Jordana Moore Saggese’s Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation is a valuable contribution to art historical literature devoted to examining racialized violence in the United States and the role of visual images in promoting and maintaining this violence.  The focus of her book is the representation of Black heavyweight boxers in the United States in visual culture—the illustrated press, photographic portraits, cabinet cards, prints, paintings, and so forth—from 1880 through 1910. Saggese examines how these representations contributed to the shaping, policing, and fetishizing of Black masculinity. She argues that their meanings were produced through visual conventions whose roots resided in the institution of slavery and the various guises enslavement took after emancipation. These conventions continued to evolve into the twenty-first century, spawning images of Black athletes that rehearse “a genealogy of Blackness rooted in violence, abjection, and even desire” (xiii).

Saggese connects the rise of the sport of boxing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the emergence of industrial capitalism and an increase in immigration from southern and eastern Europe. These developments, in turn, helped bring about a crisis in white, middle-class masculinity. While the author looks at working-class white men, particularly in chapter one, her focus is the middle or professional-managerial class, whose members—journalists, scientists, artists—were most responsible for constructing public racial discourses. In the absence of work involving physical labor, boxing became a respectable pursuit and marker of masculinity for middle-class white men. Saggese also connects boxing, with its focus on half-naked muscular bodies, to the physical culture movement. This movement drew attention to the physical body, rather than any internal factor (the mind, the soul), as the locus of individual identity, and to athleticism as the path to both physical and moral improvement.

This crisis in white middle-class masculinity was complicated by the recent end of slavery and the emergence of a free Black male population. The success of Black men in the sport of boxing, writes Saggese, threatened the self-image of white men as superior to Black men, and had to be contained, in part, through the mythologies of brutality and savagery embedded in the images of Black boxers and the narratives that surrounded these images.

Chapter one provides a brief history of boxing in the United States, from fights between enslaved Black men on southern plantations, staged primarily for the entertainment of white plantation owners and their friends, to bare-knuckle prize fights between working-class immigrants for mixed-class viewers, to gloved semi-legal, inter-racial matches for largely white audiences.

Irish immigrants were among the most prominent participants in the sport of boxing in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their increasing numbers raised concerns among citizens of English descent, who often viewed the Irish as “savages.” They were compared to African and Indigenous American people who, along with the Irish, were part of a growing pool of wage laborers made necessary by the expansion of industrial capitalism. The resulting rise in nativism and the tensions it created were played out in the boxing ring between recent immigrants and so-called native-born citizens. At the same time, definitions of whiteness promoted by the native-born elite became more complex and hierarchical to ensure that this elite remained at the pinnacle of the racial hierarchy. The affirmation of white superiority provided white working-class men a way to shore up their own sense of selfhood and masculinity in the face of the eroding of skilled craft traditions, an important source of self-worth, in a factory-dominated industrial system.

Chapter two focuses on the Black boxer Ben Bailey, the first and only recognizably Black model in Eadweard Muybridge’s massive photographic motion study Animal Locomotion, published in 1887. Saggese understands Muybridge’s photographs as part of positivist science’s focus on discovering universal laws through measurement of the human body. Such laws would enable the creation of a hierarchy of body types and the regulation, if not criminalization, of a growing urban underclass. For example, Muybridge uses an anthropometric grid background—an aid to measuring the human body—for the first time in his images of Bailey. The boxer thus appears as representative of a type, rather than a distinct individual. Muybridge also isolated Bailey within the frame instead of showing him boxing with another person, as in his photographs of white boxers. While Bailey was the only professional boxer among Muybridge’s models, he was represented in unstable poses that suggested a lack of boxing skill. Finally, Muybridge’s exposure of Bailey’s penis (those of the white boxers are covered) eroticizes his body as a site of both fear and desire.

Chapter three takes up the career of the heavyweight Black Australian boxer Peter Jackson and focuses on several photographs of him taken while he was in San Francisco in 1889. Saggese situates one group of photographs, where he is almost completely naked, within debates concerning the proportions of the “perfect body.” Jackson’s body was presented as representative of the type of perfection found in the lithe bodies of Greek sculptures of gods like Apollo. At the same time, his body “was consciously and consistently shaped by discourses of sexuality,” with “the erotic and the violent [becoming] entangled through representation” (30).  

Jackson’s public reputation also involved his photographic self-presentation as a “classic London gentleman,” an attempt, according to Saggese, “to fashion an image of himself outside his identity as a boxer” (133) and “outside the stereotype of the Black brute” (136). This repositioning was particularly important after Jackson began defeating white boxing champions shortly after he arrived in the United States in 1888.

The final chapter of Heavyweight treats the boxing paintings of George Bellows alongside the career and representations of the Black boxer Jack Johnson. Saggese looks at the intersections of inter-racial heavyweight matches, boxing as a semi-legal sport, the crisis in middle-class white masculinity, and the rise of boxing as an amateur and respectable sport for middle-class white men. She focuses on how racial tensions following Emancipation and Reconstruction informed both fine art and mass media representations of bouts between white and Black opponents. Such representations, she argues, encouraged, and even justified, racial violence.  By painting boxers, Bellows reaffirmed his own “manliness;” by painting white and Black boxers in the ring together, he drew attention to the fragility of masculinity tied to white racial superiority.

Saggese also argues that Bellows’s interest in boxing and his focus on the negative or repulsive aspects of boxing—the blood, the bruising, the violence—was part of his wider interest in the abject, that which disturbs or threatens our sense of self while simultaneously fascinating us.  The blood and violence in Bellows’s boxing painting Both Members of This Club (1909), with the massive yet undifferentiated figure of the Black boxer bearing down on the bloodied white boxer, embodies this fear and attraction of the abject.

If the body of the heavyweight boxer was seen as “the perfect example of manhood and power” (207), then the public display of the body of the Black heavyweight boxer had to be carefully managed to neutralize its physical threat. For example, Johnson’s (and Jackson’s) stage career (dancing, singing, sparring) was often cited in newspaper coverage to reinforce his position as an entertainer for white audiences. Yet Johnson also utilized many of the conventions of white masculinity—the powerful body, the financial success, the image of the self-made man, the attractive white wives—to stake his claim to manhood.  He was no match, however, for the legal, economic, and cultural resistance to his efforts, particularly after his defeat of the white boxer Jim Jeffries in the heavyweight championship bout of 1910.  A combination of death threats, federal prosecution, and hostile press coverage forced him to flee the US. His defeat by a white boxer in 1915 in Cuba was celebrated as evidence of the ultimate superiority of white men. Saggese’s brief reference to the discomfort some Black publications expressed about Johnson’s flamboyant behavior before he fled the US raises interesting questions about the broader reception of images of Black boxers within different Black communities, a topic for further research.

In her afterword, Saggese tells us she was inspired to write her book by the reimaging of Black boxers by the contemporary Black artist Lyle Ashton Harris in his photographic series Memoirs of Hadrian (2002). She also tells us she started writing her book in 2012, shortly after the murder of the young Black man Trayvon Martin. Over the next decade, she witnessed the murder of many unarmed Black men and boys by police, often captured in video footage uploaded to the internet and broadcast across the world. “How do we continue to watch?” she asks. And how did Black men come to be perceived as so threatening that such extreme violence was seen as justified? Saggese’s book is one answer to these questions. She hopes that understanding boxing’s place in the cultivation of anti-Blackness will provide a way to push back against anti-Black stereotypes and to create new, more complex, and empowering representations of Blackness.