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

The rise in athlete activism, and widespread protests by American and international sporting leagues, made headlines in 2020 as part of a broader conversation concerning police violence and racial discrimination. While certainly remarkable, this most recent embrace of social activism is one in a long list of boycotts, protests, sit-ins, and hashtags that have been mobilized by athletes and nonathletes alike in the struggle for racial equality. In Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen, Samantha N. Sheppard investigates the intersections of race, sports, media, and power to explore how connected histories surrounding subjects like protesting or collective resistance are mapped onto the Black body through critical muscle memory. Critical muscle memory contends that related histories, or past practices, result in similar experiences for Black people in society. Looking specifically at the Black sporting body on screen, Sheppard shifts the conversation from "skin in the game" (5) to "skin in the genre" (6) to address Black movement throughout sporting history. "Skin in the game" is defined as the ways a body of literature grapples with Black athletes and their positive or negative representations. "Skin in the genre" details what Blackness does to the genre itself, how Blackness influences a story's construction, and how it shapes the sports film genre in ways not done by White bodies.

Sheppard argues that Black documentaries constitute a genre of and about critical muscle memory, and, although the Black sporting body is mobilized to mean different things within different cinematic contexts, these meanings remain tethered to the collective Black experience both within and outside of cinema and sports. Chapter 1 examines the sports documentaries: On the Shoulders of Giants (dir. Deborah Morales, 2011), This Is a Game, Ladies (dir. Peter Schnall and Rob Kuhns, 2004), Hoop Dreams (dir. Steve James, 1994), and Hoop Reality (dir. Lee Davis, 2007). The athletes in these films are "historical contestants" (29), or representatives, that participate in and challenge prevailing discourses on sports, history, and Black experiences in American society. Hoop Dreams, the famous 1994 documentary about high school basketball in inner-city Chicago, is depicted as a cautionary tale in Hoop Reality, a 2007 follow-up that explores the decade after Hoop Dreams ended. Hoop Dreams, Sheppard suggests, composes critical muscle memory for Hoop Reality and for the overwhelming majority of aspiring basketball players who do not make it to the pros. Arthur Agee and William Gates, the high school hopefuls whose amateur basketball careers are chronicled in Hoop Dreams, exemplify the plight of the Black male athlete who is celebrated in victory and disowned in defeat.

Nowhere is this reality more present than in the case of high school football player James "Boobie" Miles, whose transmedia sporting life composes the focal point of chapter 2. Sheppard introduces the term racial iconicity when discussing Miles—a high school hopeful and the primary subject in H. G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (1990). Sheppard identifies racial iconicity as both exceptional and common, hinging on the veneration and degradation of the Black athlete. In the Friday Night Lights book and film, Miles is presented as an invaluable asset to his 1987 team before sustaining a career-ending knee injury. Following his ACL tear, Miles becomes attached to "racially tinged notions of worthlessness" (75). It becomes clear that he is tolerated, by mostly White coaches and community members, only because of what his body could do on the field. Similar to Agee and Gates, Miles's cinematic representation is a cautionary tale for Black male athletes whose bodies are commodified as their primary ticket to success, exploited by communities and coaches that are often coded as White, before eventually being discarded. Boobie represents the literal and figurative fracturing of the Black body, in this case, across various forms of media, as an example of the multiplicity of Black experiences. Still, as Sheppard acknowledges in chapter three, Black male...