Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 758

The Dance Company Ronald K. Brown and Evidence Celebrates 30 Years

Ronald K. Brown and Evidence, A Dance Company will usher in its 30th year at The Joyce Theater in New York City, from February 24-March 1. The week-long run includes the NewYork premiere of THROUGH TIME and CULTURE, the powerful classic GRACE and THE SUBTLE ONE, featuring a suite composed and performed live by Jason Moran.  

Models of the South Sudan Organize to Support Education and Literacy in The Sudan

A group photo-shoot of South Sudanese models for Stand 4 Education,  an attempt to raise awareness about the civil war ripping the Sudan apart and the high illiteracy rate that deters South Sudanese women like themselves from mobilizing-- Fusion

The Forgotten Heroes Of Black History

Historians Greg Carr (Howard), Treva Lindsey (Ohio State) and Brittney Cooper (Rutgers) join Huffpost Live host Marc Lamont Hill in a discussion about the invisible heroes of black history who have helped pave the way for equal rights.

Message in the Music? The Legacy of Philly Soul

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Nealtalks with veteran Philadelphia Radio personality Dyana Williams about the legacy of Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell—The Mighty Three—who created the soundtrack for Black empowerment in the 1970s with Philly Soul. Williams is the co-host of Soul Sunday (with Derrick Sampson) on Philadelphia's WRNB.

The Remix: Rapper Dice Raw on 'The New Jim Crow,' Suge Knight & the ACLU

This week, on The Remix host Dr. James Peterson talks to Dice Raw (Karl Jenkins) about his new album, documentary, and hip-hop musical loosely based on the album, "The Last Jimmy," which was inspired by Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow. The two also discuss Jenkins' work with the ACLU, the Sentencing Project and the Innocence Project. And Peterson asks him how to inspire more artists to produce work that connects with social justice movements as he's done.

Left of Black S5:E19: Through A Lens Darkly—Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People

Left of Black S5:E19:  Through A Lens Darkly—Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) is joined via Skype by filmmaker and photographer Thomas Allen Harris (@ObaOxum). Inspired by Deborah Willis' groundbreaking book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present, Harris’ latest film is Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and in conjunction with the Center for Arts, Digital Culture & Entrepreneurship (CADCE).*** Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @ iTunes U*** Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

Dancing the African Diaspora: Theories of Black Performance (a film short)

Dancing the African Diaspora (2014) brought together many of the leading scholars and practitioners of African Diaspora Dance to the Duke University Campus. The event was sponsored by The Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD), an egalitarian community of scholars and artists committed to exploring, promoting, and engaging African diaspora dance as a resource and method of aesthetic identity.

I’m Not Your Superwoman, but I Can Have It All by Simone Drake

I’m Not Your Superwoman, but I Can Have It Allby Simone Drake | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile) As a professional woman who is often viewed as a hybrid of Chaka Khan’s “every woman” and Karyn White’s “superwoman,” I appreciated the nuance of Lisa B. Thompson’s recent Washington Post commentary on gender realism in Shonda Rhimes's award-winning televisual productions.  Rhimes’s pattern of resisting both the superwoman and “happily ever after” narrative is good for popular culture.  The conclusion Professor Thompson drew from that pattern, however, made me bristle: women can’t have it all.  I would propose that having it all and being a superwoman—what Rhimes seems to actually be disrupting—are quite different. I am a university professor who has five degrees in several fields, a husband, a suburban home, three children, a dog, and the obligatory minivan. Already, I am on overkill with the number of degrees and number of children, as the vast majority of university professors cannot match those figures.  Then, I published like crazy, largely because early on I was told “as a mother of young children” a job search committee was concerned I “could not do the work of tenure or complete my dissertation,” not to mention doctoral English professor comments along the way that I was challenged with “basic English skills.”  With one book out last year, a second projected for next year, and a third grant-funded book project well under way, in addition to a solid list of journal articles and book chapters, in the area of publishing, I am also on overkill.  This, I suppose, is what happens when you tell a stubborn person she cannot have the things she wants.  But, does this mean I have it all?  It does and it does not. While the realm of popular culture and particularly television has functioned as a post civil rights space to measure social progress and incorporation for marginalized groups, there should be cautionary limits to just how much it is allowed to shape our understanding of real life.
From Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique to watching Michelle Obama transform from corporate business woman to mom-in-chief, the fact that women make career sacrifices for others and, thus, often are disproportionately burdened by an inequitable work-pleasure burden is well noted, even if very little has been done politically, socially or economically to make critical inroads in improving the predicament. Thompson encourages spectators to "see" the work Rhimes does to pushback against a patriarchal system by making life, and especially the life of professional women, messy and complicated. This is real.
Veronica Chambers famously offered a glimpse of how real it is for the women she interviewed in Having It All?: Black Women and Success. What emerged from Chambers’s narratives is what Rhimes shows the world—it is not easy for women to have it all in a heteropatriarchal, capitalist society. But, I question what the rhetorical limitations are in such an absolute conclusion. A primary concern is one of definition: how "all" is being defined. This is critical because the phrase itself proceeds from the assumption that there is a standardized set of “things” all women want. Career, opposite sex spouse, children, home, and material goods that mark social and economic status are typically the things understood to constitute the “all” professional women want to have.  According to Thompson, Shondaland separates itself from other primetime television programs because of Rhimes’s brutal honesty when every other producer opts for fairytales.  I get this, and I register the importance of the narrative intervention, but all women do not want all of these things, and even among those who do, there are often variations.  
There are women who want a career but do not desire mobility within it.  There are women who want the career and to be powerful.  There are women who want the career, a life partner, and children.  There are women who have professional credentials and chose to restrict their work to one shift—the home space.  Any of these women could understand herself as having it all, regardless of what anyone else might think. In addition to definition, language is also a problem.  The phrase is a second wave feminist term that pushes back against the sexist parameters that limited women’s educational and vocational opportunities.  Although there have been efforts to change the language—Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s “doing it all,” etc.—the bottom line of calling for gender equality in the home and work space remains constant.  Yet, all iterations of the phrase seem to still evoke doubt. This doubt resonates with Thompson’s quoting of Rhimes: “Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life. … That is the trade-off. That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel 100 percent okay; you never get your sea legs; you are always a little nauseous.” What Rhimes reveals is a humanism that speaks to the dubiousness of the phraseology that suggests there is a magical state when women, or even men, as Richard Dorment’s controversial Esquire essay proposes, can have or do it all. This utopian ideology, then, is not only complicated by presumed definitions of what “all” might be, but also by the reality of humanness that demands sacrifices.  Rhimes demonstrates a clear investment in replicating real-life narratives of professional women (and men) in her television series, as far as the work-home balance goes, but there is a limitation.  
Thompson points out that Leslie Knope, on “‘Parks and Recreation’ is running a branch of the National Park Service while raising triplet toddlers, and she never breaks a sweat.”  This is a point where I must admit my understanding of the fascination with Shondaland, especially black, professional women’s fascination, yet acknowledge my own disinterest in the hoopla.  Yes, hard decisions between career and relationships are made in Shondaland, showing viewers the “sweat.”  But, whether viewers see the sweat or not,  Shondaland is just as circumscribed by the very ideology that disallows Knope’s to break the sweat we are not suppose to see.  
Thus, unlike Thompson suggests, I am not convinced Christina Yang’s character on Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy is offering significantly more progressivism via an elective abortion than Knope’s character who lives a charmed life, because the analysis of both women relies upon employing a troubled trope for assessing gender progressivism.  Yang is only not having it all if we accept a particular definition of having it all.  If we instead think of having it all as a concept uniquely tailored to individual women who determine for themselves what “all” constitutes in their lives, then Rhimes might be showing viewers something quite different than “women can’t have it all.” I am reluctant to view Rhimes’s depiction of the “trade-off” as exemplary of women not being able to have it all. Instead, I see a pushback against the superwoman or “every woman” who is “whatever you want/whatever you need/anything you want done baby/I do it naturally.”  Can one not have “all” of the things that defines one’s definition of “all” and escape the superwoman trap?  
I would say most certainly professional women can have all the things they decide are important to them and worth working toward. What those things are will look different for each woman.  What choices are made to determine which things are given lower or no priority in order to have the things desired will also differ.   For this reason, I, personally, say I can have all the things I deem to be important to me, but I’m not your superwoman.  
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Simone Drake is an assistant professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University.  She is the author of Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (LSU Press) and her second book, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making  is under contract with University of Chicago Press.

#MuslimLivesMatter: Activists Speak Out About Death Of Muslim Students

HuffPost Live Host Marc Lamont Hill talks with Imam Abdullah Antepli, Deepa Iyer, Haris Tarin and Maysoon Zayid about the shooting deaths of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill.

How Respectability Politics Impacted Legacy of Black LGBT Civil Rights Activist Pauli Murray

Historian Brittney Cooper joins Marc Lamont Hill on HuffPost Live to discuss the forgotten legacy of Pauli Murray as a gender non-conforming Civil Rights activist.