COMM2283 · Communication

Asian Americans in Sport and Society

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

This course may be used to satisfy one of four electives required within the Communication major.In the mid-twentieth century, sport was a bastion of white supremacy, and it embodied such U.S national bodily ideals as white, heterosexual, Christian, muscular, and male. Histories of racial exclusion, racist violence, gendered policing, and sexual regulations positioned African-American men as outside the normative abilities of white men. In this respect, sport was a microcosm of the racial nation, with the language of citizenship and racial resistance coded within black-white discourse; however, this dichotomy failed to account for the long histories of Asian Americans in the United States. Asian-American sporting cultures trouble the current racial synchronicity between sport and nation while illuminating multiple performances of "belonging." This course highlights the diversity of Asian-American communities and aims to decipher how the ordinary practices of sporting cultures can offer extraordinary knowledge about U.S. society.