Medals, Rings, and Olympic Dreams: A Review Essay of Antonio Sotomayor and Cesar R. Torres, eds., Olimpismo

Abstract

Olympic scholars studying Latin America have largely focused their attention on the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Appropriately so. Mexico City was the first Latin American city to host the Olympics, and Mexico the first Spanish-speaking nation to do so. Not only were the Olympics a quintessential exercise in nation-building for Mexican leaders, but they also became embroiled in the international diplomacy of the Cold War and controversies over the thin air, amateurism, doping, and gender testing. Those Olympics featured the most memorable medal-stand protest in the history of sport, Tommie Smith and John Carlos's raised fists following the men's 200-meter sprint. And, most tragic, just ten days before the opening ceremonies, Mexican police and military officials opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protestors, killing an estimated 200–300 people in one of Mexico's pivotal events of the late twentieth century, the Tlatelolco Massacre. As a final note, having occurred some fifty-five years ago, the Mexico City Olympics have also lived in a historian's “sweet spot” for the past few decades, far enough in the past that key actors have passed on, government documents have been released, and key anniversaries sparked renewed interest, but also recent enough that many athletes and officials remained available for interviews and an abundance of media sources augmented research possibilities. The 1968 Olympics have been the subject of dozens of books and articles, including three noteworthy titles published in 2021 alone.1The drop-off in historical interest from the Mexico City Olympics to other topics related to Olympism in Latin America is substantial. Of secondary interest have been the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the five Olympic bids from Buenos Aires. Both topics lack the allure of the 1968 Olympics. The 2016 Olympics are simply too recent to have become a focal point for historians, although they have been the subject of a number of recent studies.2 Historians will certainly have their day, as Rio, like Mexico City, became a hotbed of controversy, including the prospect of a Zika virus outbreak, pollution and bacteria in the water, and displacement of residents. For Buenos Aires, the lack of attention might be explained simply by the fact that the city has never managed to win the bid to host the Olympics, and therefore has never had its crucible by fire. As leaders in Mexico City and Rio can attest, it is one thing to show an interest in the Olympic Movement, to submit a bid (or multiple bids) to host, and to host lesser events in the Olympic constellation of competitions. It is quite another to undergo the massive organizational test of successfully staging the Olympics and serving as host to the world's athletes, and the global attention and scrutiny that process brings. So, while a handful of scholars have examined Buenos Aires's quest to host, and its involvement in related events, unless and until the city actually hosts the Olympics it will always be a lesser draw for scholarly attention.3Antonio Sotomayor and Cesar R. Torres, in their recent volume Olimpismo: The Olympic Movement and the Making of Latin America and the Caribbean, demonstrate that the Olympic Movement in Latin America extends far beyond merely the “big three” topics described above—the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the 2016 Rio Olympics, and Buenos Aires and its various Olympic bids—and in fact many nations and events in the region have ties to the Olympic Movement that warrant scholarly attention. While several of the chapters address Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Rio, others explore the Olympic Movement in nations such as Uruguay, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. And beyond issues associated with bidding for and hosting the Olympics, Sotomayor and Torres and the contributors in this volume address many other aspects of Olympism in the region, such as creating and managing Olympic Committees and other athletic bodies, utilizing Olympic successes (and managing Olympic failures) as fodder for nationalist pride, medal-winning athletes as national heroes, colonialism and independence in sport, racial and gender issues in Olympic sport, sport diplomacy and international relations, and future possibilities for hosting and competing in the Olympics. This volume provides a much-needed text for students and scholars of the Olympics, and of Latin America in general, and offers a road map for other scholars interested in exploring the Olympic Movement in Latin America.The capable and diverse group of contributors provides a rich range of content for readers to consider. In the first chapter, “Sport Policy, the YMCA, and the Early History of Olympism in Uruguay,” Shunsuke Matsuo explores the early development of Olympism in Uruguay, which involved three organizations working in concert: the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), and the National Committee of Physical Education (CNEF), which was the key sports organization in Uruguay at the national level in the early twentieth century. As Matsuo demonstrates, a number of reform-minded individuals in Uruguayan leadership, and in these organizations, spearheaded the growth and implementation of an impressive sports infrastructure in the early decades of the twentieth century, with the intention of elevating Uruguayan sports and society up to “European standards” (20). Working together for a time, those three organizations forged a thriving international sports program in Uruguay, spanning the World War I era and into the 1920s. Eventually, though, the cooperation between the three dwindled, in part due to the death or removal of key individuals in each organization, and the Uruguay Olympic program fell prey to the political whims of leaders not as invested in sporting success as their predecessors. We now know that Uruguay's Olympic program peaked with its gold medals in football at the 1924 and 1928 Olympics, still the only gold medals in the nation's history. Matsuo's chapter is based on impressive archival and primary source research, including the IOC archives and extensive Uruguayan government documents.Thomas F. Carter then explores the Olympic Movement in Cuba, and specifically the role that athletics and the Olympics played in nation-building, in “Enthusiastic Yet Awkward Dance Partners: Olympism and Cuban Nationalism.” This chapter covers the longest span of time of any of the chapters, from the 1890s through 2016, making for quick summaries of several time periods over that long century. In the early years, a group of Cuban elites came to associate athletic success, and particularly Olympic success, with a growing sense of Cuban identity. As such, they promoted early Cuban Olympic efforts and even proposed to bring the postwar 1920 Olympics to Havana, a failed endeavor. In the interwar years, Cuban efforts focused on regional events such as the Central American and Caribbean Games rather than the Olympics themselves. For a time in the post–World War II era, Cuba's internal struggles (culminating in the Cuban Revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro in the late 1950s) limited the resources and infrastructure dedicated to sport, and Cuba's Olympic program stagnated. Under the sports-minded Castro, Cuba enjoyed its greatest Olympic successes in the 1970s, and Castro attempted to leverage Cuba's alliance with the Soviet Union and North Korea to exert greater international influence. With the end of the Cold War, Cuba's strategic position between the superpowers eroded, and the crumbling of the economy in recent decades again left the nation with few resources to support high-level sport. Carter's survey of Olympism in Cuba, drawing on archival documents but also extensive secondary literature, underscores the significance of sport and the Olympics in the construction of Cuba's self-image. Castro, in particular, wielded his nation's role in the Olympics as a tool for diplomatic leverage, as much as one could from a relatively small island nation with limited athletic resources. For a time, though, as Carter shows, Cuba provides a case study in how even a small nation can utilize its participation (or nonparticipation) in the Olympics to its diplomatic advantage.As Keith and Claire Brewster demonstrate in their chapter, “Olympic Diplomacy and National Redemption in Post-revolutionary Mexico,” the Olympic Movement in Mexico ranks among the most fully developed in Latin America, culminating with the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Mexican leaders, more than those in most of their Latin American neighbors, consistently embraced Olympism from the earliest years as it recovered from the devastating period of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). Working with IOC officials, Mexican sporting leaders were awarded the right to host the 1926 Central American Games, which both established Mexico as a leading sports nation in the region and bolstered national pride. Over the following decades, these and other sporting events allowed Mexico to foster relationships with both its “northern friends” and “southern brothers” (63). The momentum behind Mexico's position as a leader in international sports in the region only increased in the decades after World War II, when robust personal leadership combined with an economic boom to capture the attention of the IOC and its members. After hosting the Central American Games in 1954 and the Pan-American Games in 1955, Mexico was well-positioned to make a serious run at hosting the Olympics. Spearheaded by Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964) and Mexican IOC representatives Marte Gómez and José de Jesús Clark Flores, the Mexican bid was successful in 1963, and Mexico City was awarded the 1968 Summer Olympics. While the Mexican Olympic organizers, led by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez “succeeded in undermining all those who had doubted Mexicans’ organizing capacity” (70), the image of peace and prosperity fostered by those organizers was shaken—if not shattered—by the Tlatelolco Massacre just ten days before the Opening Ceremonies. Brewster and Brewster highlight the place of sport in Mexico's nation-building process, and the ways in which Mexican sporting and political leaders utilized sport (and specifically the Olympics and its ancillary events) to promote a positive national image. While it is based on an array of archival primary documents, newspaper accounts, and extensive secondary sources, much of the material in this chapter has been capably recounted elsewhere, including Brewster and Brewster's own work.4 For readers unfamiliar with this subject, however, the chapter offers a good synopsis of Mexico's Olympic development from the 1920s through the 1960s.Antonio Sotomayor's chapter, “The Nationalist Movement and the Struggle for Freedom in Puerto Rico's Olympic Sport,” is one of the most compelling in the book. As Sotomayor explains, “For Puerto Ricans, the Olympic Movement has been a special platform to not only display their nationhood, but also to challenge colonialism and strive for national independence” (74). This seems a simple enough argument, as a common theme throughout this book is nations utilizing the Olympic Movement to promote their nationhood; however, for Puerto Rico the story is far more complex, as for most of the period in question Puerto Rico was an American colony, whose Olympic athletes marched under the American flag. Sotomayor describes a number of nationalist athletes who engaged in various forms of protest in the early twentieth century, including Juan Juarbe Juarbe, a basketball player and track athlete, who was the Puerto Rican flag bearer at the 1930 Central American and Caribbean Games in Havana, Cuba. Juarbe Juarbe carried the American flag, but did so in bare feet as a gesture of protest. Other athletes at different times either carried the Puerto Rican flag or sang “La Borinqueña,” the Puerto Rican national anthem, over the American national anthem. Thus, when Puerto Rico established its independence and was allowed to march under its own flag and anthem in the 1950s, sport took on heightened significance in solidifying its national identity. As Sotomayor writes, “Being able to use the Puerto Rican flag and anthem in such popular sport mega-events was reason enough for Nationalist and independence leaders to jump on the band-wagon of the Olympic Movement” (93).While modern readers may assume that Brazil has long been an Olympic power, in fact, aside from winning three medals in pistol events at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics (the first attended by a Brazilian delegation), the nation won no medals before the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. There, the triple jumper Adhemar Ferreira da Silva won gold, establishing himself as a national hero. In their chapter, “Adhemar Ferreira da Silva: Representations of the Brazilian Olympic Hero,” Fabio de Faria Peres and Victor Andrade de Melo explain that the gold medalist was an exemplary model of Brazilian character and devotion to the nation, a true Brazilian hero. Scholar Maurício Drumond writes of da Silva's conquest, “It played an important part in the official propaganda, especially in conveying messages of optimism, nationalism, racial democracy, and physical enhancement of the Brazilian people” (99). After repeating his gold medal performance at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, however, da Silva's reception in Brazil was slightly different. In an era of general malaise in the country, “his second gold medal was regarded by some as an insufficient balm to hide the country's problems” (104). While Brazilians hoped for greater successes from the team, nonetheless da Silva—cultured, intellectual, and virtuous—became an athlete-diplomat and standard-bearer for Brazilian national pride in the ensuing decades. Peres and Melo provide a convincing account of da Silva's Olympic career and impact, in a well-written and engaging chapter. Da Silva's accomplishments, however, seem to occur in a vacuum, as if he was Brazil's only Olympic athlete and only source of athletic pride. Similarly, while the chapter concludes with a brief description of da Silva's diplomatic exploits and post-athletic career, it would be made stronger by including an assessment of Brazil's Olympic fate after da Silva's two gold medals. There is the suggestion that Brazilian sport was headed for troubled times after the 1956 Olympics, but Peres and Melo offer no further description. One wonders, what happened for Brazilian sport between Melbourne 1956 and Rio 2016?Cesar R. Torres, in his chapter “Solving ‘the Problem of Argentine Sport’: The Post-Peronist Olympic Movement in Argentina,” discusses the complexities of trying to “keep politics out of sport.” The president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955, Juan Domingo Perón, consolidated control of Argentina's national sporting programs—along with many other elements of Argentinian political and social life—in an effort to promote his and the nation's positive image. As Torres explains, “For Perón, sport represented a formidable social technology—an organization of human energy designed to arrange and rearrange social patterns—that could be effectively used to build, cement, and advertise his New Argentina” (114). To those ends, Perón invested heavily in Argentina's Olympic sports programs, including advancing bids to host the Olympics in Buenos Aires. In what might appear as a halcyon age in Argentinian sport, Argentina sent its largest athletic delegations to date to the 1948 London and 1952 Helsinki Olympics, the country hosted numerous international sporting championships, and boasted several world champions in various sports. But some doubted the sincerity of these efforts, and in the post-Perón era, the new leadership in Argentina went to great lengths to purge the government, and the sporting infrastructure, of Perón's appointees and influence. Accusations of corruption, breaches of amateurism, and other unethical behavior within the sports structure led to the removal or replacement of many officials and a dramatic streamlining of the nation's athletic programs. The result was a steep decline in the size and quality of Argentina's Olympic teams, beginning with the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and carrying over into the twenty-first century. As Torres powerfully concludes, “The purported depoliticization of sport, if accomplished at all, came through political interference of the kind that the revolutionary authorities criticized” (129). Politics is so embedded in sport, Torres suggests, that an effort to extricate it can only be achieved by destroying the sporting structure itself.The final chapters of the book address issues of diversity and inclusion, in the process examining more recent events. April Yoder, in her chapter “Un Compromiso de Tod@s: Women, Olympism, and the Dominican Third Way,” describes the expanded roles and opportunities for women in Dominican sports programs under President Joaquín Balaguer in the late 1960s and 1970s. Under his paternalistic “Third Way,” Balaguer appointed dozens of “women governors” in various administrative roles in the sporting infrastructure, as “symbols of democracy and reconciliation” (133). Benefitting from Balaguer's new policy, women oversaw the distribution of sports equipment and supplies and tended to the needs of athletes throughout the nation, which included growing numbers of women. In an effort to promote his new national image, Balaguer invested in amateur sports throughout the country, notably in 1971, which he branded “The Year of Sport.” These efforts culminated in the Dominican Republic's hosting of the 1974 Central American and Caribbean Games. In the buildup to those Games, sport for both women and men in the country enjoyed great support from Balaguer and the government, who sought to use the 1974 Games to demonstrate the organizational and structural achievements of himself and his government. Women participated in higher numbers and in more sports than ever before. However, as Yoder argues, heightened participation did not mean true equality or even a meaningful shift in the roles of women in Dominican society. Cultural and societal barriers still prevented women from participating on an equal basis. Yoder writes, “The cultural biases and maternal obligations that prevented more women from seizing those opportunities went beyond the limited number of events on the Olympic program” (145). Still, while the inclusion of women governors and growing numbers of female athletes may have been largely symbolic under Balaguer, the women themselves embraced the opportunity to participate and to compete, and to contribute to a shifting in gender norms that carried on after the initial changes of the early 1970s.The volume also includes a valuable chapter addressing an understudied aspect of the Olympic Movement in Latin America (and globally): the Paralympics. Chloe Rutter-Jensen, in her chapter “Dis-assembling the Logocentric Subject at the Paralympic Games: The Case of Colombian Powerlifter Fabio Torres,” explores meanings behind various depictions of Torres, a Colombian soldier who lost his leg in combat and competed in the 2016 Rio Paralympics while wearing a prosthetic leg. As Rutter-Jensen explains, Torres was hailed as a hero by Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, who presented Torres and several other Paralympian athletes with “peace flags” in a 2016 ceremony. In addition to analyzing images depicting the ceremony—in which Santos was standing while Torres and others were sitting in their wheelchairs—Rutter-Jensen notes the irony in Santos declaring Torres a national hero. Torres, who is black and was raised in impoverished conditions, represents populations typically denied any sense of equality in Colombian society; the disability he acquired in the course of military service only added to his alienation. However, Torres's athletic achievement elevates him to “heroic” status, which he would have been unlikely to achieve had he not lost his leg. In the course of this analysis, Rutter-Jensen raises important issues in the consideration and place of Paralympians in the global consciousness. Only through disability do they achieve a noteworthy status. This chapter raises questions that can hopefully be grappled with in future studies, including the different ways in which the Paralympics and the Olympics are viewed by national and global audiences. Their stories are compelling, and the images are arresting, but—as Christopher Gaffney wonders in his conclusion to this volume—is anyone really paying attention? As a final note regarding this chapter, considering that the bulk of it is spent analyzing a series of photographs of Torres, it would have been helpful to include those images in the text. One wonders if the omission was intentional, or simply an unfortunate editorial necessity, but readers are left to imagine the images described (capably) by Rutter-Jensen, when including the actual pictures would have added immensely to the message conveyed.Lamartine Pereira Dacosta, in the final chapter, “In Search of the Olympic Games’ Future Significances: Contributions from Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro,” examines the bidding and hosting experiences of the three cities and speculates as to whether and how those experiences might translate in future endeavors to bid for the Olympics. In Dacosta's estimation, the five (unsuccessful) bidding efforts by Buenos Aires to host the Olympics were not in vain, as those efforts—stretched over many decades—each contributed to tangible improvements in the national infrastructure and sports programs, along with a spirit of the people behind the bidding effort. Those efforts also resulted in the success of hosting the 2018 Youth Olympic Games, which presents some of the same logistical and organizational challenges of hosting the Olympics themselves, albeit with only a fraction of the international prestige. As Dacosta notes, the Youth Olympic Games acted as a “catalyst for both urban reform and improvements in transportation and living conditions for the city's population” (169). When discussing the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Dacosta largely engages in a historiographical review of previous publications on the topic, a useful exercise especially for readers unfamiliar with this literature. Reflecting on the work of other scholars—along with his own previous writing—Dacosta reaches the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that the Olympics yielded both positive and negative results for Mexico City. There were controversies, the medal stand protest, and the horrific slaughter at Tlatelolco Square; but there were also real improvements in transportation, housing, and infrastructure, and there was a genuine spirit of peace, harmony, and national pride that infused the games. A similar dichotomy of results is likely to be found in every host city, Dacosta speculates. Like Buenos Aires, city leaders in Rio de Janeiro presented four unsuccessful bids to host the Olympics, before finally finding success when awarded the 2016 Summer Olympics. And like Mexico City, Rio's organizers confronted a number of controversies and challenges, such as the Zika virus, pollution and environmental concerns, and dislocation of residents, among others. Like Mexico City, despite such challenges, on the balance the athletic competitions were memorable and the international response to the Olympics was positive. Dacosta concludes with some enlightening thoughts on the future of the Olympic Movement in Latin America, not least being an emphasis on youth participation and digital technology, both of which could point to possible host cities in the region in the future. Dacosta's chapter—fittingly enough authored by a scholar engaged in Olympic studies for more than four decades—provides an apt ending to the book, as it brings full circle reflections from the earliest Olympic forays in the region to his thoughts about future Olympic efforts.In his thoughtful conclusion, Christopher Gaffney reflects on each of the chapters and provides some generalizations. When he reminds readers that “sport is always political” (185), the statement is not merely a truism. Each of the chapters explores ways in which politics and sport intertwine, even when a concerted effort is made to extract politics from sport. Perhaps it is politics that breathes life into the Olympic Movement; without it, the sport, and the movement, dies. Gaffney also offers some sobering thoughts on the state of the Olympic Movement in Latin America. Interest in hosting the Olympics has flagged on a global scale, and representation and success in the Olympic competitions has declined for many Latin American nations. “It would appear,” Gaffney concludes, “that there are systemic problems in the governance of global sport as a whole and in Latin America in particular” (186). In these essays, as Gaffney notes, we find examples of successes and failures of individual athletes, teams, and national efforts; attempts to utilize sport for political and diplomatic gain by nations both weak and powerful, and by leaders in power and revolutionaries attempting to overthrow them; instances when the Olympic Movement inspired, motivated, and uplifted populations, and instances when participating in or hosting the Olympics brought pain and tragedy.It is a common critique of anthologies to note unevenness in the quality of chapters, and lapses in unity of message and tone. And while this volume does suffer in small measure from both flaws—discussed more in a moment—in general, the quality of research and writing is consistently high, and all of the chapters contribute meaningfully to the literature in the field. Latin American scholars in all fields confront an impossible task if they seek to apply sweeping generalizations across the entire region, as it stretches more than 6,000 miles from “tip to tail,” incorporating nations both large and small, and almost limitless variations in climate, economies, and social and cultural influences. One can hardly expect, then, a uniform approach to the Olympics and Olympism throughout the region. In truth, one of the strengths of this book is that it illustrates quite striking variations in how different nations viewed the Olympics and their own athletic aspirations within the movement. Particularly powerful are Sotomayor's revelations about Puerto Rican athletes and officials, who embraced the Olympics as a venue for individual achievement and recognition—and eventually national pride—but who also rejected the notion that Puerto Rican success could be co-opted by the United States. In Argentina, meanwhile, Perón fully embraced the Olympics as one avenue to demonstrate the cultural and organizational prowess of the nation, leading him to invest deeply in the nation's athletic programs. Perón's successors, however, deconstructed much of what had been built under the Perón regime, in an effort to purge the nation of his influence.The volume illustrates a range of approaches and formats. Most chapters are narrative at the core, based on archival and primary-source research and shedding new light on previously untold (or under-told) events and actors. A few of the chapters—notably Brewster and Brewster on Mexico, and Dacosta's chapter on Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Rio—are more works of synthesis, assessing other scholarly works and offering reflections. Others, including Yoder's and Rutter-Jensen's, are more theoretical and interpretive, while at the same time anchored by specific case studies. The outstanding conclusion by Gaffney offers further reflection on each of the chapters. While this breadth of approaches may be off-putting to some readers, those going into the work expecting them are likely to embrace the differences in tone, and the variety of conclusions drawn.While Olimpismo provides a worthy sampling of research on the Olympic Movement in Latin America, one can easily imagine Sotomayor and Torres (or other Olympic scholars) assembling another volume including nations or issues not covered in the chapters in this volume. Sotomayor's outstanding examination of Puerto Rico and its nationalist movement sparks similar thinking about Panama and its status in the Olympic universe. As another American “colony,” how were athletic competitions handled there, and are there similar examples of flag and anthem protests in Panama's Olympic past? Torres's chapter discussing the spectacular rise of Argentinian Olympians under Perón—and the subsequent decline of the Olympic Movement in Argentina in the post-Perón era—had me thinking about the rise of athletics in Jamaica, and the spectacular successes of Jamaican sprinters in particular. How much of that success has been by design, encouraged by government and sporting bodies? How much is a result of cultural and economic factors? And how much is simply divine intervention, and the coincidental rise to greatness of generational athletes like Usain Bolt, Merlene Ottey, and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price? While Yoder and Rutter-Jensen both address gender concerns in their chapters, there is room for deeper examination. How was the rise of female athletes greeted in other Latin American nations, many of them rooted in machismo culture? Yoder describes women serving as sports governors in the Balaguer regime, but in largely a ceremonial role and still confronting many barriers. How have women in other parts of the region achieved positions of power, and what challenges did they confront? How were athletes in Latin America affected by gender testing and other issues impacting inclusion and exclusion in Olympic sport? And finally, while most of the chapters in this volume focus on a particular issue within one nation, a transnational approach (like that adopted by Dacosta, and by Gaffney in the conclusion) is also rife with possibilities. One might consider the Olympic successes of the various football teams from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and other Latin American countries, or baseball teams from the Caribbean nations, or boxers from Cuba and Mexico. To what extent have regional ties such as Chile-Argentina, Brazil-Uruguay, and Venezuela-Colombia played a role in the evolution of the Olympic Movement? Central America in general is underrepresented in this volume and provides another opportunity for study. I offer these as merely a few possibilities for additional consideration, whether by the scholars in this volume or others in the future.On the whole, Sotomayor and Torres meet their goals as stated in the introduction: “to systematically study the Latin American and Caribbean Olympic Movement: its origins, characteristics, and impact locally and beyond . . . [and] to fill an important gap in the scholarly literature on the Latin American and Caribbean Olympic experience, broadly understood” (7). In meeting these goals, though, this collection achieves at least three other noteworthy things: (1) Readers of this book should find their curiosity piqued to further investigate the many compelling athletes and events mentioned only briefly, or explored only partially, in these chapters; (2) It provides a “road map” for future scholars in this field, who have in this volume a variety of research and writing techniques on which to base their own research; and, (3) It raises new and important questions about Olympism in Latin America, which should provide ample fodder for the editors and contributors—and other scholars—to grapple with for years to come.