Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory

Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory is a contemporary evaluation primarily of Ali in African-American and African diasporic memory, based on the field of Africana studies’ updated critical tools for considering inheritance, mythological structure, memorialization, epic intuitive conduct, hero dynamics, immortalization philosophy, and resistance-based cognitive survival. In terms of how Muhammad Ali, as an historical actor, has left an heroic legacy that bequeaths to us a sort of inheritance, the critical task at hand is to systematically explore this historical actor’s life, feats, philosophy, grit, worldview, and even his folkloric antiheroic, to decipher his Africana cultural memory value. At the core of this edited collection is a commitment to enhance the cultural storytelling about Muhammad Ali and to critically itemize the lessons we garner from his life as allegory. The ancestral life is one that is remembered and recalled. The contributors’ research uncovers Ali’s local, national, and global encounters that are legacy worldviews. These perspectives give us direction for mining the critical depth of Ali’s encounters which map his memory in terms of culturally sustaining confidence, self-esteem, reinvention, immortalization, and empathy. These are the fertile seeds of Africana cultural memory which bloom into powerful markers and monuments of an epic life of hyperheroic activity relevant to cultural memory, sports, history, politics, health, and aesthetics.

James L. Conyers, Jr., is Director of the African American Studies Program, Director of the Center for African American Culture, and University Professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston.

Christel N. Temple is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in cultural memory and Pan-Africanism and has authored Black Cultural Mythology, Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise, and Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism.