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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Race
• Social Intimacy
• Asian
• Sport
• Smell
• Post-racial Discourse

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a Simon Fraser University, Vice-President Research 4A grant in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Notes

[1] See, for example, Hua Hsu's (2012) ‘Love Jeremy Lin Without Asian, Harvard, NBA Stereotypes’, Marie Myung-Ok Lee's (2012) ‘What everyone gets wrong about Jeremy Lin’, Oliver Wang's (2012) ‘Living with Linsanity’ posting, Jeff Yang's (n.d.) articles on Lin at The Wall Street Journal, Phil Yu's postings on his blog Angry Asian Man (n.d.) and Dave Zirin's (2012) ‘Jeremy Lin: Taking the Weight’ for a small sample of the online discussions about Lin and the subject of race. A recent documentary Linsanity [dir. Evan Jackson Leong (2012)] recently premiered at the Sundance Festival and a recently released collection of essays, We'll Always Have Linsanity (Appleman et al. 2013), demonstrates an ongoing interest in Lin as a sports and cultural phenomenon.

[2] Key examples include Trinh T. Minh-ha's (1989) Woman, Native, Other, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's (2003) Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, and Intense Proximity (both the exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Centre national des arts plastiques 2012) which explores ethnography and visual culture in a globalised context. This is, of course, not just a problem for visual culture but one that also emerges in other critical and creative spaces. In the Canadian context, two notable critical works are Ty and Verduyn's (2008) collection Beyond Autoethnography which focuses primarily on Asian Canadian literature and includes an essay on visual art, and Rinaldo Walcott's (2003) Black Like Who? which uses literature, film, music and media to engage with representations of blackness that are ‘situated on a continuum that runs from the invisible to the hyper-visible’ (44).

[3] While this essay has focused primarily on the negative odours associated with the figure of the Asian within the context of racialization and racism, there are, of course, many positive ways of exploring smell as well. The pleasant and familiar scents of food, skin, clothing and spaces are just a few examples that frame the Asian in terms of desirable odour.