‘Feeble Bengalis’ and ‘big Africans’: African players in Bengali club football

Studies of contemporary globalization have tended to concentrate on the cultural and material influence of the ‘West’ on the rest of the world. By focussing on global networks which are not putatively mediated by the ‘West’ we arrive at a more nuanced and complex understanding of the phenomenon of globalization. Instead of seeing it as a tendency towards the growing homogenization of local cultural identities, we argue that globalization creates a complex set of mutually synchronized local identities that sustain exploitative trans‐local flows of goods and people. The culture of African player recruitment in Bengali club football brings this out amply. Players are recruited through an exploitative set of structures of trans‐continental dimensions and by their existence exploit both the African players recruited as well as the Bengali aspirants. Naturalistic arguments about Africans being naturally bigger and better built than the feeble Bengalis helps naturalize the socially inequitable political economy that is at the heart of the physical diminution of Bengali players as well as maintain the African players in conditions of abject poverty.