Asian American Sporting Cultures - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1479884693 ISBN 13: 9781479884698

Publisher: NYU Press, 2016

Synopsis

Asian American Sporting Cultures delves into the American sports arena to explore the long history of Asian American sporting cultures and considers how identities and communities are negotiated on sporting fields. Through a close examination of Asian American sporting cultures ranging from boxing and basketball to spelling bees and wrestling, the contributors reveal the intimate connection between sport and identity formation. Sport plays a special role in the processes of citizen-making and of the policing of national and diasporic bodies. It is thus one key area in which Asian American stereotypes may be challenged, negotiated, and destroyed as athletic performances create multiple opportunities for claiming American identities. This volume incorporates work on Pacific Islander, South Asian, and Southeast Asian Americans as well as East Asian Americans, and explores how sports are gendered, including examinations of Asian American men’s attempts to claim masculinity through sporting cultures as well as the “Orientalism” evident in discussions of mixed martial arts as practiced by Asian American female fighters. This American story illuminates how marginalized communities perform their American-ness through co-ethnic and co-racial sporting spaces.

About this title

Review:

"A wonderful read for and about sports’s observers, participants, scholars, and fans. With a wide variety of approaches ranging from media analysis to autoethnography, this collection of smart and accessible essays provides a great model for thinking about sports―and through sports about ethnicity, race, and gender in specific local, transnational, and historical contexts."-Erica Rand,author of Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice

"Sports is one of the most important arenas of socialization and popular culture, and Asian Americans have often been seen as having a disjunctive or non-existent relationship to it. This sui generis collection shows in unexpected and startling ways how a long but under-examined history of Asian American sporting culture―from participation and competition to spectatorship and fandom―fundamentally reshapes allegories of national belonging and race at the heart of athletics."-David L. Eng,University of Pennsylvania

About the Author:

Stanley I. Thangaraj is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at City College of New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1479884693
• ISBN 13: 9781479884698
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Thangaraj Stanley I., Arnaldo Constancio, Chin Christina B.