Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 600

"On a Turquoise Cloud" -- Candice Hoyes Sings + Talks Duke Ellington

'Jazz singer Candice Hoyes speaks about and performs beautiful genre-bending works by Duke Ellington from her album On a Turquoise Cloud. Many of the intricate compositions on the recording, written specifically for classically-trained singers, were overshadowed by Ellington's more mainstream melodies. Hoyes spent months researching the rarer compositions, including time at the Duke Ellington Collection of the Smithsonian’s Archives Center in Washington, D.C. The album is "a labor of love" that sheds well-deserved light on lesser-known material.' -- +Talks at Google

Poet Claudia Rankine on Baton Rouge + Falcon Heights + Dallas

'Claudia Rankine's acclaimed 2014 poetry book Citizen was a potent and incisive meditation on race. Rankine speaks with NPR's Lynn Neary about where the national conversation about race stands today.'

On Race + Class and the Workers Left Behind by the Democratic Party

'In a far-ranging interview, historian Judith Stein examines the political and economic fates of Black and White workers across the 20th century - from the racial integration of organized labor as Blacks moved from agricultural to industrial work, to the Democratic party's abandonment of pro-working class policies as it shifted to the right in an effort to court suburban White collar voters in the 1980s and 90s. Stein was interview by Connor Kilpatrick for the Jacobin piece Why Did White Workers Leave the Democratic Party?.' 

Historian Gerald Horne: Police Killings Won’t Stop Until U.S. Comes to Grips with its Racist Foundations

'Gerald Horne and Paul Jay discuss the roots of police killing people of color in the American history of slavery, the elite policy that produces poverty and racism, and the laws that police officers are expected to enforce in order to maintain superexploitation and economic inequality.' -- +TheRealNews   

Artist Kadir Nelson's Illustrations of Pride and Soul

'Kadir Nelson is an artist unknown to many. But you'll find his work on magazines, albums, posters and postage stamps. Then there are the children's books - more than two dozen of them. Ben Tracy meets the illustrator who counts Ernie Barnes , Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth among his influences - and who explains what happens when his paintbrush starts to sing.' -- CBS Sunday Morning

Marc Lamont Hill & Mychal Denzel Smith: We Must End State Violence Against Black Bodies

'According to the Washington Post, 505 people been killed by police across the United States so far this year. African Americans — especially young Black men — are disproportionately the target of police violence. Well, to talk about the fatal police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, we are joined now by two guests. Marc Lamont Hill is a journalist, Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Morehouse College. and author of Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond and and Mychal Denzel Smith, contributing writer for The Nation magazine. His new book is called, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education.' -- +Democracy No

Remembering Tuskegee Airman Dr. Roscoe Brown -- Educator + Civil Rights Trailblazer

'Dr.  Roscoe Brown was one of the last surviving "Red Tail" pilots of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. These African-American pilots served in World War II, laying the foundation for integrating the U.S. armed forces. After the war, Brown returned to civilian life and eventually earned a Ph.D. from New York University.  In the late 1970s, Brown became president of Bronx Community College, where he'd remain for two decades. After that, he served as director of the Center for Urban Education Policy at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.' -- +NPR  

Behind The Black Power Goddess: Betty Davis' Early Demos Released

'Over the last 10 years, 1970s funk icon Betty Davis has enjoyed a renaissance of rediscovery. Her music has been lavishly reissued and anthologized, but for years the holy grail was a collection of songs she recorded for Columbia Records in the late '60s, several of which her then-husband, Miles Davis, helped to produce. For decades, no one could hear those songs — until now. The Columbia Years 1968-1969 captures an artist beginning to assert her own voice.' -- Oliver Wang for +NPR Music 

On Sorrow + Pleasure + Melancholic Hope

(Photo: L. Ann and Jonathan P. Binstock © Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY)On Sorrow + Pleasure + Melancholic Hopeby Joseph Richard Winters | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
In my book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, I respond to post-racial fantasies and concomitant notions of progress and freedom. While the yearning to get beyond race is not new, it takes on heightened energy in the age of the first black president.  In opposition to triumphant images of racial progress that minimize or explain away the tragic quality of history, I put forth a conception of melancholic hope, one that is informed by black literature, film, music, and religion. I show how authors like WEB Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison and filmmakers like Charles Burnett share a tendency to connect hope and possibility, within the context of black strivings, to remembrance, loss, and a recalcitrant sense of the tragic.  
In the first chapter of the book, I suggest that we revisit one site of ambivalence (or doubleness) in Du Bois’s 1903 classic, Souls of Black Folk. While Du Bois yearns for black strivings and achievements to be integrated into narratives of progress and civilization, he also acknowledges that civilization (the nation-state, Euro-American modernity, whiteness) relies on violent exclusions and erasures. While Du Bois wants something like advancement for black people – better education, voting rights, more opportunities to flourish—he suggests that a better world will depend on how we remember, narrate, and mourn the losses that accompany the march of history.  
For Du Bois, the sorrow song is one cultural site where black people have been able to record the pains and pleasures, hopes and despairs, and beauty and horror associated with black life (in opposition to histories that either exclude black experience or use this experience to reinforce dominant imaginaries and modes of being). Du Bois anticipates Baldwin’s hyperbolic claim that it is “only in black music that black people have been able to tell their story.”
In my book, I am not only interested in particular songs like “Motherless Child” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” nor am I only alluding to Du Bois’s investment in the Fisk Jubilee Singers keeping these slave songs alive. Following the work of Jonathan Flatley, I am also interested in how sorrow, or melancholy, operates as a recurring trope in Souls, how it works as a structure of feeling and way of being attuned to blackened bodies and experiences. For Du Bois the sorrow song expresses and resounds, “death and disappointment” while breathing a kind of opaque hope. This cry of hope is directed toward different objects and possibilities – God, Justice, liberation, escape, and/or death. Between and beyond optimism and pessimism, Du Bois’s use of sorrow is “unhopeful but not hopeless.”
In other writings, I have shown how the trope of sorrow works in contemporary hip hop and black music more generally. I acknowledge that blackness or black life changes over the time (and that the conditions that occasioned the slave community’s singing of “Motherless Child” are different from those that enabled Ghostface Killah’s version).
At the same time, tracking contemporary sorrow songs allows us to identity continuities and discontinuities across time with regard to racial modernity, black strivings, and black cultural production. In my reading, sorrow is a response to and expression of death and its various intimations – loss, pain, invisibility, shame, exclusion, alienation, social death, etc. Yet as Saidiya Hartman shows us, sorrow can fuse with other kinds of affects and emotions – anguish, pleasure, intimacy, and so forth. Below are five or six songs that capture this melancholic hope or sorrow-filled pleasure.
“The Message” – Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

This is a classic early 80s song that provides part of the soundtrack for postindustrial urban life. The song begins with “broken glass everywhere” and ends with an image of a prisoner’s body “swinging back and forth.” While “The Message” draws attention to poverty, police surveillance, immobility, labor strikes, and drug addiction, the song is also an occasion for dance, festivity, and a twisted kind of laughter (uh ha ha  ha).  
“Sing About Me/I’m Dying of Thirst” – Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick takes the perspective of two murdered friends and the younger sister of a woman/slain prostitute that Kendrick wrote an earlier song about. This track prompts the listener to think about how narrative and memory “keep painful details alive,” how music enables us to dance on the boundary between death and life. “Sing About Me” also raises questions about who has the authority to tell the stories of absent others. The second part of the song ends with a baptism and the promise of new life (and of course there is the “running” metaphor which conjures up Fred Moten’s understanding of blackness as a kind of fugitivity).
“The Prayer” – Ghostface Killah and Ox

“Life is so painful yet I’m thankful”
In Ox’s prayer, the listener hears an existential struggle. While God tells him that suffering will be rewarded or redeemed, Ox responds by underscoring how difficult it can be to live and embody that suffering as an earthly being. In other words, the idea of redemptive suffering has its limitations and contradictions.  The finger-tapping and call and response add to the “spiritual” quality of the track.
“Thin Line” – Roxanne Shante

This is an underappreciated song dedicated to women who have endured domestic violence. Shante speaks from the perspective of an abused women who fights back. After throwing boiling water on her violent partner, she finds herself “doing a bid.” Yet she ends the track expressing a kind of pleasure in revenge, in making her partner experience pain. The song resembles older tracks like Bessie Smith’s “Sing Sing Prison Blues”; in addition, Shante’s line about “not being able to see through black eyes” adds new meaning to Du Bois’s notion of looking through a veil.  
“I Wanna Be Happy” - Mary J Blige

So fitting that this is the final song of her second album, My Life. While the song expresses a desire/yearning for happiness and wholeness, the listener wonders if this very desire is ambivalent and often the cause of melancholy, alienation, and disappointment. Here I am not objecting to our desires to feel loved, respected, cared for, and so forth. I am suggesting that desire is always defined by a kind of lack and that our attachments to objects and ideas that promise wholeness and happiness have ambivalent effects and implications.  
“Song Cry” – Jay-Z



Jay-Z tells the story of betraying and being betrayed by his girlfriend. While he refuses to show tears, he allows the song to cry; the song, as well as the woman’s voice on the track, become vicarious sites of mourning. Jay-Z acknowledges that gender norms and expectations compel him to act indifferent and “heroic” even though deep down, he is “so sick.”
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Joseph Richard Winters is an assistant professor of Religious Studies with a secondary position in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. Winters' first book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke University Press, June 2016) examines how black literature and aesthetic practices challenge post-racial fantasies and triumphant accounts of freedom. The book shows how authors like WEB Du Bois and Toni Morrison link hope and possibility to melancholy, remembrance, and a recalcitrant sense of the tragic.               

Bringing Black Feminist Theory Into Everyday Practice

'Some scholars are criticized for staying within the ‘ivory tower,’ and creating work that’s only accessible to a highly-academic audience. Alexis Pauline Gumbs identifies as a community-accountable scholar and puts that identity into practice, manifested in online educational projects like Eternal Summer of The Black Feminist Mind. Gumbs recently co-edited a collection called Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines (PM Press/2016) that brings forward the varied narratives of marginalized mothers of color and completed a forthcoming book of poetry called spill: scenes of black feminist fugitivity (Duke University Press/2016), which pays tribute to the black feminist thinkers who make Gumbs’ work possible. Host Frank Stasio talks with Gumbs and Norma Marrun, a contributor to the Revolutionary Mothering anthology.' -- WUNC's The State of Things