Description: "Professional boxers practice their trade within an ostensibly apolitical arena. In reality, however, the fighters work inside a capitalistic and neoliberal sports culture that they both challenge and uphold. This collection delves into professional boxing's capacity for brilliance, contradiction, resistance, and complicity. Scholars, activists, and artists explore the boxing ring as a site for understanding original and diverse ideas about the performance of race, citizenship, gender, power, and dissent. Essays and interviews draw attention to the cultural politics and performances of marginalized boxers while revealing the structures of power and practices of agency at work around Black, Brown, and queer bodies. As the contributors establish boxing's central place in communities of color, they open exciting new avenues for studying race, immigration, gender, and capital. Multifaceted and innovative, Rings of Dissent uncovers fascinating corners of the boxing world as it illuminates what the sport tells us about America"-- Provided by publisher.
Review Quotes: "Time and again, this sport has given us the richest possible window into this country, and yet it has seemed in recent years that the window has closed. But we still need boxing to not only understand our past but to also comprehend the present. [Rings of Dissent] has the immediacy of the great boxing writing of the past by figures such James Baldwin, Gay Talese, and Joyce Carol Oates, while keeping its feet planted in the present."
--From the Foreword by Dave Zirin, author of The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World