-3_9
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