Abstract

This study considers the articulation and exchanges of discourses of race and tropicality, and narratives of American colonial rule, about the bodies of Filipino prizefighters during the 1910s-1930s in a trans-imperial sphere. It tracks these through the Anglophone sporting press, examining their confluence with prizefighting’s ‘indigenous values’ and the new knowledge they produced about Filipino bodies within and for prizefighting’s ‘imagined community.’ Chapter one examines the brief Australian sojourn and tragic demise of Dencio Cabanela, the first Filipino prizefighter to achieve extranational prominence. It considers the personal links, networks, and discourses through which his body was conceived as preternaturally resilient and predictably undisciplined, situating the cause of his demise deep within his body, rather than the trade in which it was engaged. It also contemplates the unwitting role Cabanela played in uniting several components – youth, preternatural imperviousness, and aggressiveness – of a nascent Filipino pugilistic identity. Chapter two centres on the contractual relationship between world’s flyweight champion Pancho Villa and his manager, Frank Churchill, to consider the business of prizefighting, and power and agency therein. It examines how this business shaped expressions of American colonial rule and Philippine nationhood through Villa’s singular exploits, the impact of these exploits on the production of Filipino fighters, and the role of the routine, material practices of Churchill’s Olympic Athletic Club in uniting and consolidating the key elements highlighted in chapter one into a new, commodified identity for Filipino prizefighters, the ‘Filipino-as-prizefighter,’ a virtual Philippine ‘raw material’ who could not but fight.