Yellow bodies, black sweat: Yao Ming, Ichiro Suzuki, and global sport

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between Asian and Black athletes, global multiculturalism, and sport internationalism. Ichiro Suzuki and Yao Ming represent in clear ways the figuration of the Asian male body as both cultural phenomena and transnational commodity. This article describes the marked turn from the Asian male body as an unattractive representative for marketing commodity exchanges to an imported spectacle reproducing National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball transnational capital. However, it does not simply offer a conventional study of the political economy involved in the global expansion of popular sports. Rather, it attempts to illustrate how Asian men in US sports presuppose and indeed attempt to produce Asian masculinity through inverting the bodily emasculation of Asian American men. Throughout this article, I detail the ways in which popular sports has been racialized as a “Black” space of colonial fantasy and fears, and how Asian male athletes break down the fixity of this raciological thinking. The Black male body came to dominate celebrity and hero worship, an identificatory process that Norman Mailer once coined as “the white negro” or to use a famous slogan from a popular sports drink: Everyone wants to “Be Like Mike.” This article describes the ‘fetishization” of the Black male body and how representations of Ichiro and Yao subvert the fixity of Afro-Asian racial hierarchy.