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7. Decentering “Race” and (Re)presenting “Black” Performance in Sport History: Basketball and Jazz in American Culture, 1920–1950
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CHAPTER 7 Decentering “Race” and (Re)presenting “Black” Performance in Sport History Basketball and Jazz in American Culture, 1920–1950 S. W. POPE Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. —Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America” Whereas today basketball style is firmly ensconced within hip hop culture , an earlier innovative, pre–World War II style was connected to jazz. Cultural studies scholar Todd Boyd notes that “the steamy poetry of the bandstand and dance floor has long found exquisite parallels in the intensity and fancy footwork of the African American sportsman.” It should be no surprise that musicians and athletes “linked in the public mind as white social symbols and black role models, have always felt a kinship. They share celebrity status across racial lines, competence, in highly pleasurable and competitive activities.” Boyd avers that “basketball is the modern-day aesthetic embodiment of Black culture, similar to jazz in its prime” because they share similar “ways of doing things, although the specific qualities of the something that is done varies with time and place and is also influenced by a number of elements outside the tradition.”1 The key link between black athletic and musical styles is improvisation. The process of musical improvising shares analogies to sport, as jazz historian James Collier observes—both “the improvising jazz musician and the athlete must train intensely to build up sets of conditioned reflexes that enable them to respond without thinking of events that are unfolding around them in 147 fractions of seconds.”2 Philosopher Michael Novak explicated the relationship between basketball and jazz in his 1976 book, The Joy of Sports. “Teams move in patterns, in rhythms, at high velocity,” Novak observed. “They have a score, a melody; each team has its own appropriate tempo.” “Basketball is jazz,” he postulated: “improvisatory, free, individualistic, corporate, sweaty, fast, exulting, screeching, torrid, explosive, exquisitely designed for letting first the trumpet, then the sax, then the drummer, then the trombonist soar in virtuoso excellence.”3 Basketball and jazz are animated by the stylized nuances of African American culture. This style derives from the musical, dance, and performance traditions associated with slavery and commercialized minstrelsy and incubated during the long history of oppression and legalized discrimination. Both emerged prominently within major cities during the 1920s when touring black teams were formed, and musicians converged in New York and Chicago. Just as white basketball players encountered a quicker game of fast breaks, explosive speed, innovative ballhandling, and varied shot selection when playing against black teams, so, too, did white musicians learn about rhythmic improvisation and a hip, cool attitude from the early generation of black jazz pioneers. Basketball is an example of how blacks, Gerald Early explains, “transformed an American ludic endeavor into an African American cultural expression thereby redefining the meaning of being American in their own terms though the game.” In so doing, “they took a larger cultural trait, not an inherently racial one, and adapted it as a ritualized style, as a performance . . . [so as] to distinguish themselves from whites.”4 Few scholars have examined the historical development of a distinct African American aesthetic in music, dance, and basketball styles—particularly the ways in which these cultural forms that comprised a key element of 1920s to mid-1940s social life.5 Body styles and practices are prominent topics within the study of sport, cultural studies, and African American culture .6 Stylized physical and musical performances are widely admired but rarely analyzed because they are primarily nonverbal, and thus, their description and analysis remain elusive matters for most scholars. This is ironic given that performance is the essence of both sport and contemporary popular culture. “Styles of sport,” Stephen Hardy observes, taking his conceptual cues from the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “take us into the heart of body culture, with its battles to convert physical capital into cultural, social, or economic capital.” Sport historians should consider the conceptual framework articulated by Bourdieu who argued that all social groups strive and strategically seek to accumulate capital (the end product of accumulated labor and a form of power in that it determines the possession and distribution of values, assets, resources, and rewards).7 According to Bourdieu, struggles for material and symbolic resources (capital) take place in social arenas 148 S. W. Pope [3.91.11.30] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:08...