Guest Lecture Richard King (Washington State University)
Representing the NFL in Austria
As football travels, its changes. While the rules and play of the game remain largely same, it takes on new meanings, often expressed in imaginative and unexpected ways. This is very much the case in Austria, where American football allows for rewriting of the local and the global. Indeed, as this presentation explores, the cultural play around the physical play has much to tell us not only about how Austrians regard the sport and its homeland, but how they view themselves and their place in the world as well. American football in Austria today, then, is best seen as less an alien imposition or imperial effect and more an ongoing engagement with cultural codes, national narratives, and transnational texts. Analysis centers on Puls4 and its treatment of the NFL Playoffs in recent years. Specifically, it considers promotional spots that appropriate and repurpose Hollywood blockbusters and its media day presence, which this year featured Austrian icons Sissi and Franz interviewing coaches, players, and other notables. Concluding remarks reflect on the broader implications of the findings.
C. Richard King, Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University, has written extensively on the changing contours of race in post-Civil Rights America, the colonial legacies and postcolonial predicaments of American culture, and struggles over Indianness in public culture. His work has appeared a variety of journals, such as American Indian Culture and Research Journal, American Indian Quarterly, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Public Historian, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, and Qualitative Inquiry. He is also the author/editor of several books, including Postcolonial America, Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children, Beyond Hate: White Power and/as Popular Culture, and most recently, Redskins: Insult and Brand. Richard King is Fulbright Visiting Professor in Cultural Studies at the Department of American Studies in Summer Semester 2017.
The event is free and open to the public.
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies.
Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at