The Play of Race in a Field of Urban Desire

Abstract

The brutal history of racially based segregation in Johannesburg, as in other post-apartheid cities, would appear to condemn its inhabitants to live in perpetual fear of violence based on perceptions of racial and national difference. Yet urban pick-up soccer recreates spaces in which that history can be suspended, if not forgotten. In creating evanescent form out of spontaneous play, such games may be understood as artful conversations among bodies-in-motion. Players have the freedom to engage in charismatic self-fashioning, inventing a fantasy persona on the field that is larger than the life they live at other times and places in the city. In this way, participants project themselves into a social future beyond race that they might not otherwise be able to imagine.