Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 716

"I'm One of the Ones Your Bullets Missed"--"Got Over" (Robert Glasper w/ Harry Belafonte)

The passion, the brevity, the integrity, the honor, the humility: Harry Belafonte tells his story--and ours--in two minutes with the help of the Robert Glasper Trio. 

In Age Of #BlackLivesMatter, The NAACP Tries To Stay Connected to Black Youth

"One of the things that I think is really evident in the last year," he said, "is that the #BlackLivesMatter movement has captured the hearts and minds and public consciousness in a way that the NAACP and other civil rights organizations have not captured."-- Nat Chioke Williams ,  Hill-Snowdon Foundation

Ida B Wells: A Passion for Justice

Ida B Wells: A Passion for Justice (California Newsreel) documents the dramatic life and turbulent times of Ida B. Wells, the pioneering African American journalist, activist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader of the post-Reconstruction period.

#SayHerName: Questions Raised in the Death of #SandraBland in Texas Prison

Sandra Bland, who was arrested for "assault on a public servant" after a traffic stop for a minor traffic infraction on July 9th, was found dead inside a Waller County, Texas jail on the morning of July 13th. County officials claim that Sandra Bland died from "self-inflicted asphyxiation." Sandra Bland was scheduled to begin a new job at her alma mater Prairie View A&M on July 15th.

Rhiannon Giddens - "Cry No More" ( a response to Charleston)

 "The massacre at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June is just the latest in a string of racially charged events that have broken my heart. There are a lot of things to fix in this world, but history says if we don't address this canker, centuries in the making, these things will continue to happen. No matter what level privilege you have, when the system is broken everybody loses. We all have to speak up when injustice happens. No matter what. And music is one of the best way I know to do so." —Rhiannon Giddens

Bill Withers In Conversation With Aloe Blacc At ASCAP EXPO 2015

'Iconic singer/songwriter Bill Withers sits down in conversation with Aloe Blacc for a rare public appearance at the 10th Annual "I Create Music" Expo in Los Angeles. Watch video of the on stage interview as the reclusive musical genius discusses influences, religion, the difference between music and the music industry--and why he refused to cover Elvis Presley.'--via OkayPlayer

Art Historian Sarah Lewis: "Art as a Technology for Justice"

 
The Kennedy Center , in association with the Aspen Institute, presented the 2015 Aspen Institute-Kennedy Center Arts Summit. In this clip Sarah Lewis , Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery , discusses the idea of "Art as a Technology for Justice". 

Strange Bedfellows: Why Are the Koch Brothers & Van Jones Teaming Up to End Mass Incarceration?

 This week President Obama launched a major push to reform the country’s criminal justice system. The President described what he called a "broken system" in an address at the NAACP’s annual convention, praising the "unlikely bedfellows" campaigning together for criminal justice reform including the Koch Brothers and Van Jones. Democracy Now speaks with Jones, Obama’s former green jobs adviser, and Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel for Koch Industries, where he is a close adviser to its leader, Charles Koch.

CFP: #DigitalBlackness Conference at Rutgers University--April 22-23, 2016

CFP: #DigitalBlackness Conference
 Rutgers University | New Brunswick, New Jersey
Friday & Saturday: April 22 – 23, 2016
 The 21st century has been marked by the proliferation of access to digital platforms and social media sites that have completely refigured the terms and terrain of racial representation, politics, cultural expression and scholarly research.
 Whether we are speaking of the explosion of web-based series that are distributed through YouTube, the formation of a the broad social media community known as Black Twitter, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, or the on-line Queering Slavery Working Group, profoundly new questions have emerged concerning how the digital has reshaped the meaning, understanding, performance, representation, and reception of Blackness.
 What we might call the digital turn also has significant implications for how we study Blackness within and across fields and disciplines. What does Digital Black Studies mean? What are its methodological proclivities and its analytic investments? What are the possibilities of Digital Blackness? What are its limits? This two-day conference Digital Blackness will bring together scholars, students, activists, and artists from a range of fields and disciplines to interrogate the many new modes, customs, and arrangements of racial identity as they are mediated through digital technologies.

We invite proposals for individual papers, and complete panel proposals that addresses a broad range of areas. Suggestions include but are not limited to:

1. Digital Blackness and Social Media
2. Digital Blackness on Film
3. Black Television in the Digital Age
4. Digital Black Histories
5. Digital Archives
6. Digital Black Studies
7. Digital Black Feminisms
8. Digital Diasporas
9. Digital Black Politics and Social Movements
10. Digital Blackness and Musical Cultures
11. Digital Blackness and Visual Culture
12. Blackness in the Digital Humanities
13. Black Code Studies

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Proposals can take one of two forms: (A) an individual or (B) a complete panel.

A proposal for an individual paper should consist of a title and summary of the topic; if accepted, this paper and others related to it will be combined into a complete session. An individual-paper proposal should be single-spaced and no more than two pages long. Please include institutional affiliation and email address for an individual paper.
 A proposal for a complete panel provides a prospectus for a coherent collection of 3-4 papers, including a title for the session, a title and summary of each paper, and a chair, if possible. A complete panel proposal should be single-spaced and no more than three pages long. Please include institutional affiliations and email addresses for all participants.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURES

Please submit proposals to: proposals@rutgersdigitalblackness.com

Proposals are due by Sunday, November 15, 2015.

Lecture: Farah Jasmine Griffin-- “The Idea of Ancestry: Tradition, Innovation, and Black Freedom Dreams”

Columbia University Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin offers the keynote address “The Idea of Ancestry: Tradition, Innovation, and Black Freedom Dreams” at the Resisting Arrest: Black Artfulness and Survival: A One Day Symposium on Art and Resistance hosted by the Department of African + African American Studies at Duke University. In the talk Professor Griffin uses Etheridge Knight's poem, "The Idea of Ancestry" as  an opening for this rumination on the life giving force of Black creativity. How does tradition nourish and limit our sense of collective possibility? How do innovative, creative, and visionary artists, intellectuals and organizers use the past to forward a new world?