Asian American Sporting Cultures

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 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.

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 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.

For more than a century, sporting spectacles, media coverage, and popular audiences have staged athletics in black and white. Commercial, media, and academic accounts have routinely erased, excluded, ignored, and otherwise made absent the Asian American presence in sport. This book seeks to redress this pattern of neglect, presenting a comprehensive perspective on the history and significance of Asian American athletes, coaches, and teams in North America. The contributors interrogate the sociocultural contexts in which Asian Americans lived and played, detailing the articulations of power and possibility, difference and identity, representation and remembrance that have shaped the means and meanings of Asian Americans playing sport in North America. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the Asian American experience, ethnic relations, and the history of sport.

This updated edition explores the vibrant community of Asian Pacific Americans through sports. This book tells intriguing tales of athletes, such as aquatic legend Duke Kahanamoku and diving gold medalist Vicki Manalo, but has been expanded to include Tiger Woods, Tim Lincicum, Troy Polamalu and other current athletes.

"Modern sports" were introduced to Asia in the late nineteenth century as an innovation from the West, concurrently with the development of modern society in Asia. This book traces the historical developments of sporting cultures in Asia in specific local contexts – including Singapore, China, Myanmar, Taiwan, the Philippines, and India – and their intersections with larger social developments of colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism, and the building of modern Asia and its place in a globalized world. The case studies herein present the social history of modern team sports with standardized rules such as basketball and cricket, and less familiar sports such as fives and chinlone, as they vacillate between global and local perspectives. This book also shows that modern sports have had an important influence on the makeup of everyday life in Asia, and the essays here also consider sports’ impact on gender, body culture, and celebrity culture, among other concerns. This book painstakingly bridges the gaps between Asian Studies and Sports Studies in a way that reflects the historicity and multiplicity of sports in Asian societies. By adopting multi-disciplinary approaches, this book innovatively offers significant intersection between sociology, cultural studies and Asian studies of sport in Asia. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

This book highlights inconsistencies within the field of sports scholarship and provides an opportunity to open up and extend conversations about the intersection of sports media and race — particularly surrounding athletes of East Asian descent. Despite the growing influence of East Asian and Asian American/Canadian athletes, they are still underrepresented in Western media and in scholarship. This anthology adds much-needed literature to sports, popular culture, East Asian, and Asian American studies. The prominence of sports in global popular culture makes the intersections explored in this collection a crucial addition to existing conversations about both sports and East Asian/Asian American/Canadian studies.

This is the first book in English that adopts a critical socio-historical perspective to examine the important themes and challenges of Asian indigenous culture and sport. Written by leading sport historians and scholars, the chapters in the book contain real-life case studies and comparative studies in Asian sport. The book examines the history, contemporary governance and management, gender, and ethnic issues embedded in folk sports and physical culture, and the challenges faced by Asian indigenous sports and their evolution. Based on cutting-edge research from China, Japan, Korea, Israel and beyond, this book will be a valuable addition to any course in sport history, sport culture, sport development and sport sociology. It will stimulate those who are seeking ways to promote and develop indigenous sports, from intangible cultural heritage protection to global sport partnership. It will also be of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners, who wish to understand the changing face of Asian society and Asian indigenous sport. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

When Jeremy Lin began to knock down shots for the New York Knicks in 2012, many Americans became aware for the first time that Asian Americans actually play basketball. Indeed, long before Lin shook up the NBA, Asian Americans played the game with passion and skill, and many excelled at high school, college and professional hoops. This comprehensive history of Asian American basketball discusses how these players first found a sense of community in the game, and competed despite an atmosphere of anti-Asian bigotry in historical and contemporary America.