Asian American Sporting Cultures [Hardcover]

Delves into the long history of Asian American sporting cultures, considering 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 mens 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.

A wonderful read for and about sportss 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 sportsand through sports about ethnicity, race, and gender in specific local, transnational, and historical contexts. 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 culturefrom participation and competition to spectatorship and fandomfundamentally resl˜