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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity by Stanley I. Thangaraj Harjant S. Gill Stanley I. Thangaraj, Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 288 pp. Based on over four years of research among the South Asian Basketball leagues in Atlanta, Stanley Thangaraj’s Desi Hoop Dreams is an insightful exploration into the processes of identity formation for young South Asian men growing up in suburban America. Basketball, and practices related to the sport, serves as a crucial site for gender development for the second generation South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi) men. Their on- and off-court performances are motivated by the desire to repudiate being stereotyped as tepid and nerdy by demonstrating their physical prowess and athletic abilities, a practice Thangaraj refers to as “manning up,” as they attempt to “fashion their own version of American masculinity” (5). In Chapter 1, Thangaraj introduces us to core members of the Atlanta Outkasts, a cohort of young South Asian men, mostly Muslim, who met playing basketball in local mosques and community centers, and are now part of Atlanta’s diverse pick-up basketball circuit. These players do not all fit seamlessly into the middle class, professional immigrants who have lived in Atlanta since 1960s and that make up the more visible diasporic community celebrated for its achievements as the respectable “model minority” (40). Yet they are confronted with the gendered stereotypes associated with Asian immigrants, including being portrayed as effeminate in popular culture for their passive obedience to the status quo and often aspiring to be just like their white counterparts (63). Instead, South Asian men most active in Atlanta’s basketball circuits belong to working class families, many of whom arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, and are still [End Page 957] striving to achieve the elusive middle class status. Basketball courts serve as space where young South Asian men simultaneously work through their feelings of inadequacy as sons of recent immigrants and their frustrations with their racialization within the popular American cultural imagination that often stereotypes them as spelling bee champions or terrorists (42). In a style reminiscent of Mira Nair’s seminal film Mississippi Masala (1991) that subverts popular conceptions of race and nationhood, Chapters 2 and 3 complicate conventional notions of race and belonging by exploring the relationships and dynamics at play when brown and black bodies occupy the same court. Thangaraj notes that South Asian players claim American-ness by “embodying black stylistics” and consuming African American cultural forms like basketball, hip-hop, and rap music (38–39). In doing so, they challenge societal expectations for South Asians to follow “a linear progression to whiteness” (63). While their on-court performance serves as a source of empowerment in resisting stereotypes, the players often stop short of reaching a broader understanding of racial dynamics at play in everyday life in the American South (39). Instead, players recast the basketball court as an exclusively South Asian space by excluding African American players from their teams and restricting their access to the court (63, 106). These chapters paint a complex picture of how the court serves as a microcosm for broader racial dynamics playing out between different working class communities who access public sporting arenas and other recreational spaces in Atlanta (54–57). Thangaraj notes that while African American players practice exclusion of South Asians by not picking them for their teams, South Asian players practice exclusion by using capital and social networks to “privatize” public gyms, blocking access to those who cannot afford to pay the reservation fees (54–57). In this sense, middle and working class South Asian communities in Atlanta are often “complicit in the displacement of (poor and working class) African Americans” (47). Ironically, while the South Asian players seem largely indifferent to African American and other communities’ histories and experiences of similar oppression, they evoke their own histories of marginalization by referencing ethnic and caste-based identities in their team names, using terms such as “Outkasts” and “Untouchables” (87). Drawing liberally on South Asian cultural forms, they deploy Hindi and Urdu epithets like “Kallu...