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

Rutter, Emily Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496834518 ISBN 13: 9781496834515

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2021

Synopsis

Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Re-search Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research

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 Brook-lyn 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 represen-tations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring Black cul-tural 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 pro-ject of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cul-tural history more generally.

About this title

About the Author

Emily Ruth Rutter is associate professor of English at Ball State University. She is author of The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry. Along with Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, and darlene anita scott, she coedited Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. Her numerous essays have appeared in A Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, African American Review, MELUS, and Aethlon, among other journals and edited collections.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496834518
• ISBN 13: 9781496834515
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 202