Radical Acts: Pugilistic Ontology and the Politics of Identity in the Rise of Muhammad Ali

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" Radical Acts: Pugilistic Ontology and the Politics of Identity in the Rise of Muhammad Ali "
Heo, Banseok Bradley, Adam

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	1053667
Doc. No	:	TL52784
Main Entry	:	Heo, Banseok
Title & Author	:	Radical Acts: Pugilistic Ontology and the Politics of Identity in the Rise of Muhammad Ali\ Heo, BanseokBradley, Adam
College	:	University of Colorado at Boulder
Date	:	2020
Degree	:	M.A.
student score	:	2020
Note	:	61 p.
Abstract	:	A chronological consideration of the countless voices evaluating the life of Muhammad Ali reveals a troubling parallel between institutional noise and authorial silence. The more Ali’s verbal and physical abilities deteriorated under Parkinson’s disease, the more eager financially interested parties became in speaking on his behalf. Thus narrativized for nearly five decades, the name “Ali” has become disarmed and commonplace. In reaction to this cacophony of biography, I assert a need to restore the international and postcolonial significance back into the construction of Ali’s past through a rigorous study of the boxing ring and its histories. This thesis begins by situating the sport of boxing as a performance tradition that cultivates a uniquely combative and improvisational form of intelligence, or what I call a “pugilistic ontology”. Though erstwhile scholarship presents Ali as an unprecedently talented pugilist and vernacular voice of black American resistance, this thesis contextualizes Ali by framing his quick pugilistic wit as the inevitable product of professional boxing’s selective and unforgiving system of competition. Moving from classical antiquity into the 20th century, I construct a chronotopic model of the American boxing ring as a socially and historically contingent space where hegemonic narratives of the racialized body are made vulnerable to pugilistic critique. By allying with the Nation of Islam and condemning U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War despite threats of government intervention, Ali calls into question the subjectifying power of the state and renegotiates the limitations of what minoritarian people can and cannot achieve within a white supremacist America.
Descriptor	:	African American studies
	:	British Irish literature
	:	History
Added Entry	:	Bradley, Adam
Added Entry	:	University of Colorado at Boulder