Sporting Blackness

Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen

Samantha N. Sheppard

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520973855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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.

1. Historical Contestants in Black Sports Documentaries

Filmmakers have used nonfiction modes to historicize, entextualize, and recontextualize African Americans’ participation in sports. They have embraced and exploited the visual medium’s historiographic possibilities and formal strategies to interrelate sports and social issues, probing the impact and implications of sports on Black individuals and collectives’ sense of progress on and off the playing field. These works often depict how “sports have historically provided an opportunity for blacks throughout the African diaspora to gain recognition through physical struggle not just for their sporting achievement in the narrow and obvious sense but more significantly and fundamentally for their humanity.”¹ Framing Black athletes’ physical struggles for recognition alongside their accomplishments and defeats within this sports and racial humanist paradigm, sports documentaries often use narratives about athleticism to chart historical shifts and address cultural and political issues specific to Black life while celebrating the spectacle and virtuosity of Black athletes in sporting worlds competitions. These emblematic televisual and theatrical nonfiction stories of racial achievement, “where individual acts and successes become symbolic of collective progress,” often function as popular dramas, shaping the public imaginary of, for, and by Black people in American society.²

A study of sporting blackness on screen must consider documentary films for they are, by far, the dominant mode of production of sports cinema. At the same time, documentary films are important because they constellate key questions on race and generic forms, historiographic and representational practices, and the cinematic Black sporting body’s capacity and utility as an image bank for race relations in the US. In this chapter, I examine the form and traditions of Black sports documentaries. Questioning, in Stuart Hall’s provocative terms, what is this “Black” in Black sports documentaries, I ground my analysis of this subgenre of nonfiction films within both Black documentary film and video traditions and sports documentary traditions. While bearing in mind the distinct strategies and practices of the Black sports documentary, I engage fundamental questions about the intersection of documentary theory and blackness in order to advance the idea that documentaries about Black sporting bodies constitute a genre of and about critical muscle memory.

As sports documentaries attempt to index sporting moments, thus developing our critical muscle memory of Black athleticism, they become an important form and forum to consider Black film and sporting historiography. Joshua Malitsky argues that sports documentaries typically assemble found footage from sporting events as their primary documents, thus indexing “the historical experience of our own mediated histories. [. . .] They offer evidentiary traces of the past, reworking them and signaling their articulation in the process.”³ Examining sports documentaries, I extend Malitsky’s thinking in order to situate this formal process in terms of sporting blackness and the production of critical muscle memory as a subjugated form of knowledge and historiographic redress. If “historiography is about arranging and telling stories, not about delivering objective truth,” then narratives constructed in this nonfiction production mode can be understood as producing, in Malitsky’s estimation, “aesthetic memories,” representational “referents with reference” that “[drench] us in the past” of our individual and collective mediated sporting experiences.⁴ As I argue throughout this book, the Black sporting body is an expressive body, semiotically understood as a referent with references (a text made of texts) that contains and projects critical muscle memory. In this case, critical muscle memory is the ability for the documentary Black sporting body to echo history, exceed its iconography, and concatenate narratives of Black sporting and non-sporting experiences across spatial and temporal contexts within and beyond the body in and of the film.

Black athletes in sports documentaries are historical contestants, meaning figures and figurations that participate in and challenge prevailing discourses on sports, history, and Black experiences in American society. While I argue more broadly that this contested armature and trope can be read across film forms, here I examine the Black sporting body in four basketball documentaries: Deborah Morales’s On the Shoulders of Giants: The Story of the Greatest Team You’ve Never Heard Of (2011), Peter Schnall’s This Is a Game, Ladies (2004), Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994), and Lee Davis’s Hoop Reality (2007). The final two examples are studied in relationship to each other. All four examples attend to how sporting blackness becomes a historiographic force for the rendering and redressing of athletes’ embodied sporting and non-sporting experiences.

On the Shoulders of Giants; This Is a Game, Ladies; Hoop Dreams; and Hoop Reality compel us to think about sporting blackness in terms of the documentary mode and the stylization of aesthetic memories “to critique the artistic, political, and ideological ends this stylization serves.”⁵ Therefore, I consider authorial voices and representational practices in these films, analyzing how Black players function as historical contestants on screen. For On the Shoulders of Giants, I examine the documentary’s source material, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s autoethnographic cultural history On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey through the Harlem Renaissance and the film’s use of digital animation to reanimate suppressed pasts. With This Is a Game, Ladies, I address how Rutgers University’s women’s basketball head coach C. Vivian Stringer and her players represent and articulate Black female athleticism in tension with respectability politics as a redress against past, present, and futured racial and gender antagonisms and within the constraints of the documentary’s PBS format and other generic conventions. My interest in Hoop Dreams, however, is less direct, in part because of the wealth of rigorous critiques and compelling scholarship on race, representation, and realism in the documentary. Instead, I attend primarily to Hoop Reality in its citational and diacritical relation to Hoop Dreams. As an unofficial sequel of sorts, Hoop Reality’s documentary corpora inculcates the canonical Hoop Dreams into its diegesis as a metatextual dispute; thus, to talk about aesthetic and embodied histories in Hoop Reality is to do the selfsame vis-à-vis Hoop Dreams. Hoop Reality’s recursivity, then, is a cinematic example of what I am theorizing about Black sports documentary as a formal genre of critical muscle memory. All four examples turn our attention to how the Black sporting body, situated in the impulses, styles, and strategies of documentary production, becomes a contested canvas of representation whereby athletes’ incarnate sporting histories that structure and suture discourses about sporting blackness and critical muscle memory. Analyzing the representations of Black athletes in these documentaries as historical contestants invites us to consider how the Black sporting body is framed in and can possibly reframe history and historiographic narratives.

WHAT IS THIS “BLACK” IN BLACK SPORTS DOCUMENTARIES?

In “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Stuart Hall encourages us to reflect on the representational modes, expressive traditions, diasporic communities, and resonant memories that speak to the diversity, complexity, contradictions, and mythic aspects of Black popular culture.⁶ A focus on the signifier of “Black,” in his contention, is not meant to be “lodged in a biologically constituted racial category” but should be attached to “its historical, cultural and political embedding.”⁷ I want to extend Hall’s suggestion to my understanding of the intersections of race and the sports documentary to question what is the “Black” in Black sports documentaries. My query requires a study of the formal modes, cultural politics, and racial discourses that distinguish documentary and its subcategories. I argue that nonfiction sports films and their attendant histories, features, and narratives broaden and nuance the case studies, and, by extension, the strategies, practices, and typologies associated with the Black documentary tradition and vice versa. This chiasmic configuration amplifies the conjuncture of “sports” with blackness in my reformulation of Hall’s animating question. As sociologist Ben Carrington argues of the racial signification of sports in popular culture and Black cultural politics, “a reading of the race and sport conjuncture can produce important insights into both the (changing) meaning and structure of ‘race’ as well as the importance and place of sport within western societies.”⁸ My accounting, then, for what is the “Black” in Black sports documentaries is a twofold project that simultaneously regards the “Black” and “sport” in Black sports documentaries as “a contested terrain wherein competing ideologies of domination and resistance can be traced” and “[thinks] of sport as a racial project that both changes and is changed by political struggles in and through race.”⁹ Both configurations require attention to representational systems; social, institutional, and industrial structures; and, in this case, the generic conventions of nonfiction filmmaking.

Broadly speaking, documentary films record, engage, instruct, give perspectives on, and educate us about people and occurrences in the world. They “show us situations and events that are recognizably part of a realm of shared experience: the historical world as we know and encounter it.”¹⁰ They provide knowledge, information, and awareness that shape, question, and challenge the formation of popular memory.¹¹ Bill Nichols aligns documentary to other “discourses of sobriety,” or nonfictional systems that can be instrumental in altering perceptions of the world and motivating people to action.¹² As an industry that traditionally relies on securing funding from nonprofit, foundation, and federal institutions, documentary is often a less costly but still a competitive filmmaking endeavor, as the landscape and avenues for funding of nonfiction work have narrowed in scope.¹³ While distribution struggles have in the past pushed the form into marginal venues such as film festivals and public television, in the contemporary media landscape, streaming platforms have widened many documentary films’ audience reach.

Documentary has been a critical form for the excavation, exploration, and experimentation of and with blackness on screen. In the introduction to their seminal collection Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler distinguish Black nonfiction texts (in contradistinction to classic and dominant ideas about documentary filmmaking) as those works committed to “make black life visible; to define black personal and collective identity in ways that counter mass media representation; to find appropriate, expressive film/video language; to gain access to and control of the means of production; to reach an audience; to create effective social and political works.”¹⁴ They locate the African American documentary tradition, an extension of Black orature and literature practices, in a variety of mediums and formats, including television, and explain how more recent documentaries have diverged from and extended the kinds of practices associated with the past, particularly the blurred boundaries and aesthetic hybrids between nonfiction and fiction via digital effects. Klotman and Cutler argue that modern-day African American documentary film and video continues a tradition of documenting and authenticating a spectrum of alternative, undervalued, and unrecorded Black experiences “from inside the culture” through a range of narrative and cinematic strategies.¹⁵

Black documentaries often challenge distorted representations of Black people in mainstream media, particularly those found in fiction film and television. In this regard, many Black cultural producers turn to documentary as a narrative means to assert control and intervene on the images that define Black people and blackness in solely negative terms within popular culture. For documentarians, Clyde Taylor explains, “it [has] always been a struggle to say something real about black life, against the fictions, myths, stereotypes, misconceptions, and lies magnified in the fantasy factory” of Hollywood and even independent Black cinema.¹⁶ Categorized outside of the capital drive of much Black commercial spectacle and entertainment, this has meant that nonfiction filmmaking is usually a less lucrative avenue and receives limited distribution outside of educational television and film festival programming. And yet these films’ “ability to portray searing, indelible impressions of black life, including concrete views of significant events and moving portraits of charismatic individuals” makes them compelling social documents.¹⁷ As mediatic objects, Black documentaries do not replace lost or missing Black history but, importantly, signify on gaps in recorded history even as they can be constricted by various production forces.¹⁸

As a subgenre, documentaries make up an exponentially large amount of sports films, and the popularity of the form lies, partly, in the appeal of sports as a mass cultural phenomenon in our everyday “quest for excitement.”¹⁹ With theatrical and televisual traditions, institutional practices, and industrial contexts, this dominant nonfiction mode of sports cinema production arranges and interprets sports history into compelling and coherent naturalist (or realist), spectacular narratives. The lineage of sports documentaries includes, among many others, early Eadweard Muybridge actualities, propogandist films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), bodybuilding docudramas such as Pumping Iron (George Butler and Robert Fiore, 1977) and Pumping Iron II: The Women (George Butler, 1985), Ken Burns’s epic PBS miniseries Baseball (1994), and the most recent spate of critically acclaimed 30 for 30 (2009–present) films produced by the sports media empire ESPN. In the last ten years, many contemporary sports documentary feature films have won Academy Awards, including Free Solo (Elisabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, 2018), Icarus (Bryan Fogel, 2017), O. J.: Made in America (Ezra Edeleman, 2016), and Undefeated (Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin, 2011), or been nominated for an Oscar in the nonfiction category, including Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018) and Minding the Gap (Bing Liu, 2018). Currently, made-for-television and streaming/on-demand sports documentaries are the most commonly produced works in the genre. These films are extremely popular with audiences (more so than other kinds of documentaries on television), and all the major networks, including ESPN, Fox,...