Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity by Stanley I. Thangaraj (review)

Media and academic analyses of U.S. sport in general, and basketball in particular, rarely examine the participation of Asian Americans in athletics and the social importance of sports in the construction of personal and collective identities among Asian Americans. This is rather ironic, given the centrality of sports in U.S. popular culture and the fact that Asian Americans today compose the fastest-growing racial group in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Furthermore, the globalization of the National Basketball Association (NBA) since the late 1980s has made basketball one of the world's most popular sports. Nevertheless, basketball is still commonly perceived in the United States as a primarily "black sport" associated mostly with African American athletes and a smaller number of white players. As such, Stanley Thangaraj's Desi Hoop Dreams is a much-needed scholarly work on basketball in American society that does not foreground either African American or white participants.

Instead, Thangaraj examines the role that participation in both pickup basketball games and organized basketball tournaments plays in the construction of racial/ethnic and gender identities among South Asian American players, who self-identify as "Desis." Thangaraj conducted participant observation at pickup basketball games at various gyms in Atlanta and at more formally structured Indo-Pak basketball tournaments in Chicago between 2006 and 2009 to obtain qualitative data for this pioneering research on Desi basketball. As part of his research, he also conducted multiple ethnographic interviews and compiled oral histories from numerous current and former basketball players, along with some tournament organizers, of South Asian heritage. An avid basketball fan and player, Thangaraj is of Tamil South Indian heritage and has participated in Desi basketball leagues. He occasionally draws upon his own experiences to elaborate upon the theoretical points he attempts to convey throughout Desi Hoop Dreams––an approach he refers to as an "experiential ethnography" (20).

Thangaraj's ethnography investigates how basketball players from various South Asian ethnic, national, religious, and social class backgrounds utilize basketball to construct meaningful identities for themselves as Desi-American men that counter the hegemonic stereotypical perceptions of South Asian American males either as innately intelligent "model minority" geeks and nerds (who are thus presumed to lack physical strength and athletic prowess) or as menacing "terrorists" in the post-9/11 social climate. Both stereotypes construct South Asian American males as "perpetually foreign" and outside the boundaries of the imagined American national identity that privileges white Christian bodies as the epitome of "Americanness." Thangaraj notes that basketball is a quintessential American sport that also heavily incorporates elements of working-class, urban African American cultural stylistics through the sport's cultural associations with hip-hop music and African American urban fashions in footwear and clothing. As such, participation in basketball provides young South Asian American men a venue by which they can simultaneously demonstrate their "Americanness"––and counter perceptions of them as "perpetually foreign"––while engaging in a physically tough sport that shatters notions of Desis as physically weak "model minorities." This enables South Asian American men to construct distinct racial/ethnic and masculine identities that redefine traditional notions of Desi and American identities.

An intersectional analysis of racial/ethnic, gender, social class, and sexual dynamics informs Thangaraj's work, as he highlights some of the "intra-ethnic Othering" that occurs among South Asian Americans. For example, Thangaraj notes that most South Asian Americans generally fall into two broad categories based on their timing and manner of arrival in the United States: highly educated, upper-middle-class professionals and their descendants whose entry was facilitated by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act's skilled workers provisions, and less affluent post-1980 South Asian immigrants and refugees who entered under family reunification provisions. These social class differences, at times, lead to internal constructs of differentiation and racialization by...