“Liting it up”: Popular Culture, Indo-Pak Basketball, and South Asian American Institutions

Stanley Ilango Thangaraj

doi:10.5130/ccs.v2i2.1532

Abstract

South Asian American participants of a co-ethnic basketball league, known as Indo-Pak Basketball, utilized urban basketball vernacular through the phrase “liting it up” to identify individuals scoring points in great numbers. The person “liting it up” becomes visible and receives recognition. Accordingly, I want to “lite up” the scholarship on South Asian America whereby situating South Asian American religious sites and cultural centers as key arenas for “Americanization” through US popular culture. I situate sport as a key element of popular culture through which South Asian American communities work out, struggle through, and contest notions of self. Informed by an Anthropology of Sport, ethnography of South Asian American communities in Atlanta takes place alongside an examination of the North American Indo-Pak Basketball circuit. Accordingly, my findings indicate that such community formation has also taken shape at the intersections of institutions, gender, and sexuality whereby excluding queers, women, and other communities of color.

Highlights

Background on South Asian America SouthAsians in the Americas have faced various forms of displacement from the US cultural fabric through the stereotypical figures of the licentious “Hindoo” (Shah 2005), the idealised “model minority” (Prashad 2000), and the recalcitrant “terrorist/Muslim” (Puar 2007)
South Asian American institutions do not rely on cultural nostalgia associated with South Asia—such as bhangra dance forms and Bollywood film—but instead use local sporting spaces of US basketball to pass along cultural systems of meaning and identity around “South Asian American-ness.”. These sensibilities shape South Asian American-ness with particular cultural contours. Key among these is male dominance and a heterosexual masculinity which, as this paper shows, limits full participation of female and male basketballers within the South Asian American community
Origins of Indo-Pak Basketball in the US various sporting regimes exist in South Asian America, this paper examines basketball cultural practices and the ubiquitous nature of basketball in the lives of these second generation South Asian Americans

Summary

Introduction

Background on South Asian America SouthAsians in the Americas have faced various forms of displacement from the US cultural fabric through the stereotypical figures of the licentious “Hindoo” (Shah 2005), the idealised “model minority” (Prashad 2000), and the recalcitrant “terrorist/Muslim” (Puar 2007). South Asian American participants in Indo-Pak Basketball either encountered the racialising discourses mentioned above or had ancestors who did. The term “Indo-Pak Basketball” references Indians and Pakistanis, the participants in this South Asian-only league come from Canada and the US with ancestral ties to many places including India and Pakistan. The parents of these players came to North America through multiple immigration waves from the early 1900s onwards. Some of the ethnic Punjabis (from the region of India and Pakistan known as Punjab before independence from the British) moved down from Vancouver, as a result of persecution, to places in California; they formed their own bachelor communities and married Mexican women, but their grandchildren do not play in Indo-Pak Basketball (Leonard 1992)

Methods

Conclusion