Chapter 1 -- “ ‘Big does not even begin to describe her enduring impact’: Global sports development and China as sporting superpower” by Oliver Rick & Longxi Li
Chapter 2 -- “Five teams, one world: Global audiences for the Chinese Professional Baseball League in the wake of COVID-19” by Nick Bowman, Alex Hsu, & Lindsey Resignato
Chapter 3 -- “Country of Origin Bias in Portrayal of East Asian and Asian American Athletes: The NBA-Hong Kong Episode” by Olga Vilceanu & Julia Richmond
Part II: Sports media portrayals of East Asian athletes and leagues
Chapter 4 -- “ ‘No Attack, No Chance’: Takuma Sato’s Race Against the Trope of ‘Bad Asian Drivers’ ” by Dung Q. Tran
Chapter 5 -- “Intersecting race, gender and sports: How Japanese news media depict tennis stars Naomi Osaka and Kei Nishikori” by Steve Bien-Aimé & Yasue Kuwahara
Chapter 6 -- “Making Sense of Korean Baseball: Articulating Race, Gender, and Cultural Hegemony in the North American Media Coverage of Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) during the 2020 Baseball Season” by Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun à Ask authors if they’re willing to add two or three paragraphs of about what Koreans know and think about the broadcasts?
Chapter 7 -- “Framing KBO: ESPN, media discourse, and the cultural identity of Korean baseball” by Travis R. Bell & Taeyeon Oh
Part III: Sports media portrayals of North American athletes of Asian descent
Chapter 8 -- “The post-hoc Canadian Dream: Canadian newspapers’ representation of the two ‘China Clippers’ ” by Chen Chen
Chapter 9 -- “Linsanity and its aftermath: Sports journalism framing of Jeremy Lin” by Bill Cassidy
Chapter 10 -- “Portrayals of Asian Athletes in NBC’s Primetime Broadcast of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics” by Paul J. MacArthur & Lauren Reichart Smith
Part IV: Finding self amid holding multiple identities
Chapter 11 -- “In-between Korean nationalism and U.S. exceptionalism: Chloe Kim’s return to South Korea as a U.S. national athlete” by Seonah Kim
Chapter 12 -- “Contesting ‘Lin’inality: The evolution of Jeremy Lin’s racial subjectivity” by Stephen Cho Suh, Alex Manning, and Kyle Green
Chapter 13 -- “Naomi Osaka, Racial Hybridity, and Black Femininity in Tennis” by Shearon Roberts
Steve Bien-Aimé is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Kentucky University, USA. His research interests include race and gender portrayals in sports and news media. His work has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Newspaper Research Journal, International Journal of Sport Communication and Journal of Information Policy. Prior to receiving his doctorate, Bien-Aimé worked as a copy editor at The News Journal in Delaware and The Baltimore Sun and served in a variety of functions at FOXSports.com in Los Angeles, departing as deputy NFL editor.
Cynthia Wang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, USA. She is interested in the impact of digital communication technologies and social media on social relations, cultural practices, and power dynamics, particularly framed in perspectives of time and temporality. Her work can be found in journals such as Social Media + Society and Time & Society, and she is an author and co-editor of the books Indie Games in the Digital Age (2020) and Communicating Across Differences (2021) She is also the founder of The arqive, a digital LGBTQ storytelling map.
This book highlights inconsistencies within the field of sports scholarship and provides an opportunity to open up and extend conversations about the intersection of sports media and race — particularly surrounding athletes of East Asian descent. Despite the growing influence of East Asian and Asian American/Canadian athletes, they are still underrepresented in Western media and in scholarship. This anthology adds much-needed literature to sports, popular culture, East Asian, and Asian American studies. The prominence of sports in global popular culture makes the intersections explored in this collection a crucial addition to existing conversations about both sports and East Asian/Asian American/Canadian studies.