In this Book

Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line

Book
Emily Ruth Rutter
2018
buy this book Buy This Book in Print
summary

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

Half Title, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

pp. ix-x

Introduction: Archival Interventions: Black Baseball and Imaginative Literature

pp. 1-16

The First Wave - Shadow Archives, White Saviors, and Magical Negroes: Representations of Black Baseball in the 1970s

pp. 17-20

Chapter 1. “I Was Born Too Quick”: Archival Contributions and Limitations in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings

pp. 21-40

Chapter 2. Black Baseball Novels and White Redemption

pp. 41-66

The Second Wave - "It Was Ours”: Black-Authored Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line

pp. 67-70

Chapter 3. Black Baseball’s Archive of Cultural Nationalist Feeling

pp. 71-92

Chapter 4. “Let’s Play Two”: The Affective Resonances of Black Baseball in African American Poetry

pp. 93-108

The Third Wave - Reconfigurations of the Archive in Contemporary Black Baseball Literature

pp. 109-112

Chapter 5. Crossing the Color Line in Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues and Kevin King’s All the Stars Came Out That Night

pp. 113-134

Chapter 6. Educating the Next Generation: Black Baseball Children’s Books

pp. 135-158

Coda - An Archive of Feelings Revisited: Fences on Screen

pp. 159-168

Notes

pp. 169-174

Works Cited

pp. 175-182

Index

pp. 183-190
Back To Top