| Abstract: | Abstract Despite retiring from the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 2003, the iconic basketball player Michael Jordan continues to inform popular understandings of race and racial difference. Jordan could thus be considered a raced spectre (Derrida 1994): a fantastically racialized figure derived from, and cast in the mould of, the contingencies of an earlier moment in American history, who nonetheless informs the racial politics and experience of the present. In examining Jordan's enduring influence on contemporary America's implicitly raced neoliberal formation, this discussion involves: a re-envisioning of the raced neoliberal politics implicit within, and mobilized by, Jordan's commodified identity; an illustration of how the institutionalization of racial logics derived from Jordan's idealized raced subjectivity have come to inform the racially regressive management and governance of the NBA; an exhumation of how the very form of Jordan's enduring phantasm has been accommodated to shifting, and increasingly interwoven, commercial and racial forces; and an examination of the contemporaneous manifestations and influences of the Jordan spectre. |
