Black Gods of the Asphalt
Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
J-Rod moves like a small tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in each bone-snapping drive to the basket.
On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half-men, half-heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket.
Basketball is popular among young black American men but not because, as many claim, they are "pushed by poverty" or "pulled" by white institutions to play it. Black men choose to participate in basketball because of the transcendent experience of the game. Through interviews with and observations of urban basketball players, Onaje X. O. Woodbine composes a rare portrait of a passionate, committed, and resilient group of athletes who use the court to mine what urban life cannot corrupt. If people turn to religion to reimagine their place in the world, then black streetball players are indeed the hierophants of the asphalt.
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Inner-city youth turn to hoops to find hope and healing in this vivid ethnography of street basketball in Boston. Viewing street basketball as an urban "lived religion" where the principal problems and structural sins of inner-city life are ritualized, renegotiated, and reimagined Woodbine interprets the games as religious performances and practices where young men exorcise their metaphorical demons through dancing, exercising, and dunking. This narrative is more than academic prose; it is a deeply personal and poetic travel through the author's own story of racial struggle and the survival tactics of the players he befriends. The composition drips with Woodbine's passion for the game as he weaves street-court scenes of damnation and redemption with richly textured biographies of the young men who play to fight off the specters of racism, violence, and drug addiction. In this majestic study of basketball as ritual, religion, and culture, Woodbine plunges into the courts of Boston with an insider's savvy to catalogue the urban sport's pulsating (and potentially transcendent) dialogue.