The Smell of Communities to Come: Jeremy Lin and Post-racial Desire

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In this article, I engage with the intense fascination with National Basketball Association (NBA) basketball star Jeremy Lin and read Linsanity (as it has been dubbed by the North American media) as a flashpoint for a complex set of racialised histories and discourses. The illegibility of Lin as an Asian American athlete raises provocative questions about how racial logics and representations tend to rely on the visual as a site and set of metaphors. I then introduce the possibility of thinking about race, social intimacy and the Asian in terms of smell in an effort to complicate the way that we conceptualise race and imagine publics.