Anthem Africology Series Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory

Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory is a comprehensive study of Ali’s identity and superlative impact framed in terms of the discipline’s subfield of Africana cultural memory studies. This critical approach challenges us to itemize Ali’s influential legacy with precise conceptual value wherein his mythological structure is illuminated as an inheritance. One critical priority of the discipline of Africana studies is applied memory, specifically, how the record of the culture’s survival and agency reveals usable and reproducible knowledge and behavior. 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 antihero 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.