Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 538

Jazz Icon Henry Threadgill Lets His Imagination Run Wild

'Henry Threadgill wants to know how to build the house. Whether it's Moby Dick or jazz composition, the 72-year-old jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist has spent his life figuring out what goes into building the greatest works of arts. At three years of age, he started teaching himself to play piano by mimicking the boogie-woogie on the radio. From there, he set to figuring out how to compose his own music. Recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Threadgill talks with Helga Davis about giving license to your imagination in order to create, the life energy that connects a performer to his creations, and pushing yourself to go beyond excellence to greatness.' -- +WQXR 

PANEL: #OscarsBlackAF?--The State of Black Hollywood on Feb 9th

In previous years, the Academy Award nominations inspired the hashtag campaign #OscarsSoWhite, to protest the lack of nominations for people of color. In sharp contrast, six Black actors have been nominated this year -- a record number -- and diverse films like Moonlight, Fences and Hidden Figures (which garnered an impressive eight nominations) are in the running for best picture. In addition, four of the five honored documentaries, including Ava DuVernay’s 13th  and Raoul Peck's "I'm Not Your Negro" were by Black filmmakers. 
Join film scholars Stephane Dunn of Morehouse College and Natalie Bullock Brown of Saint Augustine University in a conversation with Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal about the current state of Black Hollywood.
Thursday, February 9th6:30 pmThe John Hope Franklin CenterThe Ahmadieh Family Conference Hall, Room 240 

Joan Morgan's 'When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down' Goes Digital on April 25th

When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down
by Joan Morgan

"Still fresh, funny, and irreverent after eighteen years, Joan Morgan's When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost gives voice to the most intimate thoughts of the post-Civil Rights, post-feminist, post-soul generation."
Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781439127407 April 2017
"For Black feminism to work, Morgan suggests that it must be an apparatus responsive to issues that 'explore who we are as women--not victims,' not soley the role Black men play in making them victims." -- Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture: and the Post Soul Aesthetic (2002), pp. 154.
"Without doubt, Black Women had made meaningful interventions into Feminist Thought before the publication of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, but none can claim to have done so wearing three-inch pumps, while bumping Heavy D, and sprinkling enough #BlackGirlMagic to conjure a new generation of Black Feminists who give no “f*cks” to those who dare deny the value of a Black Girl’s life and her desires."  -- Mark Anthony Neal, author of Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

The Players' Tribune: Why We're Talking about Race

'In November of 2016 NFL players Anquan Boldin, Andrew Hawkins, Malcolm Jenkins, Josh McCown and Glover Quin met with members of Congress to discuss issues related to law enforcement and race. In this installment of the Players’ POV, three of the players discuss how these issues have impacted their lives.' -- +The Players' Tribune 

Jelani Cobb: Militaristic Power or Moral Authority -- Do Governments Have to Choose?

'America has a split personality, and the country it wants to be is constantly being foiled by the country that it is. In an ideal world, says Jelani Cobb, there is a way of using power that does not entail the oppression and exploitation of other people. But how do we get there?' -- +Big Think 

Talib Kweli Live in Harlem at the Apollo Theater

'Talib Kweli performs a set as part of WNYC's 11th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration at the Apollo Theater, "Where Do We Go From Here?: MLK and the Future of Inclusion"'. -- +WNYC  

How I Got Over: 'I Am Not Your Negro' Filmmaker Raoul Peck in Conversation

'James Baldwin’s final and unfinished project Remember This House was an effort to capture the lives of three of his closest friends, all assassinated: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.. Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the manuscript Baldwin never finished in his Oscar-nominated documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro". The film is a radically nuanced examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material that connects the past struggles for racial justice to those of the present. WNYC editor Rebecca Carroll hosted an unconventional conversation with Peck about the prescience of Baldwin's work and his indictment of American racism as its own moral monster.' -- +The Greene Space at WNYC & WQXR   

Alexis De Veaux: "Politics is a word spelled N-O-W"

"Politics is a reaction to survival. A battle against the ugly conditions that bombard us. Like vultures do a carcass in the desert. We react stalling the time before our skin is shredded from its marrow in pieces of what used to be." 

-- Alexis De Veaux -- "Politics is a word spelled N-O-W" from Spirits in the Street (1974)

'The Clansman' -- Excerpt from the Film 'Birth of a Movement' (Independent Lens)

'In this excerpt from the Independent Lens documentary Birth of a Movement, silent film director D.W. Griffith, "at the top of his game," is introduced to the book The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, by Thomas Dixon. When The Clansman became a stage play, its pro-KKK, "viciously racist" (according to Harvard historian David Blight) point of view resulted in protests and race riots -- foreshadowing what was to come when Griffith adapted it into the film The Birth of a Nation.' 
 

James Baldwin for Our Times

'James Baldwin died in 1987, but his quiet rage speaks eloquently to our times. In the Oscar-nominated documentary “I Am Not Your Negro," director Raoul Peck creates a film essay from Baldwin’s words, using footage from past and present with narration by the actor Samuel Jackson. A key part of the film is the author's unfinished manuscript about three martyrs of the civil rights movement — Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.' -- +WNYC — Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen