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

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.