Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-12, Section: A, page: 5112.

Adviser: Matthew Frye Jacobson.

"Journeymen" is the first academic study to use boxing culture to examine modern ideas about race, manhood, imperial control, and the body from a global perspective. As one of the first sporting industries with international reach, boxing became a symbolic battleground for debates over the racial and imperial status quo. Integrating the fields of African American/Black Diaspora History, Transnational U.S. History, Postcolonial Studies, and Gender History, it challenges narratives of U.S. exceptionalism by placing U.S. discourses of race within their larger imperial context. In tracing the foreign travels of African American prizefighters like the first-ever black World Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson, my dissertation reveals that the transmission of popular ideas about race was one of the first examples of commercial globalization in the late imperial age. Touring African American athletes were central to this process of transnational exchange since they provoked spirited discussions about U.S. Jim Crow and the color line in places as far-flung as Sydney, London, Cape Town, Paris, and Havana. Thus, the circulation of U.S. racial politics and African American culture impacted ideas of race around the world, as transportation and communications networks began to connect everyday people across national borders.

Chapter 1 explores the relationship between the transnational discourses of physicality, race, manhood, and empire. It places the controversies surrounding Jack Johnson's 1908 triumph over French Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia within the context of contemporary fears of race war. Chapter 2 analyzes the surprisingly concerted U.S. and British efforts to ban the exhibition of the 1910 prizefight film featuring Johnson's defeat of white American Jim Jeffries. Chapter 3 uses the public uproar over Johnson's proposed title match against Bombardier Billy Wells in London to explore the transnational debates over race and citizenship during the 1910s. Chapter 4 examines African American boxers as part of a long-established, working-class Black Atlantic that experienced limited success in finding foreign spaces of exile beyond the shadow of the color line. Chapter 5 explores the paradoxical role of African American celebrities like Johnson in French discourses of race, empire, and modernism. Chapter 6 follows Johnson to Cuba and Mexico, examining questions of race in the Americas within the context of the rising U.S. global presence during and following World War I.