Affect and sport in South Asian American advertising

In this article I consider how sport and celebrity athletes are strategically used in advertising tailored toward South Asians in the diaspora, what I refer to as 'South Asian American advertising'. I discuss how ad executives construct and deploy affect in advertisements to resignify meanings linked to particular sports and analyze the significance of celebrity athletes in creating new diasporic affiliations and identities. Although sport and affect are not generally considered together, in advertising, they can converge to create particular types of brand identities and messaging that appeal to South Asian Americans. Through analysis of affect in ethnographic data collected in Asian American ad agencies in New York City, and in advertisements, I discuss how these ads not only nurture a sense of diasporic collectivity, but also contribute to the construction of South Asian Americans as what I call 'model consumers' in a neoliberal era of consumption, and thus contribute to the reformulation of race for Asian Americans.