Abstract
The intertwined legacy of sports and racism has been a consistent feature in the maintenance of social power, cultural politics, and racial inequality in modern history. Despite providing a critical platform for individual or collective national expressions, sports (as a game and a stage) have also been deployed as strategic tools to articulate a representational vision for western neo-colonial ideology. The aim of this article is to critically examine the pervasive media narratives that have shaped western cultural popular discourse about Qatar's FIFA World Cup as the embodiment of the Arab-Muslim oriental other. Relying on postcolonial theory and discursive analysis, this article argues that the racialized cultural disparagement of the ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ Qatari identity in some popular media narratives during the 2022 FIFA World Cup was in fact a form of neo-colonial anxiety intended to disavow the ‘menacing presence’ of Europe's cultural other within its presumed civilizational domain.
Published Version
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