Basketball Film

Samantha N. Sheppard is an associate professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen and coeditor of the collections Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary and From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry.

"Rigorous and readable, The Basketball Film is a superb contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on sport cinema. Samantha Sheppard incisively examines scores of basketball feature films and documentaries, and the book is chockfull with useful analytical insights. Moreover, Sheppard convincingly argues that 'basketball cinema is not only about the sport itself but also about everything that surrounds, structures, falls between, and just outside of the court's storied lines.' The same goes for first-rate critiques of basketball cinema, like this one, which is trenchant cultural criticism, a way to better understand American culture and its transnational impact." - Daniel A. Nathan, author of Saying It's So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal"The Basketball Film is so much more than an overview of basketball in cinema. It offers a generative and illuminating analysis of sports films by connecting cinematic depictions to broader cultural struggles and showing how the economics of Hollywood film have become increasingly intertwined with other forms of sports media. This carefully researched book is insightful at every turn and a model for scholars of sport and media to follow." - Thomas P. Oates, author of Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL"The Basketball Film deeply rethinks representations of basketball, its cultural transformations and impact. Among its interventions: it features essential and unprecedented attention to female participation and representation across basketball media; it also offers an historiography of "name, image, and likeness" as having always been integral to basketball discourses." - Victoria E. Johnson, author of Sports TV

• Introduction: Storied Courts 1 The Genre That Hoop Dreams Built 2 Buzzer-Beater Histories 3 Decades of Changing the Game 4 From Starter to the Sidelines 5 Name, Image, Likeness Conclusion: Growing the Game, Globalizing the Genre Appendix: List of Basketball Films and Television Shows Acknowledgments Notes Index