NBA Saviours and the Racialisation of India
The Postcolonial Sporting Body: Contemporary Indian Investigations
ISBN: 978-1-80455-783-9, eISBN: 978-1-80455-782-2
Publication date: 30 September 2024
Abstract
This chapter argues that the National Basketball Association (NBA) and American mainstream sporting media produce and mediate a representation of India as underdeveloped and as an unmodern subject/nation as a way to enter the Indian basketball marketplace. The chapter emphasizes that the NBA produces the attendant discourse of the ‘white saviour’ through a multi-pronged process. The chapter shows how it draws upon the legacies of British colonialism, along with the expansion of US imperialism, to construct India in particular racialised ways as backward, unmodern, and not cosmopolitan. In this respect, Black NBA players’ modes of basketball reach India as part of the racialisation of Indian basketball. Finally, the chapter engages with the larger global circuits of race and racialisation to understand how India is then imagined within the US sporting landscape. This chapter underscores the capitalist desires of the NBA alongside the desires of South Asian Americans for an Indian basketball hero. Both desires, institutional and personal, showcase racialisation at work. The NBA uses the language and performance of Judeo-Christian modernity through NBA players in India to racialise Indians as in need of NBA mentorship and upliftment. On other hand, diasporic Indians in the US dream of an Indian NBA player as a way to unravel, destabilise, and challenge their racialisation as hypo-masculine subjects. These competing forms of racialisation provide important information on the global flows of capital, desire, and sport.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
I am deeply thankful to Veena Mani and Mathangi Krishnamurthy for the opportunity to present in this ground-breaking and important book. I am honoured to be a part of this compilation. I am grateful for the most generous and productive commentary and suggestions by the two anonymous reviewers. I love you, Alena, Jeya, and Louis Thangaraj.
Citation
Thangaraj, S. (2024), "NBA Saviours and the Racialisation of India", Mani, V. and Krishnamurthy, M. (Ed.) The Postcolonial Sporting Body: Contemporary Indian Investigations (Research in the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 20), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 185-206. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1476-285420240000020011
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2024 Stanley Thangaraj