THEORIZING BLACKNESSFriday, 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).
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