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.
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 lă+
![Asian American Sporting Cultures [Hardcover]](/itemImage/2/2/7/3/2_196837.jpg)