Invisible Ball of Dreams

Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line

Emily Ruth Rutter

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781496817129
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496817136
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson's momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), Black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, Black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Reading representations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring Black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is necessary to the project of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cultural history more generally.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Archival Interventions: Black Baseball and Imaginative Literature
• The First Wave: Shadow Archives, White Saviors, and Magical Negroes: Representations of Black Baseball in the 1970s
• The Second Wave: “It Was Ours”: Black-Authored Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line
• The Third Wave: Reconfigurations of the Archive in Contemporary Black Baseball Literature
• Coda: An Archive of Feelings Revisited: Fences on Screen
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index