Looking for Denzel; Finding Barack: Thoughts on the President as Race Man—A Lecture by Mark Anthony Neal

Looking for Denzel; Finding Barack: Thoughts on the President as Race Man

—A  Lecture by Mark Anthony Neal

Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 4:30pm

Cornell University

Africana Studies and Research Center,

Multipurpose Room

310 Triphammer Rd,

Ithaca, NY 14850, USA

The Africana Studies & Research Center (ASRC) at Cornell University will host a lecture and book signing by Mark Anthony Neal titled 'Looking for Denzel; Finding Barack: Thoughts on the President as Race Man' at 4:30pm on Thursday, September 6th. This event is free and open to the public at the ASRC, 310 Triphammer Road and is part of the fall colloquium titled “Race and the Presidency, Part II” and the ASRC yearlong series theme “Freedom, Democracy, and Citizenship”.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. Neal has written and lectured extensively on black popular culture, black masculinity, sexism and homophobia in Black communities, and the history of popular music.

He 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). Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd Edition (2011) Neal’s next book Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities will be published in 2013 by New York University Press.

Neal hosts the weekly webcast, ‘Left of Black’ in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University (leftofblack.tumblr.com/). A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal contributes to several on-line media outlets, including Huff Post Black Voices, Ebony.com, SeeingBlack.com, and Britain’s New Black Magazine. He has also appeared in several documentaries including Byron Hurt’s acclaimed Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), John Akomfrah’s Urban Soul (2004) and Jonathan Gayles’s White Scripts and Black Supermen (2012).

Neal is the founder and managing editor of the blog NewBlackMan (in Exile) (newblackman.blogspot.com/). You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.