MAN and Tracey Sharpley-Whiting Talk Gender and Hip-Hop

Duke Magazine Forum:
Hip-Hop: Not Your Pop's Culture

Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor of black popular culture in the African and African American Studies Program at Duke, has explored the effects of hip-hop culture on black popular culture, black women, and black intellectual production through both his studies and his writing. His four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture; Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic; Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation; and, most recently, New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity, have earned him praise for his ability to bridge the divide between academe and the public.

In April Neal had a public conversation with Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, director of the program in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, at the fourth annual Duke Magazine Campus Forum. Sharpley-Whiting teaches a variety of subjects, including comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, critical race studies, feminist theory, and film and hip-hop culture. She is also a professor of French and director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies and has written several books: Negritude Women; Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narrative in French; and Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. She is also the author of the provocative forthcoming book on Black women and hip-hop, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Young Black Women, Hip-Hop and the New Gender Politics (New York University Press, 2006).

At the forum, the two scholars sought to investigate how hip-hop culture influences a wide spectrum of human interaction, ranging from the idea of the strip club as a new "church" to the tension between artistry and commercial values in music. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Read the Full Conversation


* **Sharpley-Whiting and Neal will be part of the 2007 Rap Sessions Tour, that will include Joan Morgan, Byron Hurt, Raquel Rivera and Bakari Kitwana