Don't miss the first Young Academic Alumni Lecture of 2025 with Maurice Rippel '19, currently a visiting instructor of gender and sexuality studies here at Haverford!

Held annually during the last weekend in April, the Penn Relays Carnival holds the distinction of being one of the largest events in terms of spectatorship (over 110,000 spectators in the span of 4 days), and oldest (first held in 1895) in athletics. A speculative engagement with the stories these sources hold yields an understanding of how the narrative (and reality) of Jamaican dominance reproduces racial ideology of Black physical superiority and “silences” entangled histories of colonialism and development in the guise of sports diplomacy. 

The Penn Relays Carnival presents a unique opportunity to better understand: how the technological innovations of modernity, fueled by the structures of racial capitalism, have transformed physical, affective and political movement culture. In this talk, Rippel utilizes a multimodal ethnographic approach to chart the physical, spatial, and affective dimensions of the “prep-to-pro” pipeline. Rippel posits that it is the “quiet violence” of innovations such as standardized distance and time or compulsory participation in the mass spectacle of the sporting event, which shapes, and dictates the outcomes of Black life in Africa and the Diaspora.

Cosponsored by the Libraries and the Gender and Sexuality Studies and English departments.