Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen by Samantha N. Sheppard

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen by Samantha N. Sheppard Mikal J. Gaines (bio) Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen by Samantha N. Sheppard. University of California Press. George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies. 2020. 264 pages. $85.00 hardcover; $29.95 paper; also available in e-book. As I was reading Samantha Sheppard's incisive new study on Black representation in the modern American sports film, a genre she rightly describes as "conservative," since "structural inequalities can be overcome by a buzzerbeater or a dignified loss," I immediately began imagining how her dynamic interpretive framework, "critical muscle memory," could be activated to examine some of my own favorite sports films.1 Then, of course, I began scanning the index to see if and how those films would find their way into the discussion. While some of my favorites do receive attention, it became clear that Sheppard's provocative choices—the texts she has selected, the wide breadth and depth of interdisciplinary scholarship that informs her arguments, and the measured methodological moves she makes—are all intended to position Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen as a deliberate act of scholarly resistance. The book is largely unconcerned with questions about sports films' box office success or critical reception, and it eschews a wide, comprehensive view of the genre in favor of detailed and sustained analyses of specific texts. Put another way, Sheppard provides not [End Page 199] the work we may believe we want but rather the work we need by positing an imaginative theoretical paradigm that has compelling implications for future studies of embodied Blackness across media. Drawing on human kinetics—the study of the body in motion and the forces that act upon it—Sheppard deploys the term critical muscle memory to describe how representations of Black sporting bodies "contain 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."2 Sheppard therefore presents the Black sporting body as itself a kind of haunted text, an endlessly signifying palimpsest whose power is integral to the sort of story that sports films want to tell even as it also serves as a site of disruption within those very same narratives. In this sense, sports films need the Black sporting body in order to make certain fundamental aspects of the genre legible to audiences. And yet, as Sheppard argues, the Black sporting body also "functions as an unruly historical force that exceeds the generic constraints."3 Sporting Blackness thus hopes to move beyond reductive treatments of "positive" and "negative" racial representations ("skin in the game") to inspect "skin in the genre," a more potent examination of "what Black characters, themes, and cinematic-athletic stylistics do to the sports film in terms of generic modes."4 This renewed emphasis on understanding how Blackness is continually conjured up and reconfigured within the particular aesthetic, political, and emotional registers demanded by the sports film feels in concert with Michael Boyce Gillespie's and Racquel Gates's recent calls for renewed focus on formal analysis in Black film and media studies.5 Sheppard demonstrates the reach of critical muscle memory as an investigative tool across four thoroughly researched chapters and varied case studies. Texts that center basketball and football are her primary focus due to their heightened prominence in the Black public sphere, though Sheppard acknowledges that her hermeneutic could just as easily be applied to films about other sports. Chapter 1, "Historical Contestants in Black Sports Documentaries," looks at some films that longtime fans of sports docs will immediately recognize and others that are less familiar: On the Shoulders of Giants: The Story of the Greatest Basketball Team You Never Heard of (Deborah Morales, 2011), This Is a Game, Ladies (Peter Schnall and Rob Kuhns, 2004), Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994), and Hoop Reality (Lee Davis, 2007). What becomes apparent in this opening inquiry—and is further reinforced throughout the book—is that Sheppard intends to use her close readings as more than just evidence for...