Introduction

Abstract

The introduction reconsiders sporting images, particularly those of Black boxers, as integral to both the wider visual and cultural history of Blackness in the United States as well as the ecology of white violence that continues in our present moment. Although art historians tend to overlook images of athletes, along with other iconic and/or popular images, Heavyweight recognizes the ways in which Blackness is produced, rehearsed, and regulated through images of athletes that circulated in the Reconstruction period and after. These Black men were among the most reproduced in a thriving media culture, and as such should be considered as part of the visual record of Blackness. It is in these historical sporting images that we find the blueprint for our conceptions of the Black male body as existing somewhere between fear and fantasy, simultaneously an object of desire and an instrument of brutal violence.