Sporting Blackness Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen

"Sporting Blackness, with its incisive close readings and its exciting weave of film-phenomenology, critical race theory and more, is an exemplary work of film studies that must surely influence much work to come."—Visual Studies

"Sheppard’s critical analysis is exquisite and groundbreaking. Sporting Blackness is a highly original study of film and media that examines issues of embodiment, sports, history, and renderings of the black body. Sheppard’s rich conceptions of black performativity will be of great import across the field of black visual culture.”––Michael Boyce Gillespie, author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film

"Sporting Blackness is sure to be a touchstone in the rising tide of scholarship on the nexus of media, sport, culture, and power.  It invents and introduces several concepts—particularly 'critical muscle memory'—that will productively reverberate across the fields that this excellent interdisciplinary book puts into conversation."––Travis Vogan, author of ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television

"Sheppard’s book analyzes how Black athletes are represented in Hollywood movies, experimental films, documentaries, and on television. Her focus on the convergence of sports media illustrates the influence of these representations on how we see the Black sporting body, but also the potential for reading such portrayals in progressive ways."––Aaron Baker, author of Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film

"An exceptional and urgent theoretical, historically contextualized, and rigorous close-reading of 'sporting blackness' across mainstream narrative, documentary, and avant-garde cinema. Sheppard’s analysis of 'critical muscle memory,' race and embodiment resonates across media forms and should be a grounding template for scholarship in film and media studies, sports studies, and critical race theory."––Victoria E. Johnson, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Irvine