Everyday Grandeur: Remembering Artist Ernie Barnes

Left of Black

Everyday Grandeur: Remembering Artist Ernie Barnes

by Mark Anthony Neal

Though his name was rarely uttered in conversations of fine art and few in academic circles had more than a passing interest in his body of work, when Ernie Barnes died this past Monday, his art was arguably some of the most recognizable among African-Americans. Most known for his 1971 painting “Sugar Shack” and for his striking treatments of African-American athleticism, Barnes will be most remembered for bringing grandeur to the everyday lives of African-Americans.

Born in Durham, NC in 1938, Barnes first began to paint as a refuge from childhood peers who teased him about his boyish heft. Ironically by his teenage years Barnes became interested in fitness, so much so, that he received more than twenty scholarship offers to play college football. He chose to play for North Carolina Central, an HBCU, and though he didn’t graduate, he went on to play professionally in the now defunct American Football League (AFL). It was Barnes’s connections with professional football that led to his career as a full-time painter, initially as the “official” artist for the AFL before the merger with the National Football League (NFL). Later Barnes found support from then New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin, who paid Barnes a $15,000 salary to develop his skills and helped organize Barnes’s first major gallery show in New York City.

Barnes’s biggest break occurred, when television producer Norman Lear decided to feature the artist’s work in his series Good Times (ghosting the art of eldest son JJ, who was a painter on the series). “Sugar Shack” was featured in the series’ closing credits, a painting that highlights blacks in a local dance hall. The same painting was used as the cover art for Marvin Gaye’s 1976 recording I Want You, the album in some ways serving as a logical soundtrack for “Sugar Shack.” The painting not only reflected the beauty of African Vernacular culture, it was accessible enough to be enjoyed by the very folk who derived the most pleasure from that culture.

According to Duke University Art Historian Richard J. Powell, “Ernie was arguably a pioneer in the mass-marketing of his highly stylized paintings of African American life and leisure. As early as the early 1970s (when many artists turned up their noses at the idea of transforming their art works into posters or notecards), he sold beautiful, high-quality reproductions of his paintings that ordinary folks could afford.” By the end of the 1970s Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte, Ethel Kennedy, Sammy Davis, Jr., Flip Wilson and Bert Reynolds were among those with Barnes originals in their collection while there was nary a black student dorm room that didn’t have a copy of Gaye’s I Want You cover adorning their walls.

Barnes’s signature pieces featured African-American subjects with elongated limbs—a metaphor perhaps for reaching beyond the limits of possibility. For Powell, author of the new book Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (University of Chicago Press), Barnes’s figures were “so intentionally sensuous and impossibly elongated, very much like Marvin Gaye's vocals on the classic album.” Barnes gained more recognition in 1984, when he was chosen as the official artist of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, despite being originally overlooked until former teammate and then New York congressman Jack Kemp brought Barnes’s work to the attention of Olympic officials. It was a fitting apex to Barnes career, as the artist told People Weekly at the time that, “without athletics…I don’t think my work would have the guts and fluidity that it does.”

Art historian Powell notes that Barnes “took the idea of being a ‘popular artist’ to an aesthetic apogee,” adding that “folks never grow weary of his beautiful and outrageous athletes, dancers, and other African American men, women, and children.” Indeed Barnes art resonated even for the hip-hop generation; When Camp Lo released their nostalgia laced 1997 recording Uptown Saturday Night (which features the classic “Luchini aka This is It”), the cover art paid homage to Barnes’s “Sugar Shack.”

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press.

Adopting (White) While Black

from NewsWeek

Raising Katie
What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era
Tony Dokoupil
Newsweek Web Exclusive

Several pairs of eyes follow the girl as she pedals around the playground in an affluent suburb of Baltimore. But it isn't the redheaded fourth grader who seems to have moms and dads of the jungle gym nervous on this recent Saturday morning. It's the African-American man—six feet tall, bearded and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt—watching the girl's every move. Approaching from behind, he grabs the back of her bicycle seat as she wobbles to a stop. "Nice riding," he says, as the fair-skinned girl turns to him, beaming. "Thanks, Daddy," she replies. The onlookers are clearly flummoxed.

As a black father and adopted white daughter, Mark Riding and Katie O'Dea-Smith are a sight at best surprising, and at worst so perplexing that people feel compelled to respond. Like the time at a Pocono Mountains flea market when Riding scolded Katie, attracting so many sharp glares that he and his wife, Terri, 37, and also African-American, thought "we might be lynched." And the time when well-intentioned shoppers followed Mark and Katie out of the mall to make sure she wasn't being kidnapped. Or when would-be heroes come up to Katie in the cereal aisle and ask, "Are you OK?"—even though Terri is standing right there.

Is it racism? The Ridings tend to think so, and it's hard to blame them. To shadow them for a day, as I recently did, is to feel the unease, notice the negative attention and realize that the same note of fear isn't in the air when they attend to their two biological children, who are 2 and 5 years old. It's fashionable to say that the election of Barack Obama has brought the dawn of a post-racial America. In the past few months alone, The Atlantic Monthly has declared "the end of white America," The Washington Post has profiled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's struggle for relevance in a changing world, and National Public Radio has led discussions questioning the necessity of the annual Black History Month. Perhaps not surprising, most white and black Americans no longer cite racism as a major social problem, according to recent polls.

But the Ridings' experience runs counter to these popular notions of harmony. And adoption between races is particularly fraught. So-called transracial adoptions have surged since 1994, when the Multiethnic Placement Act reversed decades of outright racial matching by banning discrimination against adoptive families on the basis of race. But the growth has been all one-sided. The number of white families adopting outside their race is growing and is now in the thousands, while cases like Katie's—of a black family adopting a nonblack child—remain frozen at near zero.

Read the Full Essay @

Bakari Kitwana's UNDERGROUND CURRENT: Walter Kimbrough Discusses HBCU Grads In New Administration

from NewsOne.com

Walter Kimbrough, the 41 year-old president of Philander Smith College, speaks with Bakari Kitwana about the current state of Historically Black College and Universities. “HBCUs will be irrelevant without a revolution of leadership,” says Kimbrough, who shares success stories from his own experience as president for the last four years. Kimbrough’s strategies at Philander Smith have resulted in increased enrollment as other HBCUs have suffered a recent decline. For Kimbrough, who’s regularly on Facebook communicating with students and who hosts the popular hip-hop lecture series on his campus, “Bless the Mic,” direct, personal contact is the key. Dr. Kimbrough also speaks here about his forthcoming book, which continues his research into Black Greek letter organizations-observing that when it comes to the new Black leadership in the Obama administration: “it’s devoid both of HBCU graduates and members of Black fraternities and sororities.” He insists that this a historical shift, and “a wake up call,” for these nearly century-old Black institutions.

Walter Kimbrough is president of Philander Smith College, a leading researcher on Black Greek letter organizations, and the author of Black Greek 101.

HISTORIES & HUMANITIES AT HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES: A Symposium

HISTORIES & HUMANITIES AT HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES
Embracing the Legacy of John Hope Franklin

Friday, May 1, 2009, 9:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center

Presented with the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture - made possible by major support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

To mark the end of the inaugural year of the FHI’s HBCU Faculty Fellowship Program - and inspired by the vision and legacy of John Hope Franklin - this one-day symposium and workshop will bring together faculty, students, and administrators from Duke and local area HBCUs to explore ways of creating institutional collaborations around the arts and the humanities, and across older historical divisions in the region and beyond.

Program Schedule

9:00 – 9:30 AM
Registration & Coffee

9:30 – 9:40 AM
Welcome

Srinivas Aravamudan, Director, Franklin Humanities Institute

9:40 - 11:00 AM
Keynote Address: John Hope Franklin, HBCUs, and the Arts and Humanities in Transition

Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of History & African American Studies, Northwestern University

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Panel: Cooperation, Cooptation, and Transformation in the Post-Civil Rights Academy

Moderator: Jelani Favors, Assistant Professor of History, Morgan State University & 2008-09 FHI Mellon HBCU Faculty Fellow
Rhonda Jones, Assistant Professor of History, North Carolina Central University
Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African & African American Studies, Duke University
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, University Emerita Professor, Morgan State University
Respondent: Sylvia Jacobs, Professor of History, North Carolina Central University

1:00 – 2:00 PM - Lunch Break

2:00 – 3:30 PM
Roundtable: Black Intellectual Traditions and the Idea of the Humanities

Dana Williams, Associate Professor of African American Literature, Howard University & 2008-09 FHI Mellon HBCU Faculty Fellow
Greg Carr, Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies, Howard University
Respondent: Lee Baker, Dean of Academic Affairs of Trinity College & Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University

4:00 – 5:00 PM
The New From Slavery to Freedom and the Legacy of John Hope Franklin

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History & African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Exhibits On View

Tell Me Again: A Concise Retrospective
Experimental Art Space, Franklin Center

Fatimah Tuggar, multimedia artist & 2008-09 FHI Mellon HBCU Faculty Fellow

Editions of From Slavery to Freedom from the John Hope Franklin Research Center
Outside Room 240, Franklin Center

* Please e-mail fhi@duke.edu by Monday, April 27 to register - registration is free, but please note that space is limited

Melissa Harris Lacewell on "The Handshake"

from The Nation

Obama Handshake and the Politics of Civility
by Melissa Harris Lacewell

Why is it that Barack Obama's handshakes create such a stir?

The Obamas fist pump congratulation after the North Carolina primary win sent Barack's candidacy into a bit of a racial tailspin, raising the specter of a secret terrorist plot apparently masterminded by dap-giving black folks and urban youth of all races. Now the genuinely pleasant greeting between President Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has some in the GOP concerned about the security of America's state secrets. Newt Gingrich seems to believe that the Obama-Chavez handshake signals to all the world that U.S. foreign policy now condones human rights violation, drug trafficking, and illegal border crossing.

I'm not completely sure how this transference of policy authority occurs through skin-on-skin contact between world leaders, but we might need to get some vaccine research going right away. Afterall, President Obama shook hands with Senator John McCain at least a half dozen times last year. Does this mean that Obama has also authorized a Republican domestic, policy agenda? (shudder)

Those who are alarmed about President Obama's easy, casual camaraderie with Chavez misunderstand the role of civility in public life. Barack Obama is, if nothing else, a civil and gracious political leader. In all honesty, he is a little too civil for my taste. I am cut from the sarcastic, snarky, blogger cloth. I hold grudges and prefer to punish my political foes with biting commentary whenever possible. Barack Obama appoints his adversaries to cabinet positions and asks those he disagrees with to pray at his inauguration. It is a core element of who he is. Even in Obama's pre-presidential book, The Audacity of Hope, he displays his brand of polite restraint. He condemns racism, but doesn't name racists. He blames conservative policies for creating our national mess, but doesn't attack conservatives. You don't have to like it, but that handshake was authentic Obama.

Read the Full Essay @

Black Rock From the Sun

from The Root.com

Hip-hop has run out of ideas. And if you need proof, consider that Lil Wayne's doing a rock album.

Rock is Black Music, Too
by Rob Fields

Know what the problem is with black folks? No imagination.

Sounds crazy, I know, but consider black music. Every significant moment in America's history has been accompanied by its own soundtrack. And black musicians have often written the music and the lyrics. But what's our soundtrack now?

The music industry has imposed the same low expectations on black artists and black life that politicians and pundits have imposed on black folks with respect to education, business and simply managing our daily lives. And we've let it happen.

The blues and jazz gave meaning to our lives in the 20th century, and it still enjoys a fringe following. But it doesn't fit this new age. R&B is formulaic and predictable. And hip-hop? In its commercial form-the stuff that hammers us from radio and video outlets-has painted itself and its fans into a corner, boxed in on all sides by what Brown professor Tricia Rose calls the pimp-gangsta-ho triumvirate.

Essentially, we've let a small group of hip-hop "artists" of limited experiences, education and vision set our cultural agenda. In this age of expanded possibilities, it is time to broaden our musical influences. Hip-hop is out of ideas. If you need convincing, consider this: The best-selling rapper of 2008-Lil Wayne-is doing a rock album. Yes, a rock album. It's time to give black rock another look. From artists as diverse as TV on the Radio, Shingai Shoniwa of The Noisettes, Gnarls Barkley, Santigold and The Family Stand, to performers at the recent South by Southwest Music Festival like Ben Harper, Whole Wheat Bread, BLK JKS, Janelle Monae and Ebony Bones, black rockers take to heart the idea that our imagination and creativity are boundless.

Read the Full Article @

Left of Black: Bullying and the Crisis of Masculinity

Left of Black:

Bullying and the Crisis of Masculinity

by Mark Anthony Neal



The recent suicide death of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover raises troubling questions about the incidence of bullying in our schools and other places where children interact. Earlier this month Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old African-American boy from Springfield, MA, took his own life, in response to the bullying he endured everyday at school. According to reports, Walker-Hoover was repeatedly taunted for “being gay.” That Walker-Hoover, who was not queer identified, was the target of homophobic vitriol speaks volumes about the challenges faced in society that has yet to fully interrogate how we raise and socialize our boys.



Thanks to best-selling books Queen Bees and Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence (the inspiration for the film Mean Girls) and the emergence of YouTube, parents and schools are hypersensitive to the incidence of bullying in the lives children and the sophisticated ways that children deploy technology in such activities. But bullying, now as always, is symptomatic of our inability as a society to deal adequately with difference—sexual, racial, religious, ethnic, gendered, etc.—in meaningful ways.



While children usually understand about the consequences of bullying their peers—the ways they will be punished, for example—there’s still a continued skittishness within schools to actually deal with the reality of difference. This is particularly the case with discussions of sexual orientation, where some feel that focusing on sexual preference encourages behavior that far too many still view as “deviant” behavior. That the term “gay” has become an umbrella term for all things “uncool” in the lives of American children and teenagers, speaks to how dismissive we are of homophobia in our society.



Bullying of course takes many forms, but anyone who has spent any amount of time in the company of boys is well aware of how terms like “punk,” “faggot,” "bitch-ass" and “pussy” are part of the normative discourse of American boyhood. Even those boys, who are not necessarily invested in bullying, find themselves employing such terms as a form of protection, lest they also be targeted (as was the case when I was a boy). Unfortunately such behavior has long been relegated to the status of “boys being boys,” even as it articulates a troubling misogyny among other things. When such bullying escalates to the level of violence, as a society we are happy to enact punitive responses to the offenders without ever interrogating the root cause of the behavior.



Often lost in these responses is that this particular form of bullying is evidence of a general crisis of masculinity in our society, where boys and men, are all too often uncomfortable in the skins that they inhabit. While there is evidence that the behavior of some childhood bullies portends adult behavior tethered to more complex emotional and mental issues, there also little denying that many boys engage in bullying behavior against other boys, because they have been socialized to believe that’s what “real” boys and “real” men do. Bullying, particularly that which targets other male peers as “less than masculine,” helps masks anxieties about what real boyhood/manhood is supposed to be. Indeed such anxiety and apprehension about masculinity was so palpable in the life of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover that he chose to take his life rather than deal with the daily reminders that somehow he didn’t play to type.



While Walker-Hoover’s tragic death brings necessary attention to the consequences of bullying in our society, the bullying will continue unless we allow our boys and men to be comfortable with who they are, rather than performing some idea of what real maleness is supposed to be.



***



Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including the recent New Black Man.

The Reggaeton Reader

from Duke University Press

Reggaeton
Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez
With a foreword by Juan Flores
392 pages (February 2009)
36 illustrations

A hybrid of reggae and rap, reggaeton is a music with Spanish-language lyrics and Caribbean aesthetics that has taken Latin America, the United States, and the world by storm. Superstars—including Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, and Ivy Queen—garner international attention, while aspiring performers use digital technologies to create and circulate their own tracks. Reggaeton brings together critical assessments of this wildly popular genre. Journalists, scholars, and artists delve into reggaeton’s local roots and its transnational dissemination; they parse the genre’s aesthetics, particularly in relation to those of hip-hop; and they explore the debates about race, nation, gender, and sexuality generated by the music and its associated cultural practices, from dance to fashion.

The collection opens with an in-depth exploration of the social and sonic currents that coalesced into reggaeton in Puerto Rico during the 1990s. Contributors consider reggaeton in relation to that island, Panama, Jamaica, and New York; Cuban society, Miami’s hip-hop scene, and Dominican identity; and other genres including reggae en español, underground, and dancehall reggae. The reggaeton artist Tego Calderón provides a powerful indictment of racism in Latin America, while the hip-hop artist Welmo Romero Joseph discusses the development of reggaeton in Puerto Rico and his refusal to embrace the upstart genre. The collection features interviews with the DJ/rapper El General and the reggae performer Renato, as well as a translation of “Chamaco’s Corner,” the poem that served as the introduction to Daddy Yankee’s debut album. Among the volume’s striking images are photographs from Miguel Luciano’s series Pure Plantainum, a meditation on identity politics in the bling-bling era, and photos taken by the reggaeton videographer Kacho López during the making of the documentary Bling’d: Blood, Diamonds, and Hip-Hop.

Contributors. Geoff Baker, Tego Calderón, Carolina Caycedo, Jose Davila, Jan Fairley, Juan Flores, Gallego (José Raúl González), Félix Jiménez, Kacho López, Miguel Luciano, Wayne Marshall, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Alfredo Nieves Moreno, Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Raquel Z. Rivera, Welmo Romero Joseph, Christoph Twickel, Alexandra T. Vazquez

***

“It’s about time academia dared to include reggaeton. This might mean that we’re finally understanding that all of us are los de atrás (the ones behind): our country, Puerto Rico, and the whole Caribbean. I hope people support this book so it can be translated into Spanish, and kids in Puerto Rico and Latin America can read it. Because we Caribbean people, even if we don’t want to, even if we don’t like it, even if it hurts, we come from behind, . . . and there’s a value to that. There’s a beauty to being los de atrás.”

—Residente, frontman of the Grammy and Latin Grammy award-winning duo Calle 13

“This anthology opens a chapter in hip-hop history that brings it all back home, back to our transnational Afro-Spanish-speaking countries and diasporas and ’hoods where young people are going through their hip-hop ecstasies and traumas, but in their own language, and in their own unique and hitherto-unknown style.”

—Juan Flores, author of From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, from the foreword to Reggaeton

“The kinetic contributions in Reggaeton melt false borders—ones wrapped like straitjackets around peoples, knowledges, and cultures—and move the crowd. More than an exciting, exhaustive treatment of this vital musical culture, this anthology is a fine blueprint for engaged cultural scholarship right now.”

—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“I cannot overstate how critically important this volume is. It captures the synergies of a musical and cultural movement that few have seriously grappled with, even as the sounds and styles of reggaeton have dominated the air space of so many urban locales.”

—Mark Anthony Neal, author of Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic

***

Raquel Z. Rivera is a Researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the author of New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone and many articles for magazines and newspapers including Vibe, Urban Latino, El Diario/La Prensa, El Nuevo Día, and Claridad. She blogs at reggaetonica.blogspot.com.

Wayne Marshall is the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Ethnomusicology at Brandeis University. He blogs at wayneandwax.com, from which a post on reggaeton was selected for the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 anthology.

Deborah Pacini Hernandez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. The author of Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music and a co-editor of Rockin’ Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America, she has written many articles on Spanish Caribbean and U.S. Latino popular music.

Juan Flores is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His books include The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribbean Latino Tales of Learning and Turning and From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity.

Stimulating the Arts

from The Nation

The Creativity Stimulus
By Jeff Chang
April 15, 2009

On inauguration day, Tom Brokaw was moved to compare Barack Obama's election to Czechoslovakia's 1989 Velvet Revolution. At the eye of each storm, of course, was an icon who merged the political and the aesthetic--Václav Havel, the rock-star poet and prophet, and Barack Obama, the post-soul master of his own story. Both struck down eras of monocultural repression with their pens.

Artists played a largely unheralded role in Obama's victory. But they had been tugging the national unconscious forward for decades, from the multiculturalist avant-gardes of the 1970s and '80s to the hip-hop rebels of the '90s and 2000s, plying a fearless, sometimes even unruly kind of polyculturalism. By the final months of the election season, these artists had secured Obama as the waking image of change.

Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk but by an explosion of mass creativity. Little wonder that two of the most maligned jobs during the forty years after Richard Nixon's 1968 election sealed the backlash of the "silent majority" were community organizer and artist.

Obama was both. So why haven't community organizers and artists been offered a greater role in the national recovery?

During the transition, arts advocates floated some big ideas--including the creation of an arts corps to bring young artists into underfunded schools, the expansion of unemployment support and job retraining to people working in creative industries and the appointment of a senior-level "arts czar" in the administration. But in practice, they faced the wreckage left by a nearly three-decade culture war.

In January they lobbied for $50 million for the NEA in the stimulus package and prevailed over Republican opposition. The one-time allocation will preserve more than 14,000 jobs, allow for new stimulus grants and leverage hundreds of millions more in private support for the arts. Two million Americans list "artist" as their primary occupation. Nearly 6 million workers are employed in the nonprofit arts-and-culture complex. In the words of the NEA's Patrice Walker Powell, the stimulus vote finally "dignified [them] as part of the American workforce."

Read the Full Essay HERE

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Jeff Chang, a 2008 USA Ford Fellow in Literature, is the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. He is at work on Who We Be: The Colorization of America, on the cultural implications of the new American majority

9th Wonder making Beats for Nas?

Black, Male & Feminist? A Mini-Conference

Black, Male and Feminist? A Mini-Conference



Tuesday April 21, 2009

Duke University

The Ernestine Friedl Building, Room 225

5pm



Roundtable Discussion: The Labors of Black Male Feminist Analysis



Kinohi Nishikawa (Duke, Literature)

Otis Tilson’s Shame and the “Crisis” of Black Masculinity:

Queering Iceberg Slim’s Mama Black Widow



Armond R. Towns (UNC, Communications)

From G’s to Gents:

Questioning Black Male Progressivism on Reality Television



Wallace C. Baxter III (Duke, Divinity)

Liberation Through Self-Actualization:

A Black Preacher’s Salvific Pedagogical Responsibilities



Andrew Belton (UNC, English)

Kanye’s Closet, Kristeva’s ‘Catastrophic’, and the Cons(truction)umption of a Twenty-First Century Hip-Hop Fashionisto



Kelvin Clark (Duke, MALS)

The Effectiveness of the Black Male Feminist Critique



Respondents:



Kaneasha Shackelford (Duke, Dvinity)

Chantel Liggett (Duke, Women’s Studies)



***



Keynote Address:



David Ikard, Assistant Professor of English

Florida State University



Author, Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism (LSU Press)



She Had It Coming: Rethinking the "Good Black Man" Paradigm

Though our library shelves now abound with texts, commercial and academic, that investigate the social pitfalls of hyper-black masculinity and strong black womanhood, we have yet to adequately interrogate the "Good Black Man Paradigm" upon which many of our loftiest visions of a better world rest. To riff on Toni Morrison's Playing in Dark, I want to make this culturally celebrated version of black manhood "strange" by making visible our continued preoccupation with black race/gender authenticity. That is to say, I want to make more obvious the disjuncture between our political ideals and our lived experience. Teasing out the conflation of good black manhood with dominating/beating women in Tyler Perry's highly touted movie, The Family that Preys, I will make the case that the "good black man" discourse is, in many ways, as ideologically lethal to black communal health as the hypermasculine thug discourse that most of us vehemently repudiate.

Sponsored by the Department of African & African-American Studies