Caribbean Studies Seminar | “The Youth Ambassadors of our Country”: Little League Baseball and Postcolonial Nation Building on Curaçao
Online: 25 Nov 2025 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm.
Speaker: Jan Bant (Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Curaçao)
This paper studies the representation and the reception of the Curaçaoan youth baseball team who won the 2004 Little League World Series, the world’s largest youth baseball tournament. Studies on Caribbean sports history have largely overlooked the Dutch Caribbean, despite sport’s important role in the region. Furthermore, baseball plays an important role in identity formation and self-representations on Curaçao but there is little research about the sport and its role in everyday life. By analyzing oral history interviews and newspaper articles, Bant argues that the 2004 victory played an important role in Curaçaoan nation building and national unity at a moment when the island was in the process of becoming autonomous. At the same time, however, this effect was short-lived, and the victory had little fundamental impact on Curaçaoan society. More broadly, this paper also shows that feelings of “national” identification do not necessarily need to be linked to an autonomous nation state. […]
OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
REGARDS CNRS (18 de noviembre de 2025). Caribbean Studies Seminar | “The Youth Ambassadors of our Country”: Little League Baseball and Postcolonial Nation Building on Curaçao. Redial & Ceisal. Recuperado 11 de febrero de 2026 de https://doi.org/10.58079/155tz






