Hangtime melancholia

ABSTRACT The efforts to capture and render the dunk demand a consideration of hangtime as ‘ghosts and specters’ in the machine of photography, some combination of technical production and a centuries-old visual orientation to the vertical suspension of Black bodies. This paper is divided into two sections. The first presents the dunking ability of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain as being understood through the racialized and sexualized fear of Black men, literal (and corporeal) terrors in the sky. Second, if the photographic impetus for documenting hangtime in the 1960s was understood through a phallic logic of aerial invasion, the following section considers more modern iterations of hangtime where dunkers are no longer thought to be aerial invaders. Now, they are more like celestial or angelic bodies represented through visual allusions to religious iconography. With this work, my goal is exposure, to reverse engineer the technical production of hangtime and provide a long view of processes and materialities of production that foreground the positionality of bodies (who were almost always black) and the men (often white) who documented the dunk’s spectacle.