Abstract
Sports films are a widely recognized part of the mainstream American cinematic landscape. These films, which contain a fervent belief in hard work and the potential of the underdog, often transmit messages to viewers about the power of sport and meritocracy. Whether directed at children or adults, sports films contain ideas of what it means to engage in competition and suffer hardships but eventually emerge victorious at the end. These messages, deeply ingrained within sports films, often do the work of neutralizing ideas about race. Even when showcasing narratives about Black athletes, individually or collectively, mainstream fictional sports films tend to imagine race as either irrelevant or part of a project of advancing ideas of American exceptionalism and progress.
Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen by Samantha Sheppard challenges these ideologies by interrogating the role of racialized bodies in sports films. Her work provides an essential intervention in the study of sports films, an area that has been “undertheorized,” especially in regard to “race and representation” (p. 5). Through foregrounding interdisciplinarity, which includes pulling from fields such as Film Studies, Sport Studies, and African American Studies, Sporting Blackness advances theoretical understandings of the body, race, and visual culture. By providing attention to sports films from the 1970s to the present, the book not only contributes to contemporary understandings of athletics and cinema. The text also examines historical connections in the films and sports films as archives. As she rightly notes, “fragmented and absent Black sports archives” shape the genre (p. 5). By reading against the grain, Sheppard analyzes Black sports cinema and its relationship to histories of race, racism, and representation.
In Sporting Blackness, the term “critical muscle memory” connects representation, history, and sports. Sheppard defines critical muscle memory as “embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s diegesis to index, circulate, reproduce, and/or counter broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society” (p. 5). Through documentaries to fictional movies, Sporting Blackness argues that representations of the Black sporting body cannot be separated from histories and legacies of race and racism. The text demonstrates how “social identities” and “historical narratives” are reflected in sports films as well as how these films also reveal the limits of their genre (p. 11). Across four chapters, Sheppard explores the ways in which racialized athletic bodies, particularly those in the realm of basketball, are portrayed on screen.
Within the book, the Black sporting body intersects with history, gender and sexuality, spectacle, and social protest. In the first chapter, Sheppard examines sports documentaries and their role in archiving narratives regarding the Black athletic body. Through analyzing On the Shoulders of Giants; This Is a Game, Ladies; Hoop Dreams; and Hoop Reality, sports documentaries emerge as sites to interrogate gaps in the sports archive as well as highlight “athletic achievement and failure within a capitalist and racist society” (p. 34). In the analysis of This Is a Game, Ladies, the book examines the critical muscle memory of the Black gendered body through tracing the experiences of Rutgers University coach C. Vivian Stringer and her women’s basketball team. Evident by the vitriol spewed by Don Imus, these contemporary actions cannot be separated from past histories that imagined the Black female sporting body as deviant. Connections such as these in the text make clear the ways in which critical muscle memory draws upon legacies of racism and sexism that demonized the Black athletic female body.
In her second chapter, Sheppard analyzes the iconic figure of Boobie Miles, a high school football player who first appeared in Buzz Bissinger’s nonfiction book Friday Night Lights. In this chapter, the racial iconography of the Black athlete symbolizes “a celebrated and condemned sporting body” (p. 74). The body of Miles, whose football career ended in high school, glides between different media including books, film, television, and music. Across these media, his body represents physicality, failure and success, and exceptionalism—ideas that frame contemporary readings of the Black sporting body. This close reading of the fluidity of his image across various texts is one of the many strengths of Sheppard’s work. Together, hip-hop and the figure of Boobie Miles emphasize the role of not only visual, but also “sonic critical muscle memory” (p. 103) and the configuration of Black athletic iconography.
The third chapter provides a vital focus on the portrayal of Black women in sports cinema. While Chapter One analyzed Black women in the documentary This is a Game, Ladies, Chapter Three expands upon this and interrogates race, gender, and fictional sporting films. Using Love and Basketball and Juwanna Mann, Sheppard analyzes the construction and performance of Black athletic womanhood. Through “athletic genders,” bodies of Black athletic women depend on a series of repetitions through the body—a framework that bridges Judith Butler’s work and Sheppard’s own critical muscle memory (p. 117). Both these films, as Sheppard argues, can be used to “conceptualize the gendered modes of sporting Blackness as embodied acts and stylized aesthetics” (p. 139). At the same time, the chapter pays careful attention to the ways in which these films reinforce norms around gender identity and sexuality.
Finally, the fourth chapter as well as the conclusion explore the role of revolt and protest in sports films. Through experimental films such as Hour Glass and the recent High Flying Bird, the book moves away from its assessments of sports documentaries and narrative sports films that embrace conventions. Instead, Sporting Blackness encourages readers to view these films in conversation with critical muscle memory that evokes the 1968 protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos—or, as she terms it, “the revolt of the cinematic black athlete” (p. 148). Not only does Sporting Blackness offer readers the chance to make connections between the past and the contemporary. By ending with examples of actions taken by intercollegiate and professional athletes that detail a “new era of protest,” the text also offers readers a chance to imagine the future of Black sports cinema.