Asian sport celebrity: The nexus of race, ethnicity, and regionality

Abstract

Drawing on P. David Marshall’s understanding of the celebrity, David Andrews and Steve Jackson delineated sport celebrities as ‘significant public entities responsible for structuring meaning, crystallizing ideologies, and offering contextually grounded maps for private individuals as they navigate contemporary conditions of existence’. This interpretation alludes to an important role for sport celebrities in linking the public projection of particular values, desires, and personalities and the private experience in association with, or consumption of, such values, desires, and personalities in everyday life. Like classic celebrity figures in cinema and films, the sport celebrity is constructed through the historical development of mass media including newspapers, radio, television and, now more pervasively, the internet. While the sport celebrity has become a popular topic in sport studies, there has been little attention devoted to an understanding of the commonality and difference in how Asian athletes may embrace, embody, reproduce, or re-code the notion of sport celebrity. With the emergence of more than a few world-class Asian athletes in the twenty-first century, this phenomenon demands scholarly attention. As such, Asian Sport Celebrity provides the first collection of its kind to take an in-depth and holistic look at a range of socio-cultural issues related to the Asian sport celebrity including globalization, transnationalism, migration, post/coloniality, gender politics, spectacle, citizenship, and nationalism