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At Home and Abroad: Cooper Harriss on Muhammad Ali
32 Plays1 year ago
There are few figures so engrained in pop culture and world history like Muhammad Ali. Along with being one of the best professional heavyweight boxers in history, Ali was a civil rights and anti-war activist, a follower of the Nation of Islam, later converting to Sunni Islam, an author, and an artist. Beyond these titles though, Muhammad Ali stands as this almost mythological figure; a symbol, supported by all the literature, films, theater, and artwork that exemplifies his life and impact. It’s like Muhammad Ali always said, “I am the greatest.”
In our finale, Matt Cavedon and Ira Bedzow speak with Cooper Harriss of Indiana University. Harriss is an associate professor in religious studies and an adjunct professor in comparative literature, folklore, and ethnomusicology. His research focuses on the relationship between religion and major cultural figures in American history, and how they defined the culture then as well as today. Harriss has written about Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, Nat Turner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Muhammad Ali.
In his essay, “On the Abroad of a Different Home: Muhammad Ali in Micro-Scope,” Harriss uses the history of the athlete, as well as how his life is represented in media, to explore how the selectiveness of identity can paint specific pictures of an individual. The three begin by discussing why Harriss chose to write about Ali, explaining how Ali acts as a symbol for post-war American religion. The conversation then shifts into the art meant to illustrate the life of Ali, from work that highlights a certain span of time, such as all the film biopics that follow Ali between 1964-1974, to work that focuses on a specific moment, such as in Will Power’s play Fetch Clay, Make Man. And along with discussions of how white popular memory and black popular memory remember Ali, as well as the ways “irony” and “double cross” relate to the athlete, the three consider the question: How do we explain our identity, or is there no such thing; only perception?
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Interactions' Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello, I'm Ethan Anthony and welcome to Interactions, a podcast about law and religion and how they interact in the world around us. There are a few figures so ingrained in pop culture and world history like Muhammad Ali
00:00:23
Speaker
Along with being one of the best professional heavyweight boxers in history, Ali was a civil rights and anti-war activist, a follower of the nation of Islam, later converting to Sunni Islam, an author and an artist. Beyond these titles though, Muhammad Ali stands as this almost mythological figure, a symbol supported by all the literature, films, theater, and artwork that exemplifies his life and impact.
00:00:51
Speaker
It's like Muhammad Ali always said, I am the greatest.
Book Highlight: Law, Religion, and Politics in America
00:00:58
Speaker
Published in 2021 by Columbia University Press at home. The broad, the politics of American religion explores the ways religion connects with law and politics on topics ranging from religion in Hawaii to the culture of yoga.
00:01:13
Speaker
Our co-hosts are Ira Bedzo, the director of the Miriam Institute Project in International Ethics and Leadership, and Matthew Cabbadon, the Robert Poole Fellow in Law and Religion.
Meet the Co-Hosts and their Approach
00:01:25
Speaker
In this series, they'll be talking with authors from this volume and asking not only about the text and their inspiration by the chapter, but also its timeliness today. In our season finale, Matt and Ira speak with Cooper Harris of Indiana University.
00:01:42
Speaker
Harris is an associate professor in religious studies, an adjunct professor in comparative literature, folklore, and ethnomusicology. His research focuses on the relationship between religion and major cultural figures in American history, and how they define the culture then as well as today. Harris is written about Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, Matt Turner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Muhammad Ali.
Cooper Harris on Ali: Symbol of American Religion
00:02:11
Speaker
In his essay, On the Abroad of a Different Home, Muhammad Ali in Microscope, Harris uses the history of the athlete, as well as how his life is represented in media, to explore how the selectiveness of identity can paint specific pictures of an individual. The three begin by discussing why Harris chose to write about Ali, explaining how Ali acts as a symbol for post-war American religion.
00:02:35
Speaker
The conversation then shifts into the art meant to illustrate the life of Ollie, from work that highlights a certain span of time, such as all the film biopics that follow Ollie between 1964 and 1974, to work that focuses on a specific moment, such as in Will Powers' play Fetch Clay, Make Man.
00:02:52
Speaker
And along with discussions of how white popular memory and black popular memory remember Ali, as well as the ways irony and double cross relate to the athlete, the three consider the question, how do we explain our identity? Or is there no such thing? Only perception. All this and more on today's episode of Interactions, brought to you by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.
00:03:24
Speaker
We are here today with Cooper Harris. Cooper is an associate professor of religious studies at the Indiana University's Bloomington campus. He is also an adjunct professor of folklore and ethnomusicology and an adjunct professor of comparative literature. A lot of different hats to wear. His research and teaching
00:03:43
Speaker
looks to a number of different sorts of texts, including literature, vernacular music, preaching, and performance, in order to try to suss out ways that religious thought, belief, and practice contribute to and are generated by diverse American cultures both in the United States and around the world.
00:04:02
Speaker
His most recent work explores religious and theological concepts around race, teaching critical religious terms of its development and cultural expression in American, African-American, and global contexts. Professor Harris has written about Ralph Ellison, as well as about Zora Neale Hurston, Nat Turner, Bob Dylan, Kurt Vonnegut, and other leading aspects of American popular culture. We're here today to talk to him about Muhammad Ali.
00:04:31
Speaker
I'm Matthew Cavadon, and I'm your co-host together with. I'm Ira Benzo. And Matt, if you don't mind, I'm going to take this first question.
Ali's Multifaceted Identity and Religious Influence
00:04:40
Speaker
Cooper, I'm really excited to speak to you today. It seems as if you have interests that are wide and deep in many different areas. But since we're talking about your chapter, titled on the abroad of a different home, Muhammad Ali in the microscope,
00:04:57
Speaker
I guess my first question is going to be why write about Muhammad Ali? Where did your interest come from? And how did it come to be that you would write a chapter on such a great fighter? Sure. No, thanks. And thank you also for having me. I'm really fascinated by people who don't readily fit into categories. I think you just read a list of people I've worked on from Bob Dylan and Zora Neale Hurston.
00:05:24
Speaker
Ralph Ellison, Nat Turner, and I see Ali very much in that same vein. I'm really fascinating with trying to maybe make sense isn't the right word, but to dive into what it is about this figure, this person, this persona, and how it is that he functions as
00:05:48
Speaker
as a public figure, but also how his religiosity and the reception of his religiosity contribute to and sort of work within changing modes of post-war American religion. I often argue that Muhammad Ali is post-war American religion, which we can talk more about if you like.
00:06:14
Speaker
The project, the Home and Abroad Project, I was part of the working group. And it became clear to me that home and abroad as these kinds of terms could be very helpful for thinking about Ali as this person who is working through and now getting negotiating, performing a number of different contradictions. I was fascinated by my colleague Evan Hightfully's comment
00:06:43
Speaker
that about the abroad of another home, right, where he was trying to move the Great Awakening away from just an American colonial context and to think about it elsewhere. And for me,
00:06:55
Speaker
I was seized by that statement. And moving forward with that, I began to think about what is it that Ali moves us away from? What is it that he allows us to think about differently or to see differently in this story that we often think or suppose or presume that we know, even when we don't?
00:07:20
Speaker
All right. You said something that I need to ask you. You said Muhammad Ali is post-war American religion. And then you said, okay, maybe we'll talk about this. I think we need to talk about this. Right. What do you mean to say Muhammad Ali is post-war American religion? Sure. So Muhammad Ali is, I mean, there are a number of ways we can couch this. I'll kind of give you a battery of them. I think
00:07:44
Speaker
One is if we want to look at how American religion was understood.
00:07:51
Speaker
going into the post-war era, how it's often been studied and in some ways it's still studied. It's obsessed with, the study itself is highly Protestant, historically white, historically male. It's fascinated with evangelicals. I mean, there are exceptions here, but even the exceptions, right, of thinking about increasing diversity
00:08:14
Speaker
thinking about, you know, ideas of religious freedom, even these still kind of come out of that Protestant sensibility. And so one of the things that I think, or many of the things that I think Ali allows us to think about differently is that he doesn't necessarily check those boxes. He's often understood to or thought to or maybe
00:08:37
Speaker
wedged into some of those boxes. But he doesn't. He's a black man. He's a Muslim. He's a Muslim in a way that is both at once sort of aspirationally global and yet also very much embedded in an American context. He is fascinating aspects of his gender where he's both sort of masculine but also there's a kind of queerness to the fluidity of it. He's pretty
00:09:06
Speaker
He floats like a butterfly and he stings like a bee right through these kind of dual aspects. He's also right at the heart of, I think, a number of different arguments and ideas that are coming out in courses of law, questions of the body, mentioned gender and sexuality.
00:09:28
Speaker
poetics, right? He is very much enmeshed in all of these aspects and in all of these ideas. And he does so in a way that is, I think, appropriately, pugnaciously defiant of the inherited legacy of American religious history. He is something quite different. And that something quite different is, I would argue, what we ought to be thinking about and paying attention to.
00:09:57
Speaker
You know, your answer speaks to not only how we think about post-American religion, or post-war American religion, but who gets to tell those stories. And who has the authority to say what post-war American religion is based on the examples that they see as salient or as relevant. In your chapter, you also talk about how
00:10:23
Speaker
Ali's life and career are the stories that we tell about Ali in a number of biopics focused really on a specific decade of his life. And it made me think of and wanting to ask you, forget the broader point of how broad and varied Ali's experiences were such that you could have biopics on any decade, right?
00:10:45
Speaker
Who gets to choose which particular decade speaks to Ali's identity? Who's determining what Ali's identity is by virtue of the stories that they're highlighting or focusing on? And how does that speak to who gets to tell the story of post-war American religion?
Ali's Religious Journey and Media Portrayal
00:11:03
Speaker
Right. No, that's a good question and a good way of putting it because I think the short answer is that the market drives it.
00:11:13
Speaker
sort of just a little bit of background on what we're talking about. This is another chapter from another book, but I look at the way in which 1964 to 1974 is very much the ground that everybody covers. Most documentaries do that. Biopic Ali starring Will Smith does that. And there's a compelling story here. In 1964, he wins against all odds, the heavyweight championship.
00:11:42
Speaker
He announces his conversion to Islam the next day. He then, as a result of that, you know, refuses military induction. He goes into exile. He loses his titles. He's broke. But then he's found, I guess, not guilty or he is affirmed by the legal structures of the American system on the basis of a sincerely held faith, a sincerely held religious belief.
00:12:10
Speaker
And he comes back and he wins back the titles that he's lost, that have been stripped from him. So what I argue here is that there's really kind of a classic story for him, right? Rise, fall, return. You can map that onto so much. And so I wonder, I mean, another question to think about is, you know, what other
00:12:33
Speaker
10-year span, you know, could one do? And it's tough. I mean, I think you could do other 10-year spans. They may be less compelling and certainly would not be blockbusters without rehearsing sort of the different options. No one else really offers the same kind of viability. But I think it's market.
00:12:58
Speaker
It's market. Ali is largely in decline. He leaves the nation of Islam when Elijah Muhammad dies in 1974. Elijah Muhammad dies in 75, but things are different. This is the triumph. This is where you go to dark with him standing in the ring having won the rumble in the jungle.
00:13:23
Speaker
At a very superficial level, it would seem like, if you want to bring Ali back into the mainstream of American culture, covering that next religious move away from the nation of Islam and into more mainstream Islam with Warith Din Muhammad would be a smart way to do that.
00:13:42
Speaker
Nevertheless your chapter says that the popular at least the popular white memory about Ali freezes him at the end of that Triumph still as a member of the nation of Islam What does that say about us? Why is it that that is the Religious aspect that is still remembered rather than the later move toward What would seem like a safer more recognizable sort of Islam or am I mischaracterizing that in some way?
00:14:11
Speaker
No, I think you're right. I think it's a good question, you know, ideas of a mainstream, certainly the esoteric nature of the nation of Islam. But what I think is interesting, and this gets played out, I think, in that compartmentalizing of the story, which is also basically 64 to 74 is more or less the length of his time in the nation. He might go back a year and up a year.
00:14:38
Speaker
but so the story of his rise and fall is the story of the nation of islam and and what gets mainstreamed uh interestingly is not um his involvement or it's not his it's not the specifics of his involvement with the nation it is the fact that the nation becomes a kind of uh smoothed over or vague religion it becomes the sincerely held belief it becomes the um
00:15:08
Speaker
the thing that he fights for his religious freedom for. So it ceases to be this esoteric black man with spaceships kind of thing, and it becomes what he really believes, what he thinks is right, what he goes to court for, what he defies logic for. And so that then gets transferred into something much more recognizable, much more quote unquote American in that it is kind of
00:15:38
Speaker
Well, it's very Protestant. This is that transformation that takes place. I think with the later terms, there are
00:15:48
Speaker
reasons why that works probably less well also. It's more diffuse. It's spread out over a number of years. I think the story of that is less compellingly tied to a digestible section of Ali's career. I think also whatever one ought to say about a mainstream of Islam, and I'm speaking sort of from a reception view of
00:16:18
Speaker
America slash white America, the notion of a mainstream Islam is probably not so evident. I mean, this is a period you could look at Iran, which is Shiite, not Sunni, but still, that's not a difference that most Americans are thinking about. You can look at Iraq, you can look at the World Trade Center bombings, both of them. This period in which he is sort of becoming what you might call
00:16:46
Speaker
or gesture toward as a mainstream Muslim, is a time when that's also decided to be not mainstream. And so, if you can look at this highly recognizable American religious freedom version of things, as opposed to this more amorphous aspect, then I think that's also a difference.
00:17:10
Speaker
is one of the real ironies here that the US Supreme Court, the embodiment of the institution, somehow actually rehabilitates the nation of Islam into being a more normalized religious thing for the US white context than other forms of Islam. I mean, when you say it, it makes sense. It's also just absolutely stunning.
00:17:35
Speaker
In a lot of ways, the idea that the man, if ever there was such a thing, actually facilitates the culture being more comfortable with the nation of Islam, a homegrown oftentimes radical militant resistance oriented religion than with a more universalist or certainly foreign. And that's a perfectly fair point. But but variety of Islam, I mean, I'm just I'm just absolutely fascinated by your point here.
00:18:03
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's, but that's Ali. And that's what's really fascinating if you can break out of the, you know, the heroic narratives, right? As you begin to see, or if you can begin to recognize those narratives for what they are and how they work. There's just so many ways in which he fractures and tears up any kind of assumptions that we want to make. So irony is a really important word for me, which you can talk more about, but I think you're right on it with that word and that description.
00:18:34
Speaker
But you say in your chapter that having these biopics, and I know that you also push back and say that we shouldn't have these decade-long biopics. You think sometimes a capture of a moment or a microscope might tell a better story of Ali as well. But you say one of the reasons to end these biopics where they do is because it allows Ali to be seen as a good Muslim by being
00:19:00
Speaker
part of the Nation of Islam. What do you mean here by a good Muslim? I mean, I know we've spoken about this a little bit in Matt's question to you, but I mean, given how radical the Nation of Islam was and how controversial it is, and what is your definition of good Muslim here such that it fits with this description? Yeah, I mean, I'm there. I'm working with the idea of good religion as something that is recognizable, right? So in the classroom we'll talk about, you know,
00:19:29
Speaker
certain things we tend to get deemed good religion, certain things get to be deemed bad religion, and oftentimes that demarcation is based on some way in which you either understand or identify with or recognize something. And so when I say a good Muslim, or if I say that it's good religion, I'm very well may, I don't have the copy in front of me,
00:19:53
Speaker
But what I'm talking about is that idea that the goodness is not necessarily the specifics. Well, it's not the specifics of the myth of Gakub or many of the criticisms that could be leveled at this group. It is the fact that it is about religious freedom. It is the fact that he's standing up for what he believes in. It is that which makes him good. And I think also if you play that off of
00:20:22
Speaker
sort of ramping up, ramping up Islamophobia, certainly after the mid 70s in the US. That is how that plays out.
00:20:52
Speaker
You do give an example of an artistic portrayal of Ali that does zoom into a particular moment. You talk about this play by Will Power, great name, by the way, where Ali learns the anchor punch, a way to summon up all the energies of the entire Black experience, including enslavement and pain and suffering and hopes and survival and concentrates it into a single blow. And then that the apex of the play
00:21:22
Speaker
just like in the movies, Ali delivers it onto Liston, knocks him out and wins. And that's the great triumph moment. Can you talk a little bit about how black popular memory remembers Ali in light of that and about the significance of that anchor punch moment, perhaps within that discourse or otherwise?
00:21:44
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's a really good question. And part of the way that I would respond to it is that I think when it comes to Ali, I mean, certainly we might make general characterizations, but I don't know that there's ever a kind of singular categorical response.
Racial Dynamics and Media Complexity
00:22:04
Speaker
And I think that my understanding of the anchor punch here and how power might be using it has something, it might help to clarify or at least illuminate my point some.
00:22:15
Speaker
He is summoning, as you said, the power of the ancestors, the power of the experience, and he levels it, you know, 90 seconds into the match against another black man. For Jack Johnson, the anchor punch was
00:22:34
Speaker
almost exclusively summoned against a great white hope, and it's an expression of this power. For Ali, again, he's not playing into these kinds of black-white bifurcations. And this is something we see across his career.
00:22:56
Speaker
He's, you know, a figure who's often paled for his racial authenticity, but this is tricky. He's, it's an unstable authenticity. He could be quite cruel. You know, leading up to this fight into the previous, this is the second Liston fight that we're looking at, but up to the previous one as well, he's showing up at Liston's door in the middle of the night, calling him a bear, calling him an animal, highly, highly racially freighted terms.
00:23:23
Speaker
He says he's ugly, he says he's stupid. We can go up to Artie Terrell in the late 60s. He's calling him Uncle Tom, which is a racial judgment, invaded against someone who called him Clay, but I think also thought that they were doing the play around thing. And someone like Joe Frazier, where it's just kind of breathtaking, the ways in which his criticisms were
00:23:52
Speaker
traded along these racial ways. And so I think one of the things that I find fascinating about the Anchor Punch is the way that it's both used but also misused. And by misused, I put quotes around that because I think this also gets us into another important figure in the play that deals with this same kind of question and this question about sort of particularly about Black reactions.
00:24:19
Speaker
And that is his good friend, Steppenfetchit, Lincoln Perry. And that leads right over to my next question, which is you write in the chapter about the idea of a double cross. You talked a little bit about irony already, but talk us through this idea of a double cross as it relates to Ali and to Steppenfetchit or Lincoln, I believe it was, it was Perry.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yeah, so Lincoln Perry, Stefan Fuchet. Lincoln Perry is the actor who portrayed Stefan Fuchet. Stefan Fuchet was the earliest film star, sort of earliest mainstream black film star. He portrayed a character that was lazy, dishonest, he wanted to take naps, very much a kind of minstrel character. He was a black minstrel in a lot of ways. And as his life went on, this would have been in the 30s.
00:25:13
Speaker
primarily, maybe into the 40s. But by the 60s, the rise of black power and so forth. Of course, he comes under strenuous scrutiny. People have always not liked him, but he really becomes a kind of traitor. I think that's a word that gets used in the play. And so it becomes, and I think this is another example of where Ali sort of defies expectation,
00:25:43
Speaker
Uh, he takes up with, um, Perry. He, by all accounts, genuinely liked and was fascinated by the guy. Uh, and so it's, it becomes this question of how, you know, how do you account for that? How do you account for this, this sort of beacon for black power? Uh, how can you account for his involvement with someone like, like Lincoln Perry?
Ali's Olympic Medal: Symbolism and Transformation
00:26:10
Speaker
The idea of the double cross becomes a way to think about not just the contradictions, not just something like home and abroad or black and white or good or bad, but it becomes a way to think about the ways and how these presumably opposite aspects work together.
00:26:32
Speaker
The term itself comes from a couple of, I think, appropriate sources. The first one is from boxing. The double cross is a quick second punch that's unexpected that isn't necessarily damaging, but it throws your opponent off balance so that then you can come back with a stronger punch and inflict damage. So there's this kind of trickery
00:27:01
Speaker
that's involved with it. It also comes from boxing lore. I think the OED takes it back to the mid 19th century for a boxer who both agreed to take a fall, took the gambler's money, and then also won the fight. So cross and double cross in a way. It also comes from a state. The double cross would be you pretend to be someone else who is pretending to be someone else.
00:27:30
Speaker
So there's an extra layer here. And the way that I like to describe that is actually by looking at a thing, looking at Ali's gold medal. He won the gold medal in 1960, fighting for his country at the Rome Olympics. Not long after that, the story goes that he had a racist encounter, trying to eat in a restaurant in downtown Louisville, ran to the Ohio River that
00:27:57
Speaker
symbolic dividing line of North and South in the US, casts the metal into the river. He loses, so it's gone. He becomes a member of the Nation of Islam, where he refuses to fight for his country. And so if you look at pictures of him and his nation uniform, his Fruit of Islam uniform, he's got all kinds of decorations for the uniform, but the metal itself is gone. And then fast forward another 30 years,
00:28:27
Speaker
to Atlanta in 1996 when he, you know, there's this moment where he, representing the greatest of American athletes, he lights the torch on the Olympic stage with trembling hand from the Parkinson's.
00:28:43
Speaker
He's in a sense brought back into the fold. They give him actually a replacement medal. So these great pictures of him with the second dream team Having pictures made and what I'm interested in in particular is that that third iteration because it's not Muhammad Ali with a medal It's not Muhammad Ali, you know standing on stage. It's Muhammad Ali who? Already had a medal
00:29:07
Speaker
But it's gone. It's Muhammad Ali who is on stage, not because he's a medalist, but because he's a medalist who threw away his medal and then comes back again. That is the double cross. It's not the continuity of one thing over time. It is this other reversion. And so if he fights for his country, if he becomes a fighter who wouldn't fight,
00:29:31
Speaker
and then comes back to accept, in a way, this medal. This medal means something entirely different than if he had never had it. And so that becomes a model for a lot of my thinking about how Lee is not just he does this, he does that, but how are all of these part of a larger whole? How are these? And this is where irony comes in. How can we think about him ironically in a way that doesn't reduce him to hero or pariah, jerk or
00:30:00
Speaker
Swell Guy or any of the other more powerful and better dualities that aren't necessarily coming out of my mouth. I want to congratulate you for giving a shout out to the Oxford English Dictionary. It's not often in a podcast that we have such a great reference to a great book. I also now understand given
00:30:25
Speaker
your answer when you say that Ali doesn't play into bifurcations. The sentence that you write in your chapter, that Ali is never singular, never either or, he always signifies the both and, a plenitude of meaning, the masked and the mask. But I do have a question on what you mean by the masked and the mask. If you can lead us into your thinking there, that would be great.
00:30:55
Speaker
Sure. Um, so a couple of things, and this is, this is blending kind of nicely with, um, a couple of other things that we have on the table. So, uh, quite simply, uh, you know, the wearing of the mask, um, changes the, the identity of not only of the mass person, but also it gives a different vantage point on the world.
00:31:20
Speaker
But in a way, also, this mask itself becomes kind of a Muhammad Ali mask, right? And so this would be something like the double cross. And I think maybe to help this make more sense, we could look at the concept of irony, which is, in and of itself, rooted. And again, we'll get etymological. Maybe not only do, but maybe they could sponsor the podcast or something. But nonetheless, to get etymological, irony itself is derived from
00:31:51
Speaker
The iron of the Greek stage It is the it's a mask. It's also a mask character. So it's a character who is known for his mask who was a dissembler and So the idea of irony sort of comes from this Irony itself can come in any number of guises. It is what the great literary critic Wayne Booth
00:32:15
Speaker
really breaks it down nicely in a way where it can be stable, it can be unstable, it can be local, it can be infinite. But one of the differences between stable and unstable is the idea of stable is that you recognize that it's irony. So if you wear a mask, then I can see that you're wearing a mask and you are not quite what you, you know, are. You're pretending to be. There is that level of change, but I
00:32:43
Speaker
can see that. And so I understand there's this agreement. There's this stability of the irony between us. Unstable irony is where one side doesn't know. And this is where I think it becomes really rich for thinking about Ali. And if we want to think about Ali, for instance, wearing a Muhammad Ali mask or something along these lines, or having the mask put on him by an audience or a crowd, this would be another way of thinking about that, of what it is that people need him to be.
00:33:13
Speaker
And so there is this constant kind of back and forth along these divisions that sort of signify irony. The mass becomes the place where the two perspectives meet and where the really interesting work gets done.
00:33:53
Speaker
Let's go back to the first question. I'm going to ask something really similar that I asked in the beginning, but it seems like it's going through our entire conversation. In the beginning, we talked about how we create or convey Ali's identity through these biopics is based on the market. What's entertaining? What's going to sell? Now we're talking about irony.
00:34:18
Speaker
and whether Ali put a mask on himself or his audience has put a mask on him. In your chapter, you talk about a number of different conversions or transformations that Ali goes through. What does this mean in terms of Ali's identity? Does he have multiple identities over time? Is there a thread of identity that comes into focus? Or as my search for identity,
00:34:44
Speaker
a futile, like, would you just argue with me, there is, there is no such thing as identity only perception. Yeah. Or, or maybe the, the later extension of that last statement is how do we know? Um, I mean, the identity is, is what, oh, how do I, um, how was I thinking about it? Um, so what does it mean even to stake a claim about anyone's identity? Yeah. So, so, uh, the only coherence really,
00:35:11
Speaker
to any life is the meaning that we ascribe to it, either ourselves or that other people ascribe to it. And I think this is why the spans become important is because they are ways of organizing what we understand Ali's identity to be. And he may have had a similar process and perhaps one could track different persona and
00:35:34
Speaker
and think about how that works, but also, and this is a big part of my research and interest in Ali, is I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't have any way of knowing. And I won't pretend to know. That's where I think the approach where I'm looking at is where I don't even try to think about belief or a kind of interiority. I'm really focused on the persona. I'm focused on the exterior. That's where I think that can be helpful.
00:36:03
Speaker
I want to ask one more question about a specific attribution that gets layered on top of Ali's collective identity, as it were, and that's his disability.
Ali's Disability and Evolving Public Perception
00:36:14
Speaker
You describe his disability as representing an uncanny abroad that people write onto his life. I'm a wheelchair user. I'm very, very curious for how that notion helps to explain the role of disability for Ali and for our society. Yeah.
00:36:33
Speaker
No, I think that the idea of the uncanny abroad has to do, again, with the reception of disability scholars. They often describe how people with disabilities are either cast or understood or treated as possessing special insight from God or uniquely blessed or heroic or this notion of preventive suffering or something along those lines.
00:37:04
Speaker
What's, I think, fascinating about this is what Ali becomes, the way that he becomes identified, much of his persona, particularly as it's received among whites, but much of his persona more broadly, derives from his role as a sort of powerful mouthy black man who specifically challenges social norms, patriotism, sportsmanship. And he does this because he's beautiful and strong and young and elegant and
00:37:34
Speaker
eloquent, but he's also drawing on, you know, facial expressions. I think there's a way we could think about his, his interest in Stephen Fetchit, for instance, says he's on this sort of borderline minstrelsy kind of thing that comes out of the face. And what the Parkinson syndrome does is it attacks those very aspects. It attacks his speech. It attacks his facial aspect. It attacks his physical dexterity. And so in a way, he becomes
00:38:04
Speaker
saintly. It allows for him to become saintly precisely because he can no longer dispel those in the ways that he might have before. It's another way of kind of locking him into a certain narrative and be that because of guilt or pity or because this is how people understand and deal with these situations. I think that that plays a highly, highly important role
00:38:33
Speaker
in the way that Ali becomes, well, in the way he gets his medal back, in the way that he sort of becomes good. He becomes good because he can't be bad anymore, at least according to the ways in which he's often read. What does it mean that perhaps his Parkinson's may have been affected by taking blows to the head over the course of a boxing career? Yeah, no, I think it was without a doubt caused by that. And
00:39:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think it goes into more of these kinds of double crosses and the brutality of boxing and the question of what we want and expect from people who are out there. I mean, this influx, interestingly, with religion and religious violence, I mean, there's just so much, so much that's so rich to think about with this man. You know, Cooper, I'll tell you,
00:39:32
Speaker
both reading a chapter, but as important, speaking to you made me really think about home and abroad somewhat differently, where I think from some of the other chapters, we played with the ideas of home and abroad in terms of communities, where here I'm really thinking about home and abroad as the relationship between seeing myself as a subject in my own eyes versus being an object in the eyes of somebody else.
00:40:00
Speaker
And I think it's a really important frame to think about, especially when you think about communities as a collection of individuals, as opposed to simply just an amalgamation of individuals. And I really want to thank you for this conversation. It was really helpful, very enjoyable. And I will tell you, it gave me the ability or the desire to want to see movies and the lives of famous people.
00:40:29
Speaker
in a deeper and a deeper and different way. Good. Well, thank you. I think it's been a great conversation. I appreciate your questions. And I would encourage people to find Fetch Clay, Make Man by Will Power, which is the play that we're talking about. And then also another example of this that I wasn't aware of when I wrote the piece, but it does. Something very similar is maybe more famous. Kemp Powers is One Night in Miami, which places Malcolm X, Jim Brown.
00:40:58
Speaker
Ali and Sam Cooke in a room the night that Ali wins the title and everything plays out. So other very good examples of this, but thank you very much.
00:41:11
Speaker
Thank you Cooper Harris for joining us in this discussion and thank you all for listening. We hope you enjoyed our At Home and Abroad series. If you'd like to stay updated on new and upcoming episodes, please be sure to like, share, and subscribe. The Interactions podcast is distributed by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University in Canopy Forum and produced by Ethan Anthony.