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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• black radical masculinities
• Muhammad Ali
• resistance
• performance
• the black male body
• conscientious objector

Notes on contributor

Johnny Jones is an assistant professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville. His research focuses primarily on performances of black masculinities and black male identities in early 21st-century America and extends into the various forms of affect in black American life and culture.

Notes

1. For this article, the phrase ‘black folk' replaced the more common phrase ‘black people' to reference Du Bois’ use of the phrase in The soul of black folk (1903).

2. Boxing was one of many sports established as recreation to help make men out of boys in mid-nineteenth-century America. By 1850, New England clerics began linking Christianity with individual strength and found it supplementary in the USA's effort to become the world's superpower. In Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, Jeffrey Sammons writes about the clerics’ necessary linkage of religion and sport:

Their opinions reflected to a large degree the emerging spirit of English ‘muscular Christianity, with its reconciling of a robust physical life and Christian morality and duty.’ This new social gospel even maintained that physical strength built character and righteousness, making the believer fit for God's work and, implicitly, the nation's. (Sammons, 1988, p. 4)