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Publication date: 30 September 2024

Stanley Thangaraj

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…

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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The Postcolonial Sporting Body: Contemporary Indian Investigations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-782-2

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