Sporting Blackness examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Sheppard analyzes not only “skin in the game,” or how racial representation shapes the genre’s imagery, but also “skin in the genre,” or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre’s modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain “critical muscle memories”: embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.
Samantha N. Sheppard is the Mary Armstrong Meduski ’80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University.
"Sheppard’s critical analysis is exquisite and groundbreaking. Sporting Blackness is a highly original study of film and media that examines issues of embodiment, sports, history, and renderings of the black body. Sheppard’s rich conceptions of black performativity will be of great import across the field of black visual culture.”––Michael Boyce Gillespie, author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film
"Sporting Blackness is sure to be a touchstone in the rising tide of scholarship on the nexus of media, sport, culture, and power. It invents and introduces several concepts—particularly 'critical muscle memory'—that will productively reverberate across the fields that this excellent interdisciplinary book puts into conversation."––Travis Vogan, author of ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television
"Sheppard’s book analyzes how Black athletes are represented in Hollywood movies, experimental films, documentaries, and on television. Her focus on the convergence of sports media illustrates the influence of these representations on how we see the Black sporting body, but also the potential for reading such portrayals in progressive ways."––Aaron Baker, author of Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film
"An exceptional and urgent theoretical, historically contextualized, and rigorous close-reading of 'sporting blackness' across mainstream narrative, documentary, and avant-garde cinema. Sheppard’s analysis of 'critical muscle memory,' race and embodiment resonates across media forms and should be a grounding template for scholarship in film and media studies, sports studies, and critical race theory."––Victoria E. Johnson, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Irvine
264 pp.6 x 9Illus: 25 b/w illustrations
9780520307797$29.95|£25.00Paper
Jun 2020