Manufacturing a Messiah

Abstract

This monograph analyzes how Nike and the athlete himself jointly commodified the public persona of LeBron James, with James cast in two normative narratives: (a) the Messiah and (b) hegemonic masculinity, stripping James of his Blackness and making him identifiable to a mainstream audience. The open-ended configuration of these narratives allows for “pivot points” in James’ life. Real-life developments fold into the construction of James, mitigating damage and shaping narratives in the process. New avenues of research in critical celebrity-branding analysis focus on areas such as the cross sections of endorsements and social media as well as the process of how mediated narratives normalize subjectivities.