The Meanings of Manu: Style, Race, and Globalization in the Culture of Basketball

Abstract

Can a basketball player be said to “mean” something? And, if so, in what sense or senses? A significant body of work in sports studies has persuasively argued that athletes can and do indeed “mean,” at least in one sense. Thus, Professors Susan Birrell and Mary McDonald noted, already in 1999, that “our attention has been drawn to a new form of critical sport analysis: articles that conceptualize particular sporting events or celebrities as texts and offer readings of those texts” (283). Professors Birrell and McDonald elaborate on the features and value of such analyses: Critical analyses of the narratives surrounding events … and sport personalities…offer unique points of access to the constitutive meanings and power relations of the larger worlds we inhabit. We find this move to read non-literary cultural forms as texts significant because it ties sport scholars to other critical scholars in terms of the theoretical and methodological choices we make as cultural critics. And we find the analyses themselves compelling because they concern the popular yet deceptively innocent cultural form of sport. (283)