Visualizing Basketball's Past

The Historical Imagination of ESPN's Basketball Documentaries

Bibliographic Data

ID2349247
AuthorsYago Colás (Oberlin College & Conservatory, OH, USA, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume41
Issue6
Pages447-461
Publication date2017-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Sport and Social Issues (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0193-7235 • E-ISSN: 1552-7638
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0193723517719666
OpenAlexW2773577711
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited2

ESPN's 22 basketball-themed documentaries are popular and influential sources for students and fans interested in basketball history. I offer close readings of two films, There's No Place Like Home and The Fab Five, to shed light on how they (and to some degree the corpus as a whole) portray basketball history, reflect on the historiographical task of portraying the past, and affectively engage viewers to adopt certain stances with respect to the past and its portrayal. There's No Place Like Home invites viewers to share in a fantasy of basketball as a decontextualized static idea whose history can be possessed. By contrast, The Fab Five challenges viewers to view basketball history as contested terrain where conflicting power vectors of language, culture, and society intersect

Advertising · Archaeology · Art · Basketball · Fantasy · Historiography · Literature · Media studies · Power (physics · Sociology · Visual arts · History · Psychology · Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society

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