Race, Place and Community

Posted in Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Live Events, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States on 2017-03-30 12:51Z by Steven

Race, Place and Community

Duke University
Trent Semans Center
Great Hall
Duke University Medical Center Greenspace
Durham, North Carolina 27710
Thursday, 2017-03-30, 08:00-10:00 EDT (Local Time)

Emily Raboteau, Professor of English
City College of New York

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

A conversation with award-winning author Emily Raboteau. A Q&A and book (Searching for Zion) signing will follow.

The event, “Race, Place and Community,” is free and open to the public. Light breakfast will be served. Those unable to attend can watch a live webcast of the event at bit.ly/EmilyRaboteau.

Organized by the Duke Clinical Research Institute, the event co-sponsors include the Duke School of Medicine, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Center on Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship, and Left of Black.

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Race, Place and Community: A Conversation with Author Emily Raboteau

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2017-03-29 20:06Z by Steven

Race, Place and Community: A Conversation with Author Emily Raboteau

DCORE: Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
2017-03-28

Micah English, T ’17


Emily Raboteau

Award-winning author Emily Raboteau will visit Duke and Durham this week as part of the Duke School of Medicine’s ongoing series, A Conversation about Race.

She will be interviewed by Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture in the Department of African and African American studies. Neal, is also the co-director of the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity and the host of the weekly webcast, Left of Black. A portion of the event will be recorded live for a future episode of Left of Black.

The event, “Race, Place and Community,” is free and open to the public and will be held at 8 a.m., Thursday, March 30 in the Great Hall at Trent Semans Center. Light breakfast will be served. Those unable to attend can watch a live webcast of the event at bit.ly/EmilyRaboteau.

Raboteau, an English professor at the City College of New York, will sign copies of her latest book, Searching for Zion, following the talk.

Organized by the Duke Clinical Research Institute, the event co-sponsors include the Duke School of Medicine, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Center on Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship, and Left of Black.

Searching for Zion is a work of creative nonfiction that chronicles Raboteau’s search for a place to call “home,” as a biracial woman who never felt at home in America. Recently DCORE was able to speak with Raboteau about being of mixed race, blackness and the racial color line…

Read the entire interview here.

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Presents Race, Hip-Hop & The American Future: A Conversation with Adam Mansbach

Posted in Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2015-09-28 00:58Z by Steven

Presents Race, Hip-Hop & The American Future: A Conversation with Adam Mansbach

The John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2204 Erwin Road
Durham, North Carolina 27708-0402
Monday, 2015-09-28, 18:30 EDT (Local Time)

Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African & African American Studies

The Center for Arts + Digital Culture + Entrepreneurship (CADCE) Presents Race, Hip-Hop & The American Future: A Conversation with Adam Mansbach on Monday, September 28, 2015 at 6:30 pm at the John Hope Franklin Center for International & Interdisciplinary Studies (2204 Erwin Road).

Mansbach’s 2013 novel, Rage is Back, was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle and is currently being adapted for the stage; his previous novels include the California Book Award-winning The End of the Jews and the cult classic Angry Black White Boy, taught at more than eighty schools, including at Duke, this semester.

Mansbach is also the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, which has been translated into 40 languages, and was Time Magazine’s 2011 “Thing of the Year.” The sequel, You Have to Fucking Eat, was published in November of 2014 and is also a New York Times bestseller.

For more information, click here.

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Oreo: A Comeback Story

Posted in Audio, Judaism, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2015-07-25 01:55Z by Steven

Oreo: A Comeback Story

On The Media
WNYC FM
New York, New York
Friday, 2015-07-17

Mythili Rao, Host and Producer

Guests: Mat Johnson, Harryette Mullen, Mark Anthony Neal and Danzy Senna

In 1974, Fran Ross published her first and only novel, “Oreo.” The satirical tale of a biracial teenager’s Theseus-style quest to find her father was almost completely overlooked in its era. Now, more than 4 decades later, its re-issue is being met with critical praise. Producer Mythili Rao explores why Ross’s take on racial identity was so ahead of its time.

Listen to the interview (00:10:58) here.

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Will Police Killings of Blacks be the Defining Crisis of the Obama Presidency?

Posted in Barack Obama, Interviews, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Videos on 2015-04-28 01:40Z by Steven

Will Police Killings of Blacks be the Defining Crisis of the Obama Presidency?

NewBlackMan (in Exile)
2015-04-24

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Duke University University Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of the classic Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (now in its 4th edition) and Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal discuss #BlackLivesMatters and the Obama Presidency.

Watch the interview (00:06:45) here.

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Left of Black S2:E33 | Race, Writing and the Attack on Black Studies with Adam Mansbach and La TaSha Levy on Season Finale of Left of Black

Posted in Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2012-12-10 06:16Z by Steven

Left of Black S2:E33 | Race, Writing and the Attack on Black Studies with Adam Mansbach and La TaSha Levy on Season Finale of Left of Black

Left of Black
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2012-11-19

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by writer Adam Mansbach, the author of several books including Angry Black White Boy (2005), The End of the Jews  (2008) and the New York Times Bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep.  Mansbach discusses the inspiration for Macon Detornay—the protagonist of Angry Black White Boy—the surprise success of his “adult children’s book” and his new graphic novel Nature of the Beast.  Finally Neal and Mansbach discuss race in the Obama era and the legacy of the Beastie Boys

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Left of Black S3:E10 | Who is Black in Multiracial America?

Posted in Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States, Videos on 2012-11-20 04:32Z by Steven

Left of Black S3:E10 | Who is Black in Multiracial America?

Left of Black
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2012-11-19

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

American racial history was long framed by the notion of the “one drop” rule, which within a political economy of race and difference, was a blatant attempt to embolden Whiteness and the privilege that derived from it.  Scholar Yaba Blay offers a different view of the “one drop” rule with her multi-media project (1)ne Drop which “seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what Blackness is and what Blackness looks like.”

Blay, a Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University and contributing producer to CNN’s Black in America 5, which was inspired by the (1)ne Drop project, joins Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal on the November 19th episode of Left of Black to talk about the complexities of Black identity.  Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part two of an interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press).

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Left of Black S3:E9 | Racial Passing and the Rise of Multiracialism

Posted in Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Passing, Social Science, United States, Videos on 2012-11-14 14:50Z by Steven

Left of Black S3:E9 | Racial Passing and the Rise of Multiracialism

Left of Black
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2012-11-12

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

For many African Americans, the practice of ‘Passing’—where light-skinned Blacks could pass for White—remains a thing connected to a difficult racial past. In her new book, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press), Marcia Dawkins, a professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California provides a fresh take on the practice arguing that passing in the contemporary moment transcends racial performance.

Dawkins talks about her new book with Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, via Skype.  Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part one of a two-part interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press) in which she links the rise of Multiracialism in the 1990s to the maintenance of traditional gender norms.

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‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Communications/Media Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Philosophy on 2012-07-03 17:04Z by Steven

‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Daniel McNeil, Associate Professor of History, Migration and Diaspora Studies
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Many conservative commentators reacted to the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 with platitudes about the clash of civilizations. Robert Fulford, a prominent cultural critic for the Canadian National Post, was one of the few to tie a post-9/11 context to the fortieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death. In an article strategically published at the beginning of Black History Month, Fulford claimed that Fanon’s classic texts were invoked and not read, as if The Wretched of the Earth was just another ironic commodity for consumers full of sound and fury who wear images of Malcolm X and Che Guevara without knowing anything about their commitment to human rights. To go further, he maintained that Fanon should be remembered as a ‘poisonous thinker’ who helped usher in a culture of violence and victimization in the West.

Providing a critical alternative to Fulford, activists and scholars marked the fiftieth anniversary of Fanon’s passing with extensive discussions of his impact on social justice movements and intellectual debates about existentialism, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. This short article takes a rather circuitous route to their commentaries on the legacy of Fanon’s explorative, suggestive and provocative work. It argues that the loaded metaphors Fanon used to target ‘half-breed’ translators in the 1950s and 60s have been creatively adapted by transnational intellectuals in their critique of forms of neoliberal multiculturalism that privilege the multiracial American citizen as a subject more universal and legitimate than even the multicultural world citizen.

The article revolves around three sections and three conceptual metaphors in its attempts to address an oft-repeated element of Fanon’s work that has rarely been the subject of extended analysis or critical inquiry. The first section introduces three popular metaphors about mixed-race objects and ‘racial bridges’ that Fanon used to invoke the threat of bestial, immature and consumerist Others – metaphors that were not swept away by the winds of change in the 1960s, or the decline and fall of Black internationalist movements in the 1970s. It contends that similar metaphors and similes continue to frame representations of mixed-race individuals that emerged after the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and 80s called for ‘new’ multicultural identities to replace ‘old-fashioned’ notions of racial essences. The second section documents how intellectuals such as David Theo Goldberg, Paul Gilroy and Lewis Gordon have engaged with Fanon and mixed-race metaphors in order to critique the slyness of neoliberal agents in the age of Obama. The third and final section also addresses three writers – Jared Sexton, Paul Spickard and Mark Anthony Neal – who have developed work on multiracial national subjects in the United States. The short conclusion contends that Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism avoids some of the pitfalls of national consciousness evident in the work of Spickard and Neal – and engages with the diasporic work of Fanon and ‘Fanon’s children’ in order to challenge multiracial, and post-racial, environments that deny the legitimacy of African American anger. In short, it uses Sexton’s vision of a global African American studies to illuminate some of the discordant affinities between more insular visions of ethnic American studies and the cultural project of neoliberal multiculturalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries…

Read the entire article here.

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