European football worlds and youth identifications in Kenya

Abstract

This article examines the various ways in which the phenomenon of English football, beamed across the world via satellite television, provides a canvas upon which many Kenyan youth can confront their lived experiences and desired aspirations. Drawing on theoretical tools fashioned by discourses on identities – pan-Africanist and global – together with dynamics of youth and popular cultural productions, I demonstrate how football as a leisure activity allows the youths a chance to imagine themselves as being more than what they are in material and socio-economic terms. This, I hold, is part of their larger aspirations of assuming global and cosmopolitan identities.