Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the idea that Senegalese athletes are predisposed to success in the NBA which contrasts with the public fear of uncouth African Americans. 'Black' basketball players are commodified through a dialectic of race where Africa figures prominently.

Paper long abstract:

As we know, the concept of the "fetish" first arose during the fifteenth century in a west African commercial zone frequented by Portuguese and African merchants. The pidgin term fetisso was coined as part of a European commentary on the gold statuettes and assorted ritual paraphernalia, Portuguese traders believed, Africans misrecognized as having mystical propensities instead of belonging properly to the sphere of capitalist value.

For reasons having to do with its theoretical signficance and its location in an Atlantic sphere of exchange, this concept is of crucial importance: in treating the commodification of black basketball players as a historical process structured by economic and symbolic forms of value, this paper examines efforts to recruit Senegalese athletes by building upon the idea that a "fetish" effectively bridges both domains. In doing so, I suggest the way Senegalese players are fetishized has as much to do with what recruiters no longer want to see in the NBA as what they hope to introduce to it. The quest to find a basketball player who fits the definition of a "natural"—a player with certain gifts with which he is endowed by nature, but which he improves upon by developing a disciplined work ethic—has arisen during a moment when the NBA is seemingly plagued by African American players (like Allen Iverson or Ron Artest) who are rowdy and rambunctious, from a certain perspective. In exploring these assumptions, this paper paves the way for a view of the commodified basketball player as structured by a certain Trans-Atlantic dialectic of race, one which—in contrast to the idea of the "Black Atlantic" developed by Paul Gilroy—attends to the place of Africa in these transnational figurations.