Abstract
This article explores the peculiar passions of football (soccer) fandom. Autobiographical in tone, it meditates at once on the personal dimension of fandom and larger theoretical concerns—the love for the Liverpool Football Club and postcolonialism belong to the same broad conversation. The article maps the process by which a fan in apartheid South Africa develops a deep and lasting relationship with an English football club; it demonstrates the arbitrariness of fandom and the importance of narrative (sports journalism) to long distance fandom; it explores how race and fandom complicate each other. It shows, most importantly, how fandom overcomes the debilitations of distance, the lack of technology, through a singular kind of imagination.
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