Shifting the 'White Gaze' on Black Bodies in Philippine Collegiate Basketball: Toward a Structural Understanding of Covert Racism in the Global South

In a postcolonial Global South context, the representation of race seems to persist and is manifested through the media scripting of Black African sporting bodies that in effect extends the deployment of the “White gaze,” the effort to explore the Black body within the context of white supremacy. Through a qualitative content analysis of media texts in the Philippines, the paper illustrates how in a postmodern context racial stereotypes literally play out within Philippine collegiate basketball framed by the “White gaze” that expresses a covert form of racism that supports an essentialist deployment of categories of race. The paper ends with a call for praxis that critiques subtle racialized ideologies and institutionalized racism in a postmodern Global South context

The Azkals fever phenomenon: redefining the historiography and setting a research agenda for the role of soccer in Philippine society

In 2010, soccer scaled new heights in the archipelago nation of the Philippines, as the sport firmly re-established a following in the otherwise basketball-crazy country. The Azkals–the moniker given to the national men's soccer team–fashioned a historic achievement at the regional AFF Suzuki Cup in 2010 in generating a soccer frenzy in the Philippines, a mania labelled the ‘Azkals Fever’, which increased consciousness of the sport in the country. Based entirely on content analysis of both print and electronic literature over a two-year period (2010–2012), this paper highlights how the ‘Azkals Fever’ phenomenon has come to redefine the country's historiography. Given the lack of scholarly studies on soccer in the Philippines, this paper argues for a research agenda on the sport–a position that is in agreement with Ben-Porat's (2000) suggestion that the history of sport is very much the history of the society in which it is engulfed