Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Following Stuart Hall’s evocation that making meaning fixes identities, especially in relation to racialized African bodies, how do we make sense of the multi-directional performance of East African bodily production, and international consumption, of Ethiopian athletic bodies? This paper interrogates this question based on pre-dissertation fieldwork experience in which a white tourist group from Spain, Runners for Ethiopia (Viajar a Ethiopia), visited Ethiopia’s 16,000-person town of Bekoji, to discover the “secrets of East African running success” and give back to the “town of runners” by donating an enormous supply of shoes and other sports wares. Athletes who would otherwise be donning GPS watches leave them at home for the performance, fully prepared to reproduce an authenticity of desire. The Spanish tourists revel in awe of these dignified young rising stars, turning the other way when the pair of shoes just donated are sold for cash behind their back minutes later. Of course, mobility here, is not equal. Runners for Ethiopia arrive and move around Ethiopia on a modern white bus, consuming a fabricated and reproduced authenticity, simultaneously demonstrating the global athletic market, and reinscribing the borders that realize the possibility of migration while simultaneously making it evidently difficult. Thinking through genealogies of authenticity, this ethnographic paper interrogates how performance, labor, and movement engage simultaneously across and outside of borders in an attempt to ‘fix’ a subject to be continuously produced and consumed.