Heavyweight Champion Research Articles

Signifying Dis(Ability): Perusing Interpretations of Muhammad Ali's Disability

ABSTRACTWritings about Muhammad Ali—the former heavyweight champion who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease—often discuss the cultural significance of Ali's career, activism, and disability. This article examines writings that interpret Muhammad Ali's Parkinson's disease. The authors argue that Ali's Parkinson's disease is discussed as an unmoored signifier that is disconnected from the lived experience of Parkinson's and is instead tethered to Ali's legacy as a cultural icon. By analyzing articles and books on Ali, the authors identified the discursive practices that encourage the interpretation of his disability. Four distinct interpretations of his condition are discussed before presenting Ali's own interpretation of his Parkinson's disease. This pattern of communicating about disability has implications for how representations of disability are critiqued.

A Call for Love in the Face of Hatred

A Call for Love in the Face of Hatred

Muhammad Ali. Un'icona dell'emancipazione degli afroamericani

Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali’s worldwide fame resulted not only from his extraordinary accomplishments in the ring but also from his unconventional social activism, public fight against racial discrimination, forthright commitment to black separatism, and blunt criticism of the Vietnam War. The article outlines Ali’s role as a spokesperson and resonance box for the radical wing of the African-American community, highlighting a few contradictions and a subsequent switch to a less extremist stance that eventually enabled the whole U.S. society to identify itself with him.

‘Papa’ Jack and US Federal Interventions

After reviewing the significance of race and celebrity in comparative law, this examination details the legal encounters plaguing former world heavyweight champion boxer, Texan Arthur John (Jack) Johnson. On Boxing Day 1908 ‘Papa’ Jack became the first Afro-American to successfully cross the colour line by defeating Canadian Tommy Burns in the unlikely venue of Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. On returning to the United States, and successfully defending his title against ‘Gentleman’ James J. Jeffries, the federal government commenced a protracted series of legal interventions, virtually ending Johnson’s professional sports career. The legal relationships between the federal ‘white slavery’ and ‘fight film’ prohibitions are documented, illustrating the combination of paternalistic racial, moral and commercial justifications levelled against Johnson and images of his prize-fighting exploits. Various legal and bureaucratic implications of this multi-faceted purge within and beyond early modern sport, entertainment and film are also discussed.

Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life by Cara Caddoo

Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life, by Cara Caddoo. Cambridge & London, Harvard University Press, 2014. 294 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Both Film Studies and African American Studies are relatively new interdisciplinary fields, and scholarly advances are especially valuable as these areas of inquiry consolidate their stature within the academy and elsewhere. Cara Caddoo's new book on cinema and the building of modern Black life, Envisioning Freedom, is a major contribution to both fields. It adds powerfully to our understanding of both US and African American film history, and it expands our vision of the civil rights movement and the long struggle of people of African descent to control their own imagery in the media and popular culture. A key feature of the book reveals the crucial role of the Black church in generating audiences for the emerging Black film productions. This was part of the long process of how people of African origin, only recently liberated from enslavement, determining their identities as free people. African American clergymen, fully understanding the attraction of early motion pictures, began incorporating film viewing into their efforts to help their congregations move toward the goal of racial progress and uplift. Not coincidentally, this attractive feature of Black church life also increased church attendance and fundraising. Ministers realized that young people especially would often rather spend their Sundays in movie theaters rather than in churches. Understanding the tension between spiritual and secular pursuits gave them additional reason to promote Black films within churches themselves. The films promoted positive Black images and became an integral feature of the self-help and self-respect movement that pervaded much of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American life. It likewise served as an early foundation for the pivotal role of the Black church in encouraging Black filmmaking and exhibition as part of a greater development of Black enterprise generally. The most compelling parts of Envisioning Freedom involve conflicts over Black representation in film. A key struggle occurred when Black prizefighter Jack Johnson defeated the Great White Hope Jim Jeffries in 1910. Johnson, a bold, defiant Black man, evoked powerful fears in white America--the same apprehension that has existed against strong Black males from slave days that resulted in the persecution of leaders like Paul Robeson. Rob Williams, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and many others in later decades. Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight champion and the first inadvertent Black film star when films of that fight were made and distributed throughout the United States. …

A “Suspiciously Swarthy” Boxer

On September 14, 1923, Jack Dempsey and Luis Firpo of Argentina fought for boxing's heavyweight championship of the world. This article argues that descriptions of Firpo generated in the buildup to the title match reveal the ambiguous racial positioning of Latin Americans and Southern Europeans in the United States during the transitional decade of the 1920s. The prefight coverage provides a unique window into the complex relationships between the construction of racial identities and mass sporting culture. Representations of Firpo hewed closely to established racial stereotypes and yet challenged and confounded these caricatures by presenting him both as an exotic and strange foreigner from a racially suspect region and as a familiar, white American whose hard work and intelligence would have made him a worthy champion.

Black radical masculinities in American warfare: reconfiguring resistance in the body of Muhammad Ali towards exile

This study focuses on boxing champion Muhammad Ali’s resistance to patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity in American warfare. The narrative textual analysis is designed around Ali’s final three championship-boxing bouts before he was stripped of his heavyweight championship title because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. The author constructed a narrative that found that Ali’s performance during this specific period was an extension of the black radical tradition. As a prizefighting champion and a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, the gender performance of black radical masculinities is distinguished in Ali. The results from the bouts were organized with biographical quotes and facts during the period and connected with black radical theory and the trajectory of black masculinities. Amid the three bouts and resistance that led to his eventual exile from boxing, Ali’s black masculinity is reconfigured through an analysis of multiple themes, such as voice, skill, anger, faith, style, and corporeality.

Evoluzione e persistenza dell’iconografia di Primo Carnera nella cultura popolare italiana: mitopoiesi plebea e propaganda fascista

This essay focuses on the process of entrechment in the Italian collective imagination of the figure of Primo Carnera, World Heavyweight Champion from 1933 to 1934, and on the evolution of his image from the years of his first wins to the beginning of XXI century. More specifically, the essay makes visible how the mythization of Carnera had spontaneously developed long before the Italian press started to extol the successes of the boxer, and how the Fascism subsequently tried to appropriate the image of Carnera – modifying some of its fundamental traits – in order to use it as a powerful tool of regime’s propaganda, especially during the war years. In the end, the essay shows how the figure of Carnera regained favour after the fall of the fascist regime reappropriating (or, more rarely, being distorted of) its original traits. The study has been carried out through the comparison of a selection of cartoons, caricatures and illustration from the popular press dedicated to Carnera, official portrayals of him during the fascist regime and comic books more or less expressely inspired by the figure of the boxer.

RETHINKING GRIFFITH AND RACISM

Most years I teach a course called “American History through Hollywood Film.” One of the movies I use for teaching is The Birth of a Nation. This year, in the exam at the end of the course, I asked my students to comment on a particular clip from the film: the scene of the fight in the saloon in which the muscular white blacksmith Jeff (Wallace Reid) battles a group of African Americans and beats them all in a brawl before he is shot in the back. What I expected from the students were some comments on the linkage between alcohol and race, together with a discussion of the wider historical resonances of the sequence, particularly those associated with black boxer Jack Johnson and the attempts to find a “great white hope” able to seize his crown as, since 1908, heavyweight champion of the world. What I got were a number of further suggestions relating to class as well as race that made me want to rethink, at least to some extent, the analysis of this sequence I gave in my 2007 book.

The Resurrection: Atlanta, Racial Politics, and the Return of Muhammad Ali

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again. --William Cullen Bryant, Battle Field (1839) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The wait was over. On October 25, 1970, on eve of Muhammad Ali's first professional boxing match in forty-three months, African Americans flooded streets of Atlanta, anxiously anticipating what Ali called his day of judgment. They came from all over: Birmingham, Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, Miami, and Philadelphia. Peachtree Street had never been more colorful. Rows of chrome covered cars, gold limos, and purple Cadillacs lined road. One fan, a slender man smoking a foot-long pipe, wore an ankle-length mink coat matched with a tall mink hat. Another man who washed dishes for a living told a reporter that he had saved for months so he could buy a puce suit and bet one thousand dollars on Ali. Women dressed up like it was New Year's Eve, sporting bouffant Afros, fake eyelashes, and sleek sequined mini skirts. The fight attracted a wide assortment of people, politicians and celebrities, hustlers and gangsters. The biggest names in black America were in town: Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, Hank Aaron, Harry Belafonte, Curtis Mayfield, Diana Ross, Coretta Scott King, Whitney Young, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Julian Bond. It was, Sports Illustrated observed, the most startling assembly of black power and black money ever displayed. (1) That evening, Ali strutted down Atlanta's thoroughfare with a loud, laughing entourage following closely behind. fans shouted his name as he passed corner newsstands, clubs, hotels, theaters, and restaurants. Crowds swarmed him. In Atlanta, nothing else seemed to matter with champ in town. He owned city. It was a powerful scene, playwright Jack Richardson wrote, sheer black, street-corner ebullience out for a Sunday evening promenade. When Ali's fans spilled out onto streets of Atlanta one knew that there was a new tempo in town that was much more devastating to Old South rhythms than gospel cadence of a freedom march. (2) His fans last saw him in ring on March 22,1967, when he knocked out Zora Folley in seventh round at Madison Square Garden. About a month later in Houston, as war in Vietnam intensified and draft calls escalated, Ali refused induction into United States Army on religious grounds, claiming that he objected to wars not declared by Allah. Many Americans already despised him for his membership in Nation of Islam, a separatist Muslim sect framed by mainstream media as a subversive cult. Excoriated as an insincere, unpatriotic draft-dodger, Ali polarized country. Immediately after he refused induction--before he had even been charged with a crime--the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) suspended his boxing license and withdrew his heavyweight championship title for conduct detrimental to best interests of Athletic commissions across country followed New York's example, leading critics to predict slow death of boxing. On June 20, 1967, a federal court convicted him of draft evasion and sentenced him to maximum five-year imprisonment and $10,000 fine. For next three and a half years, free while his case worked its way through courts' appeals process, Ali waited to learn his fate. (3) Never before was his widespread support in black community more evident than when he returned to boxing in Atlanta, a rapidly changing metropolis and Black Mecca of postwar New South. During civil rights era, white moderates and black elites envisioned a harmonious city, proudly proclaiming Atlanta as City Too Busy to Hate. Atlanta's culture of racial moderation and influence of Leroy Johnson, a black state senator who wielded significant political power, made Ali's return to boxing possible. For over three years, promoters and politicians in dozens of cities had failed to arrange an Ali match, but Johnson leveraged his unique connections with black and white municipal politicians to secure a boxing license for former champ. …

Boxing in New Mexico, 1868-1940 ChrisCozzone and JimBoggio. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.

Boxing in New Mexico, 1868-1940 Chris Cozzone and Jim Boggio. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.Many boxing fans probably cannot name a single boxer from New Mexico, with the possible exception of former light heavyweight champion Bob Foster, who came a couple of decades after the period covered here. Although boxing became more acceptable in the 1890s, with the international popularity of fighters like John L. Sullivan and Gentleman Jim Corbett, when the brutish London Prize Ring Rules gave way the less violent Queensberry Rules, this chronicle begins a generation earlier. It was in this transition period that prizefighting in New began with a bang but also with tragedy. The first fight was a 185-round slugfest in 1868 that lasted six hours and nineteen minutes, which would make it the longest fight in the annals of boxing, if more verification existed besides a lone Denver News article. This fight between Barney Duffey and also reflected the vicious nature of the sport at that time, as the latter died ten minutes after the endurance test was over. After this dubious start, no records exist of another fight occurring in the territory for the next twelve years. More years would pass before prizefighting became legal in the territory, as sentiments toward the sport were often like one fight observer in 1908 who opined, Personally, I'd rather see a dogfight in the street than all the prizefights on earth-for the dogs don't know any better while men ought to (76). The authors, Chris Cozzone and Jim Boggio, cover some of these legal battles, but New also benefited from its outlaw status, as clandestine fights were sometimes held there just north of El Paso and Juarez, as boxing was also illegal in Texas (and would remain so until 1933).The first of boxing in New identified by the authors began in 1912, the year of statehood as well as the biggest fight ever held there, the Jack Johnson-Jim Flynn bout in Las Vegas, New Mexico. This period ended in 1917 and was marked by featherweight Benny Chavez, who gets his own chapter, a fighter highly regarded regionally and might be the greatest fighter ever come out of New Mexico (186), but one who never got a shot at the world title. The second golden age (1922-1932) was led by lightweight Eddie Mack (born Pedro Christostomo Quintana) who merits not one, but two chapters of his own, despite also never getting a real chance at a championship belt, even though he did defeat a current world champion, Tod Morgan, in a non-title bout. …

‘The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration’: The Many Sordid Lives of America's Bloodiest ‘Pastime’

Pastimes are played. No one plays boxing. But for centuries Americans from diverse ethnic, racial and class origins have gathered to watch the spectacle of prize fights, and they have rewarded the best brawlers handsomely. For as long as it has been a spectator sport, boxing has weathered attacks by politicians, ministers, journalists, medical professionals, and a host of other critics. And it has survived largely unchanged, loosely regulated and baldly dangerous. The history of boxing is a history of tradition and persistence. But it is also a history of adaptation, technological changes and changing public tastes. Promoters have been some of the quickest to adopt new technology that can help build the drama and ultimately sell tickets to prize fights. Particularly when those bouts involve a popular and dominant heavyweight champion, throngs of fans have paid good money to consume this legacy of another era via the most current media innovations of the day. Few, if any, would call it their national pastime, but many will pass their time watching a blood sport of pre-modern origins

Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line

On October 25, 1970, the night before Muhammad Ali ended his government-imposed exile and returned to the boxing ring to fight Jerry Quarry, he and his entourage watched films of the legendary and controversial fighter Jack Johnson. Ali and Johnson seemed to be cut from the same cloth: both were great black showmen, hounded by the government, and forced into exile. The next night, during the Quarry fight, Ali's assistant trainer and cornerman, Drew “Bundini” Brown, kept shouting, “Jack Johnson's here! Ghost in the house! Ghost in the house!” During Ali's heyday, it was easy to see him as a latter-day Jack Johnson. Proud and defiant cultural lightning rods, both men transcended the ring and the world of sports. They moved the writer Eldridge Cleaver to observe that “the boxing ring is the ultimate focus of masculinity in America, the two-fisted testing ground of manhood, and the heavyweight champion, as a symbol, is the real Mr. America” (Soul on Ice, 1992, p. 87). Cleaver was correct, of course, as was noted by a host of supporters and critics of both boxers. In fact, after Johnson's arrest in 1912 on the grounds that his relationship with Lucille Cameron violated the 1910 White-Slave Traffic Act, a headline in the Cleveland Daily News announced, “Black Pugilist Will Be Made an Example.” The importance of his case was not what he had done but rather what he symbolized.

Joe Louis: the life of a heavyweight

Joe Louis held the heavyweight boxing championship longer than any other fighter and defended it a record 25 times. During the 1930s and 1940s, the owner of the heavyweight title belt was the most prominent sports competitor not aligned with a team sport. In addition, Louis helped make breakthroughs for African American athletes and bridge the gap of understanding between whites and blacks. During World War II he not only raised money for Army and Navy relief, entertained millions of troops as a morale officer, but became a symbol of American hope and strength. In a famous speech Louis pronounced that the United States would win the war Because we're on God's side. The simple phrase helped energise the populace and some said that Louis named the war. The biography of Louis outlines his rise from poverty in Alabama to becoming the best-known African American of his times and describes how an uneducated man, simple at his core, became so articulate and always ended up on the side of right in the battles he fought, with fist or voice.

The Dirty Parts

The Dirty Parts Tom Williams (bio) Hold It ’Til It Hurts. T. Geronimo Johnson. Coffee House Press. http://coffeehousepress.org. 340 pages; paper, $15.95. Heavyweight Champion of Nothing. Zak Mucha. Ten Angry Pit Bulls. http://www.tenangrypitbulls.com. 264 pages; paper, $15.00, eBook, $2.99. I hope I'm not the only writer whose love for literature commenced with books that had sex scenes in them. I like to think many happened upon Portnoy's Complaint (1969) or The Fear of Flying (1973), or, in my case, Chester Himes's Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), paged through what at first seemed dull dialogue and description to get to the dirty parts. Later on, I spent time reading the dialogue and description and started to think this was something I might be able to do. But somewhere along the way, books like the above titles seemed to grow scarce. The HIV/AIDS epidemic made many of my generation circumspect about sex in general and how it should be depicted upon the page. I'm not the only writer who has asked, "Would it be irresponsible to have two characters have sex without protection? Wouldn't it be simpler to cut that scene?" While our international counterparts revel in sex, U.S. writers appear squeamish or just not good at it. As well, the Workshop has had some impact on fiction that portrayed its characters' sex lives. No one wanted to be remembered for turning in a story with a sex scene ruined by clichés or Penthouse Forum-like drivel. Could it also be that even in the twenty-first century, we're still struggling with the Puritan ethos of this nation regarding this most human of subjects? That's why this special section of ABR bore so much promise. I was looking forward to seeing some writers to shelve next to Jong, Roth, and Himes. The novels—Zach Mucha's Heavyweight Champion of Nothing (2013) and T. Geronimo Johnson's Hold It 'Til It Hurts (2012)—demonstrate decidedly different approaches to dealing with sex. And while these two books may not point to a shift in mood among our novelists, they at least promise that writers-in-the-making might have scenes to furiously page toward. In his introduction to Heavyweight Champion of Nothing, Zach Mucha writes: "This book is about people who know they won't leave a mark on the world and can feel their little bit of comfort and protection being threatened." This almost clinical examination (Mucha is a social worker as well as a novelist) of characters can be seen also in Mucha's depiction of sex. In this novel, nothing titillates or excites. Sex is rendered in the same manner as other actions: beer-drinking, furniture-moving and scheming for better things. The setting is populated with "raggedy prostitutes" and housewives who deliberately tantalize the movers who make up the central cast of characters. Of the few relationships between male and female characters in the novel, the most prominently sexual one exists between the unnamed narrator and his neighbor, Dolly. The narrator always has Dolly's body, if not her soul, and one wonders whether she knows how to give that away. Never is their coitus described as pleasurable or enduring; it is over briefly, and in a surprising and excellent touch by Mucha, always punctuated by Dolly's requests for "loans." The novel's slow-developing plot concerns movers conspiring with a designer to fence stolen goods. The narrator's own complicity in the thefts and eventual arrest (conspicuously after spending the night with Dolly) along with his search for some sense of self outside of his job, ultimately leads him to an actual escape, from decent pay and reasonable conditions in Chicago to subhuman treatment as an illegal sublet builder in Queens. Intriguingly, Mucha does not allow his character to ever even "hook up" during this latter third of the novel: "No woman would come near me, though—I think I was trying too hard. When you want to get laid, you might as well write 'I Want Pussy' on your forehead and have it misspelled." A third relationship flickers on...

“That goes for Sweeny”

It is the perseverating Jamie who employs the expression “That goes for Sweeny” (as O'Neill spells the name) when he wants to dismiss a remark he has just directed at Edmund in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. This expression appears to have originated in the horse-racing and betting world, though its usage later expanded. Such is the claim—“A New Slang Phrase and How It Originated”—put forth in the New York Morning Telegraph, a newspaper published for horse-racing followers, on February 12, 1901: “That Goes for Sweeney”The slang of the racetrack is as distinctive as that of the gambling house, the stage, or the city slum, and much of it is unintelligible to the average man about town who thinks he has heard everything and knows everything.A frequent expression of disgust among racing men is “That goes for Sweeney.” Translated it signifies, “I pass it up.” “I don't want any part of it.” Ordinarily it is employed with reference to a bad proposition that does not appeal convincingly to the keen business judgment of the speaker.Sweeney is a quaint little Irishman who does the calling on the Western tracks. Whenever anything particularly shady or dubious in the way of inside information crops up it is unloaded upon Sweeney. The knowing ones reject it with the satirical comment, “That goes for Sweeney.” They don't care for it.But, although he never “gets it right,” unless by mere accident, poor Sweeney is a blithe and light hearted person, with a vein of quaint philosophy and original humor that makes him much liked by the racing people. Some of his own contributions to the slang of the period are weird and wonderful word creations.He takes a cheerful and optimistic view of the future, and is serene in the belief that one of these days some good thing that “goes for Sweeney” will put him on velvet for the rest of his life.1 Use of the expression quickly spread to other part of the sports world, to baseball and boxing, for example.2 An amusing early instance involves boxing and the courts. When Magistrate Herrman held the redoubtable heavyweight champion Jack Johnson “for consideration by the grand jury in $1,000 on the charge of whipping a consumptive negro named Norman Pinder,” he did so after dismissing Johnson's counsel's explanation. The case was “framework,” argued Johnson's lawyer; Pinder “received his injuries by falling downstairs in ‘Baron’ Wilkins's negro resort in West Thirty-fifth Street on the night of the assault.” “Tell it to Sweeney,” countered the judge.3By the end of the decade we find the phrase “that talk goes for Sweeney” employed as the writer states his credentials in “Confessions of a Dope Fiend”: Our greatest moving picture star is a “snow bird”; her name I do not care to mention, and one of our greatest song writers of the day is up against the pipe, and you can take my word for it as a gilt edged bond, for seeing is believing.In the underworld you hear of this stuff: “How do you know” and “who told you,” but that talk goes for Sweeney. I know who and what's what because I handed over the dope myself for I was a messenger boy in the employ of the Postal Telegraph company for five years and I was stationed in New York's famous tenderloin for that period.4 A more widespread use of the expression is suggested by an article in the New York Times in 1920 complaining that visiting Europeans were taking advantage of Americans, in which O'Neill's friend Benjamin De Casseres reminded his readers that “when some one got off a cock-and-bull story in our presence we used to say ‘Tell it to Sweeney,’ or ‘Tell it to the marines.’”5So widely disseminated was the phrase even by 1910, however, that it cropped up as the title of a popular song, the tag line for a local advertisement, and in the slogan for a major newspaper. “Tell It to Sweeney” was sung by Blanche Ring (1877–1961) the vaudeville and Broadway star.6 An enterprising harness supplier named Sweeney in Trenton, New Jersey, repurposed the expression to advertise his wares and expertise. “Use a Sweeney Collar for a sweenied horse,” he advised. “If you have any harness trouble tell it to Sweeney, the leading harness maker, Broad and Market Sts.”7 And it is reported that when Joseph Medill Patterson started the New York Daily News in 1919, he “crafted his paper for New York's common man, whom he dubbed ‘Sweeney.’ The paper's slogan ‘Tell it to Sweeney! The Stuyvesants will understand,’ captured the imagination of both readers and advertisers, and the paper flourished.”8

Boxing Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner, Race, and Popular Front Boxing Narratives

One powerful and productive trend in recent Faulkner scholarship has been to situate No Count within the popular culture of the 1930s and early 1940s, examining his appropriation of its themes and narrative tactics. John T. Matthews has demonstrated, for example, how Faulkner both used and challenged Hollywood formulas in his script writing, and how he exported his experiences as a screenwriter to his fiction, as in the story Artist at Home. (1) Read under this light, novels like Sanctuary (1931) and Intruder in the Dust (1948) clearly borrow from the popular genres of detective novels and noir film, unsurprising in light of Faulkner's time in Hollywood and his friendship with detective novelist Dashiell Hammett. Such scholarship so far has not recognized Faulkner's use of yet another highly popular trend--the boxing narrative. While Faulkner never wrote a boxing story nor prominently featured boxers in his fiction, much of his best known work deftly and subtly borrows from the boxing narratives well known to naturalist writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to Popular Front writers of the 1930s. Exploring the connections between Faulkner's fiction and Popular Front boxing narratives sheds light on the 1930s and 40s as a time of cultural confusion, when Americans were losing faith in established institutions yet remaining apprehensive of sweeping societal change, valorizing certain mythologized figures while also seeking new ones. gangster, the detective, even the comic book superhero--all these types emerged as pop culture icons during the 1930s, and aspects of each character could be found within the boxing narrative. Faulkner's engagement with boxing tales one more mark of his canny understanding of the cultural currents of his time. In particular, this essay will discuss how Faulkner's work in the 1930s and early 1940s engaged Popular Front boxing narratives in ways that acknowledge the need for social change while remaining skeptical of the limits and results of such change. I want to begin by discussing the popular and artistic understanding of the boxing ring--a world that offered individual success and valorized masculinity, while also offering the danger of corruption and savagery. This essay will discuss how Faulkner's major works leading up to World War II dovetail with the cultural narrative beginning with Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion, and culminating with the second African American champ, Joe Louis. Both Faulkner's work and the stories of two black champions engage and illuminate national fears and struggles with racism at home and fascism abroad. I will trace the influence of boxing narratives through several key passages in Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Bear and The Fire and the Hearth from Go Down, Moses (1940). In doing so, I will demonstrate an ambivalent narrative trajectory in Faulkner's novels that cautiously explores the potential for progressive race relations. While both Faulkner and the nation made great strides during these years, Faulkner's work ultimately exposes the remaining imaginative barriers to racial progress. Cultural and literary critics find the boxing ring a rich arena for social signification. As Gerald Early characterizes it, boxing is a remarkable metaphor for the philosophical and social condition of men (and, sometimes, women) in modern mass society (xiv). Within the prize ring, one can establish independence, individuality, and most importantly a clear triumph over another individual. prizefight offers the hope of fame and fortune earned with nothing but one's own hands. Of particular cultural interest are the boxing narratives of American Naturalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and American Popular Front writers of the 1930s and 1940s. (2) Naturalist writers drew on the figure of the Great White Hope to bolster waning faith in modern masculinity and white racial superiority. …

“Ali Even Motivates the Dead”: The Pursuit of Sovereignty in Norman Mailer'sThe Fight

Norman Mailer was haunted by the specter of social death—a specter created for him by living as a Jew between the parentheses created by the Holocaust and the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. As an antidote to social death, Mailer sought its opposite—sovereignty within and beyond his writer's sphere. In the boxer Muhammad Ali, Mailer found an exemplar of the seizure of sovereignty within and beyond a sphere.The Fightchronicles the heavyweight championship battle between Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, a country treated like a private bank account by its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. I argue that Mailer regrettably failed to emphasize fully the fact that Zaire was exhibit B (the Vietnam War being the writer's inevitable exhibit A) in the case Mailer passionately made that the Cold War brutalized the American psyche.

Cultures of the Body in Colonial Bengal: The Career of Gobor Guha

In recent years, the history of modern Indian wrestling – or kushti – has begun to receive scholarly attention. Most accounts agree that the last decades of the nineteenth century saw the coming of the modern form of this ancient Indian sport, with Indian wrestlers emerging from the confines of their akharas and fighting with their Western counterparts. But while there are some scholarly accounts of north Indian wrestling, and Gama in particular, the rest of the country has not fared well. What has also been lacking is a perspective that considers wrestling as one of the many cultures of the body which characterised the nationalist phase in Indian history, dating from roughly the end of the nineteenth century till the third decade of the twentieth. During this time, a kind of muscular nationalism was beginning to gain ground in Bengal. Fed up of being stigmatised as a ‘frail and effeminate’ race, Bengalis – both men and women – began to participate in various kinds of physical cultures, ranging from martial arts to gymnastics, trapeze acts to hot-air ballooning. With the rise of the swadeshi movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, akharas or gymnasiums mushroomed all over north Calcutta. In this paper, I will survey the history of such cultures in colonial Bengal, with particular reference to the figure of the wrestler Gobor Guha, who still remains the only Indian to win a world heavyweight title in wrestling.

“Ghost[s] in the House!”: Black Subjectivity and Cultural Memory in Howard Sackler’s <i>The Great White Hope</i>

After The Great White Hope (1967) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1969, its author, Howard Sackler, told the New York Times that the play was not “about blacks and whites” and was instead “a metaphor of struggle between man and the outside world.” Figuring racial identity as a dramatic device, he argued that what made the play compelling was “not [its] topicality, but the combination of circumstances, the destiny of a man pitted against society” (Shepard). Though Sackler drew the play’s protagonist Jack Jefferson from events in the life of the first African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, whose reign from 1908 to 1915 sparked racially motivated violence throughout the US, he consistently argued for the universality of the play’s characters and themes. Despite his claim, Jefferson’s racial identity and the nation’s racial turmoil framed theater critics’ discussion of the play in both the mainstream and African American press at its 1967 debut at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and its subsequent 1968 Broadway opening at the Alvin Theatre. In turning to the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s with its social and political unrest, as well as the spectral presences of both Johnson and Muhammad Ali in their evaluations of the play, theater critics resist Sackler’s positioning of universality and topicality as mutually exclusive and reject racial identity as simply a dramatic device. This critical impasse between Sackler’s stated authorial intent and theater critics, who do not deny the play’s universality, but instead emphasize its topical comment on 1960s racial politics, creates space to consider The Great White Hope from three vantages: first, as an exploration of the tensions between the play’s representation of Jefferson and the post-soul aesthetic that challenges Sackler’s claim of race-neutral universality; second, as a critique of Progressive Era racial hierarchies and racial uplift ideology—the “racial common sense” of the Progressive Era and its implications for African American subjectivity; and third, as a means of recovering how the play is situated in cultural memory by examining theater