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The main goals of this article are first to examine through Olympic sports journalism what hierarchies and categorisations of the global space and the people populating it were considered important to the national imagery in Finland at the beginning of the twentieth century and, secondly, to assess how the notion of race was intertwined with these categorisations. Sports journalism played an important role in Finland by constructing and legitimising a national imagery and by providing accounts of other races, cultures and nationalities that were considered`different' from us'. The article concludes that sports journalism at that time employed three major discursive practices that were aimed at constructing an image of a white, Western and Finnish nation living in the north. The`others' were placed in a hierarchy, in which their position was determined by their racial background and assumed similarities/ differences in appearance and behaviour as compared with Finnish males.Thus, man as we ®nd him in Africa has not progressed beyond his immediate existence. As soon as man emerges as a human being, he stands in opposition to nature, and it is this alone which makes him a human being. (

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In this article, we discuss Finnish rap music by dissecting its relations to various forms of humor and spatiality. While there exists a stereotypical understanding of the rap scene as a continuum of the heritage of a serious, masculine and even aggressive African-American ghetto culture, our purpose is to show how humor and parody have also prevailed within the scene. Through dissecting spatiality, contextuality and humor in Finnish music videos, we first focus on how the tradition of Americanism and African-American hip hop identity is parodied in Finnish rap visualizations. Second, we discuss how rap is localized in humorous ways to fit Finnish conceptual and aesthetic categories. Third, we show how humor allows artists to create temporary hybrid identities for themselves and mix fantasy and foreign cultural influences in their rap videos. The research material consists of Finnish rap videos that were screened at the Oulu Music Video Festival during 2000-2010.