Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation - Hardcover

Saggese, Jordana Moore

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1478026405 ISBN 13: 9781478026402

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2024

Synopsis

In Heavyweight, Jordana Moore Saggese examines images of Black heavyweight boxers to map the visual terrain of racist ideology in the United States, paying particular attention to the intersecting discourses of Blackness, masculinity, and sport. Looking closely at the “shadow archive” of portrayals across fine art, vernacular imagery, and public media at the turn of the twentieth century, shedemonstrates how the images of boxers reveal the racist stereotypes implicit in them, many of which continue to structure ideas of Black men today. With a focus on both anonymous fighters and notorious champions, including Jack Johnson, Saggese contends that popular images of these men provided white spectators a way to render themselves experts on Blackness and Black masculinity. These images became the blueprint for white conceptions of the Black male body—existing between fear and fantasy, simultaneously an object of desire and an instrument of violence. Reframing boxing as yet another way whiteness establishes the violent mythology of its supremacy, Saggese highlights the role of imagery in normalizing a culture of anti-Blackness.

About this title

About the Author

Jordana Moore Saggese is Professor of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, author of Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art, and editor of The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478026405
• ISBN 13: 9781478026402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304