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Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation

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Narrator
Release Date
April 8, 2025
Duration
10 hours 32 minutes
Summary
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, she demonstrates 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.
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Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation

Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation

Author: Jordana Moore Saggese
Read by: L. Malaika Cooper
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