Abstract
This essay offers a broad introduction to the representation of black athletic bodies in film. It explores how black athletes, from Jack Johnson to Jackie Robinson, from Muhammad Ali to Tiger Woods and Cathy Freeman, are depicted – and speak for themselves – in their encounters with the media. The focus of this essay, however, is on the 1996 docu-drama When We Were Kings. It offers a critique of Muhammad Ali's standing as a figure of the global black struggle by juxtaposing Ali's outspokenness in the USA with his too often unremarked-upon reticence in the post-colonial world. This essay explains how Gast's When We Were Kings plays Ali off against his opponent in the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, George Foreman, while simultaneously denying both boxers the right to speak for themselves in a documentary first screened some two decades after the original event.
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