Selling streetball: racialized space, commercialized spectacle, and playground basketball

ABSTRACT

This paper outlines plans for a research project on representations of basketball in New York City. It argues that a highly performative style of playground basketball strongly associated with racialized urban ghettos, often referred to as “streetball,” has become a significant way that basketball-related products has been marketed in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. These marketing efforts are an important source of popular fantasy about the “iconic ghetto,” and work to maintain racialized spatial relations in the U.S.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport
• race
• basketball
• urban
• space

Notes on contributor

Thomas P. Oates holds a joint appointment in American Studies and Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. His scholarship on race, gender, and sport has appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Sociology of Sport Journal, and Radical History Review. He is the co-editor (with Zack Furness) of The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, and (with Robert Alan Brookey) Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play. He is the author of Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL, which will be published in March by the University of Illinois Press.