Imperialism on Planet Lovetron: Darryl Dawkins, Rudyard Kipling, NFL films, and the origins of the postmodern NBA

This article offers a cultural-historical analysis of a tribute video dedicated to NBA player Darryl Dawkins, which ran during the halftime intermission of game six of the 1980 NBA Finals between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Los Angeles Lakers. The video features the voice of NFL Films narrator John Facenda reading the Victorian-era British writer Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If–’ over a montage of scenes of Dawkins. This article utilises concepts from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism to argue that the Dawkins tribute acts as a postmodern response to contemporaneous tensions in what historian George Mosse calls the normative White masculine ‘stereotype’. It sets the video in the media-historical context of NFL Films, from which it borrowed its aesthetic language. Unlike NFL Films productions, which sought to inscribe a Kiplingesque imperial masculinity within the domain of sport, the Dawkins tribute achieves a novel postmodern integration of race and masculinity. The NBA’s postmodern turn set the stage for its dramatic rise in the 1980s and made it an ideal partner of US corporate power in the emerging age of neoliberal globalisation. The Dawkins persona was the forerunner of the Michael Jordan icon.