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)



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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