| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Andrew M. Kaye. The Pussycat of Prizefighting: Tiger Flowers and the Politics of Black Celebrity. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 208. $26.95.

The lack of historical context regarding American popular culture in mainstream publications motivates many of us (cultural historians) to choose the career path that we do. Andrew M. Kaye's book is a model of how successfully to use historical context in writing about a subject. While the protagonist of Kaye's work is Tiger Flowers, an African American middleweight champion of the 1920s, this volume is about much more. Using Flowers as a potent symbol, Kaye explores the racialized nature of boxing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, race relations and turn-of-the-century segregation, the "politics of black celebrity," and the ideologies of racial uplift. As if peeling an onion, Kaye removes layer after layer of the life of this forgotten yet influential prizefighter, recovering him from obscurity. The interrelatedness of all of the principal characters, from Jack Johnson, to Muhammad Ali, to Joe Louis, to the Battling Siki, to Flowers himself demonstrates the line that connects these celebrity boxers of the past 150 years. One truly can not comprehend the significance of Muhammad Ali without understanding the historical context in which he emerged, following the exploits of Louis, Flowers, and Johnson.

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