Theorizing Blackness: The Conference

THEORIZING BLACKNESS

Friday, April 4th, 2008

CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10016

8:00 AM – 7:00 PM

The Africana Studies Group (ASG) of the CUNY Graduate Center invites you to join us for a day of presentations and discussion.

On April 4th, 1968 the esteemed civil rights leader and social philosopher, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee thus marking what many regard as the closing bookend of the mainstream African-American Civil Rights Movement. Since that pivotal moment in 1968 (a watershed year in numerous other respects) momentous sociopolitical, technological, and cultural changes have occurred both within the United States and around the world. In light of those substantial changes, "Theorizing Blackness" asks: What does blackness mean in the current day? How is blackness conceived, constructed, represented, and consumed. How has it changed or remained the same?

Keynote speaker:

Professor Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Director of the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies (ICUSS) at Duke University.

Professor Neal is the author of four books: What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005), and co-editor of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004).

Plenary participants:

Dr. William E. Cross Jr. is the Director of the Social-Personality Psychology Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is author of Shades of Black: Diversity in African American Identity.

Mahen Bonetti is the founder and Executive Director of African Film Festival Inc. (AFF), a non-profit art organization founded in 1990.

Jacqueline Nassy Brown is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College (CUNY). Dr. Brown is the author of Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool.

Johanna Fernandez is an Assistant Professor of History and Black Studies at Baruch College (CUNY) She is currently working on a book about the Young Lords Party, tentatively titled: When the World Was Their Stage: A History of the Young Lords Party, 1968-1974.

Donette Francis is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Binghamton. She is currently writing a book defining the "third wave" of Caribbean women writers, Fictions of Citizenship: Rewriting Sexual Histories in Third Wave Caribbean Women's Literature, forthcoming in 2009.

Throughout the day, panels will be moderated by doctoral students and faculty members such as Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Leith Mullings and, Jerry G. Watts, Professor of English and Sociology and Interim Director of the Institute for Research in the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC).

Check Out the Full Schedule (hat tip to canwebefrank.com)

Duke University Law School Presents: "Hip-hop culture: a convenient scapegoat or a contributor to inequality?"

Mills Conversation Series: "Hip-hop culture: a convenient scapegoat or a contributor to inequality?"

March 21, 2008 -- The Jean E. and Christine P. Mills Conversation Series on Race continues at Duke Law School on Wed., March 26, with a panel discussion on the variously controversial and conciliatory aspects of hip-hop culture.

This event will begin at 12:15 p.m. in room 3041 and is free and open to the public. The Law School is located at the corner of Science Drive and Towerview Road on Duke University’s West Campus, with parking available at the Bryan Center. A light lunch will be served on a first-come, first-served basis.

Three distinguished scholars will lead the discussion on the inter- and intra-racial implications of the hip-hop genre. Duke Professor of African & American Studies Mark Anthony Neal has written extensively about black and hip-hop music and culture in works that include That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. Professor Imani Perry of Rutgers Law School, the author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip-Hop, focuses her scholarship on race in law and culture. Professor Mario L. Barnes of the University of Miami School of Law, is a specialist in the areas of criminal and constitutional law and race and the law.

Co-sponsored by the Program in Public Law, the Jean E. and Christine P. Mills Conversation Series on Race is endowed by Amos Mills ’72 with a view to opening lines of communication and improving relationships among people of different skin colors and backgrounds.

The series is organized by Professor Trina Jones, whose own scholarship and teaching focuses on issues related to diversity, colorism, and employment discrimination. The topics for the March conversations were selected, she said, to take a discussion of race out of a strictly black-white paradigm and demonstrate the complexity of race relations in the United States between and within racial groups.

“In addition to examining how whites react to the ‘browning’ of America, we have explored how other groups of color respond to the recent influx of Latino and Latina immigrants ― which actually isn’t a new phenomenon ― through our first two events,” said Jones. “We are acknowledging some of the underlying perceptions of threat, particularly as they relate to the competition for low-paying jobs, and access to social services ― such as health care and education ― that can present a challenge to lower-income Americans."

With a particular view to initiating a dialogue across age groups, the March 26 discussion will acknowledge the cross-racial appeal of hip-hop, Jones said. “It is perceived to be a black art form, but huge numbers of suburban white youths also participate. In addition to taking account of its much discussed negative aspects, we will be examining hip-hop’s opportunities for cross-racial interaction and even healing.”Webcasts are or will be available of all events in the Mills Conversation Series on Race.

For more information, contact Frances Presma at (919) 613-7248.

Remembering Ivan Dixon

from CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Nothing But a Man: Remembering Ivan Dixon
by Mark Anthony Neal

It would be easy to think of Ivan Dixon, who died recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, as just another brilliant black actor or actress who never received the recognition that they deserved. Indeed if you placed Dixon's career alongside those such as Rosalind Cash, Roscoe Lee Brown, Gloria Foster and Calvin Lockhart, you'd have just an inkling of a level of genius that was tragically underutilized and overlooked. But Dixon, distinguished himself even among those stellar talents, by playing critical roles--as an actor and director--in two films that will forever serve as the most evocative examples of black masculinity and black radicalism in mainstream American cinema.

For many, Ivan Dixon was simply the black guy on the 1960's sitcom Hogan Heroes. Set in a Nazi POW camp, the show poked fun at the very idea of Nazi imperialism at a historical moment, the 1960s, when the United States was the most resonant example of such imperialism. A critique of America's own imperialistic desire, was the not-so-deep meaning beyond the clowning of Colonel Klink--the hapless face of Hitler's ambition. Dixon's Sgt. James Kinchloe, though, offered the only so-called "black" perspective on Nazi imperialism that could be easily accessed in mainstream American culture in the 1960s. It's not like Band of Brothers gave any inkling of what the brothers were doing in Europe during World War II. For better or worse, Dixon's Kinchloe also presented one of the first African-American television characters who was defined by a more global perspective, an aspect of his career that frames his early success as the Nigerian exchange student Joseph Asagai in the original stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun.

Dixon's most stirring role though, would be much closer to home, geographically and politically. Nothing But a Man (1964) directed by then 35-year-old German-born director Michael Roemer, depicts the life of Duff Anderson (portrayed by Dixon), a wandering day laborer, seeking to escape the demands of marriage and fatherhood in the poverty stricken American south. Dixon's wife in the film was portrayed by the legendary jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Critic John Nickel suggests that Roemer's film anticipated the infamous Moynihan Report on the black family, which argues that black families needed to embrace mainstream patriarchy in order be fully integrated into American society. In essence, future US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that black communities were hamstrung by the overarching influence of black women.

Nothing But a Man's power come from also locating the impact of joblessness on the lives of black men (Roemer used NAACP field workers to help do research for the film), who felt as though they couldn't be men in their own households, if they weren't the primary financial providers in those households. Dixon brought a depth of humanity to this situation, particularly as he seeks out his own absentee father. Though Nothing But a Man lacks much of the nuance that three decades of black feminist scholarship has brought to bear on the dynamics of black gender relationships, the film remains a visual testament to the struggles of black men in the south, just as the Black Power Movement was about to erupt.

Read the Full Essay

"Bitch" is the New (Black) Feminism

From The Chronicle Review (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
From the issue dated March 14, 2008


Standing Up for 'Bad' Words
By STEPHANE DUNN

It took me five years to finally tell my conservative religious mother and my pastor stepfather the title of my book, which at that time was "Baad Bitches" & Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies. I figured it was unfair to wait until I sent it to her in the mail or she strolled past it in Barnes & Noble, or, even worse, some concerned church folk called her on the phone about it. Now, my mother was a woman once known to backhand-slap bad words and cussin' right out of your mouth. So I sat across from them at the dining-room table, giggling nervously, and hurriedly blurted out the first two words of the title. Mama looked at me, her left eyebrow raised way too high. My stepfather looked at her, then glanced at me and took over the nervous grinning.

I rambled on some more about how it was a study about race and gender, underlining women's representations in some 70s action movies associated with the blaxploitation genre.("Blaxploitation" was a controversial label for these movies aimed at black audiences; the genre emerged after the commercial success of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971.) Mama rescued me: "Well, they used that word all the time in them movies. Mmmmph, guess we won't be taking it to church. We'll just say the second part and people can look it up." My mother loved the actress Pam Grier back in the day, when Coffy and Foxy Brown came out, but she found them disturbing for the same reasons that I did. I exhaled.

A year later, I received a seemingly innocuous e-mail message from my editor with a line about possibly shortening the book's title. The press was squeamish about the B-word in the wake of the Don Imus scandal last spring, when Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." What were my thoughts? I sent a reply, trying to explain why the title fit. But I was so pleased that my book was finally on its way to publication that I suggested a compromise: What about bleeping the letters following an uppercase B and substituting asterisks or dashes, as is often done with words deemed profane? I didn't even like my own suggestion. Until then there'd never been a hint of distaste for the title from the press or readers; I'd heard only how much people liked saying, "How's the 'baad bitches' project going?"

Imus's careless and racist, and sexist reference to Rutgers' black basketball players infuriated me; it was personal and political. The controversy turned up the heat about the use of racialized words. I was surprised, though, to find myself debating my book's title with my publisher. I've always loved those 70s films, which have become so much a part of our cultural fabric, and been fascinated with their problematic portrayals of women and with the connections between the hip-hop and blaxploitation subcultures, particularly in how they use the word "bitch." While the word "bitch" — and its variants — has long been a derogatory reference to "difficult" women and femininity generally, it has been flipped and claimed by women to signify female empowerment and to celebrate tough women who don't accept subordinate positions easily.

Read the Full Essay

***

Stephane Dunn is a writer and a visiting assistant professor of English at Morehouse College. Her book, "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

Beyond Hallie & Whoopi: Black Women and American Cinema--A Conversation

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2204 Erwin Road
Room 240

WEDNESDAY AT THE CENTER:
BEYOND HALLIE AND WHOOPI: BLACK WOMEN AND AMERICAN CINEMA-A CONVERSATION

With a figure like Michele Obama poised to challenge America's perceptions of black women, journalist ESTHER IVEREM will discuss the ways that black women have been portrayed in recent cinema. Expanding on her recent book WE GOTTA HAVE IT: 20 YEARS OF SEEING BLACK AT THE MOVIES, 1986-2006, Iverem will discuss with activist and poet ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, the tensions associated with black female performances in mainstream cinema in a moment when black women's bodies are particularly marked as dangerous, oppositional, and non-traditional.

***

Esther Iverem is a cultural critic, essayist and poet based in Washington D.C. Her most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder's Mouth Press), featuring more than 400 of her reviews, interviews and essays on the "new wave" of Black film. She is founder and editor of SeeingBlack.com, an award-winning Web site for Black critical voices on arts, media and politics. She is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, New York Newsday and The New York Times and is a contributing critic for BET.com and Tom Joyner's BlackAmericaWeb.com. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and an artist's fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also the author of two books of poems and a member of the Washington Area Film Critics Association.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a 25 year old queer black trouble-maker. She is currently a doctoral candidate in English, Africana Studies and Women's Studies at Duke University Alexis is also a member of UBUNTU and the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press.

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Sponsored by "Center for the Study of Black Popular Culture" (CSBPC)

Of Black Men and Song: Dwight Trible

from CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

of (Black) Men and Song (ver. 1.0)
by Mark Anthony Neal

I dream men like Dwight Trible--these singers black, these singers men--even as they tug at those baritone and tenor strings that so embody the very idea of some pristine, immaculate dark masculinity. Their willingness to explore the full range of their expressiveness--emotiveness gone awry--simply undermines the comfort that the deepness of their voices presupposes. And it's not like this is a new phenomenon--figures like Jimmy Scott, Ronnie Dyson, Eddie Kendricks, and Rahsaan Patterson are standard bearers of sort for this thing, but because they live(d) in a register up-above, it has always been easy to dismiss their presence--and their art--as being less than something fully masculine (as if there was such a thing). And this is where men like Trible and Jose James (like Bey and Johnny Hartman) who force us to re-imagine our investments in masculinities that don't bend and don't break.

Read the Full Essay @
CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Raisin Redux: A Hustle in the Sun

from NewsOne.com

A Hustle in the Sun
by Mark Anthony Neal

At a moment when Barack Obama is poised to make good on the promises to Black America that have long shriveled up, like that raisin in Langston Hughes “Harlem,” the ABC production missed an opportunity to make clear the political stakes that Hansberry wanted to address in the first place.

Ironically it was Sean Combs’s performance—from a limited actor, who can be described as adequate at best—that provides A Raisin in the Sun with any contemporary resonances. Combs is clearly no Sidney Poitier, but in fairness to Combs, Sidney Poitier wasn’t Sidney Poitier yet when he portrayed Walter Lee in the stage and Hollywood versions. What Combs did effectively was heighten the sense of hopelessness and even despair that animates Walter’s instincts as a hustler. And this is perhaps as it should be, since Combs, better than any of his generational peers—Misters Simmons and Carter included—embodies the hustling instinct of the so-called hip-hop generation.

Read the Full Essay

On Lizz Wright's The Orchard

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

(Covering) Strange: Lizz Wright's The Orchard
by Mark Anthony Neal

Location, location, location, as in when Fred Moten theorizes about the tropes and aesthetics of escape and fugitivity that power certain black expressive cultures, it is always almost understood this also about a devotion or incarceration (take your pick) to place. Simply put, there's nothing never to escape to or escape from if without this fidelity to someplace, somewhere. So when Stuart Gorrell got to thinking about "Georgia on My Mind" it was the sister of Hoagy Carmichael (who wrote the music) and we'll accept that the feminine can be a metaphor for place, but when Ray Charles sings "Georgia on My Mind" it can never be nothing but place.

Lizz Wright's most recent recordings, Dreams Wide Awake and The Orchard, evoke the beauty of the pastoral south, which for African-Americans of southern heritage, animates the irony of loving (even aesthetically) the very Southern plantations that were the literal sites of our brutality; so desired because of that very beauty (amidst the betrayal) and the capacity of these places to generate a generational wealth that we hungered for. It's no surprise that many of the institutions in Black America have appropriated some aspects of the political economy of the plantation--including aesthetically--in order function as legible subjects in an American contexts. I can't help thinking about what's on Lizz Wright's mind.

In publicity photos, Wright often possesses a sly look of bemusement, like someone whose very being is linked to a fated incarceration to the images that propel her into a relative celebrity among jazz contemporary aficionados. Wright's smile--something like an offhanded joke played out only in her mind or an all too secret shiver in her coital region--is less about the boredom of doing yet another photo-shoot where Verve can exploit her own pastoral beauty (in direct opposition in the girlish android-noids found in contemporary R&B), but an artful act that itself represents an engagement (not a masking) of the full weight of having to be in this place.

Read the Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Fragments of a Feedback Loop

Greg Tate & Ahmir ?uestlove Thompson

Critical Noir: Generous Brilliance
By Mark Anthony Neal

***

What was apparent as Greg Tate and Arthur Jafa exchanged fragments of "feedback loops" long cultivated in the midnight hours of their friendship, is that they love and respect each other enough to challenge each other's thinking, but are secure enough in their own intellects to not feel threatened when one of them might get the cerebral upper hand--because even in those cases it raises the bar. Tate and Jafa's relationship highlights that genius for genius's sake matters little if not enveloped in a committed generosity. Understandably such generosity is difficult in an era where there is a marketplace for smart negroes--and certainly for those whose prose (if not ideas) play to certain mainstream notions of accessibility (i.e. Can an oblivious so-called white literate NPR listening public understand it?). Far too many of us I think, are unwilling to publically acknowledge when one of our peers produces something that really forces us to go back to the lab. All too often our measure of what matters is connected to cover story bylines and $2.00 a word gigs and our desire to protect our individual proximities to that kind of marketplace prestige. And this is not to suggest that Ellison, Murray, Painter, McKay, Tate, Jafa, and so many others did not have to create to live--but that ultimately it was the quality of the exchange of ideas that mattered more than a "mess of pottage."

Read the Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com