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This article advances a twofold argument regarding the intersection of globalization, sport, and race. Such is world football's popularity, first, that the sport itself is now a rhetoric in its own right. So freighted is football with internationalist associations that this rhetoric has been enlisted in support of various political invocations of the global from the middle decades of the 20th century forward, as the following abbreviated case studies of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama will demonstrate. Second, football's unique transnational reach has simultaneously yielded a self-negating rhetoric of race. The global paradigm by which the sport is typically referenced has eroded race as a category of cultural analysis-this, despite football's obvious dependence on racially heterogeneous modes of production and reception. Football has overcome the color line in neither society nor sport as a result. The color line instead has been reified through transnational abstraction, obscured on the strength of football's insistent internationalism.

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American author Henry David Thoreau's transcendental writings are aesthetically “shallow.” To read Thoreau's signature works is to locate interpretive meaning elsewhere than the resonant “depths” with which we long have associated the transcendental text. These are the implications for literary transcendentalism generally in the wake of our recent critical turn toward “surface reading.” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus write on the one hand in the journal Representations of the weakening hold that “symptomatic reading” now has on critics who, from the 1970s forward, have accepted the “metalanguages” of psychoanalysis and Marxism as interpretive bases for seeking the “hidden, repressed, deep” meaning of texts. On the other hand, Best and Marcus contend that, “in the last decade or so, we have been drawn to modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb their depths.” Whether we can or should agree with their proffered explanation for this “depth”-evading turn—“at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century,” they write, “so much seems to be on the surface”—is a matter that resides beyond the scope of this essay. This article's informing concern instead is how students of nineteenth-century American romanticism negotiate a surface reading practice that denies the very “depths” of subjectivity, interiority, and symbolic, transcendent correspondence that long have been thought to constitute Romantic meaning.