The Enemy: Nelson Mandela And The Game That Made A Nation By John Carlin

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Introduction I am proposing the course, “World Cultures through Sports Literature”, because I want to offer an interesting course that examines how cultures and sports interact on an international level. It would focus on sports that are mostly foreign to the general American population. This is because American students have a good understanding of how sports play into our culture even if they are not interested in them. This class would be an intermediate 200 level World Literature or International Studies course depending on what the student needs. This is because the course will examine various cultures through many lenses and mediums of World Literature. World Literature allows the insight needed for foreign cultures to interact
We will use the book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin. This book discusses the events surrounding the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It was held a year after Mandela was elected president in South Africa’s first free election. South Africa practiced apartheid and the minority, white population had control over the native, black population through intense racism. The book describes how Mandela used rugby to bring together the blacks and whites in South Africa after apartheid had ended. Bill Keller’s review states, “This wonderful book describes Mandela’s methodical, improbable and brilliant campaign to reconcile resentful blacks and fearful whites around a sporting event, a game of rugby” (Keller). Keller also says that John Carlin does not lead you to believe that it was all fixed with the winning of the World Cup. Carlin goes in depth on how Nelson Mandela slowly brought the people together with the culmination of the World Cup victory (Keller). It will provide a good basis of discussion for how a sport can bring a nation and cultures together. The class will read the poem A Poem for Nelson Mandela by Elizabeth Alexander. We will really look at this

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