Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 789

Left of Black S5:E3: The Danger of Being Publicly Black with Karla FC Holloway

Left of Black S5:E3: The Danger of Being Publicly Black with Karla FC Holloway
Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in-studio by Professor Karla FC Holloway, the James B Duke Professor of English at Duke University, where she holds appointments in the Law School, Women’s Studies and African & African-American Studies. in response to recent examples of violence in Black communities, Holloway acknowledges “The danger of being publicly Black, is still a danger that we embody in just our presence and being.” Professor Holloway’s latest book is Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (Duke University Press) 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.*** Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @ iTunes U*** Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlackFollow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackMan
Follow Karla FC Holloway on Twitter: @ProfHolloway

'Liliquoi Moon' (2003) -- Meshell Ndegeocello | 'Waterbearer' (1986)--Lorna Simpson

Waterbearer (1986)--Lorna Simpson 
"Liliquoi Moon" (2003) -- Meshell Ndegeocello

A 'Post-Post-Colonial' Take On The Violent Birth Of Modern Jamaica

The Athlete Who Made LeBron James Possible: Curt Flood--Rebel without a Clause

New York Times
When baseball star Curt Flood rejected a trade in 1969, he challenged America’s pastime and helped spark a revolution that rippled beyond the game.
 Video by RetroReport on Publish DateOctober 5, 2014.

Carrying on the Legacy of C. Eric Lincoln

Duke Chapel
Joshua Lazard was recently appointed Duke Chapel's inaugural C. Eric Lincoln Minister for Student Engagement. The position honors the late Dr. Lincoln, a scholar, social activist, novelist, hymn-writer and pastor who taught religion and culture at Duke from 1976 to 1993. Lazard explores the legacy of Dr. Lincoln in an interview with Lucy Lincoln, an educator and the widow of Dr. Lincoln.

'Up Above My Head' (1972)--Rance Allen Group | 'Tongues (Holy Rollers)' (1929)--Archibald J. Motley, Jr.

Archibald J. Motley Jr., Tongues (Holy Rollers), 1929
Rance Allen Group--"Up Above My Head" (1972)

#DyingInAmerica: Panel Discussion on Narratives, Politics & Law at the End of Life | Oct. 9th

#DyingInAmerica: Panel Discussion on Narratives, Politics & Law at the End of Life 
Thursday October 9, 2014 @ 7pm at the Franklin Humanities Institute (Duke University)
Farr Curlin | Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities; M.D., Hospice and Palliative Care, DUMC
Luke Powery | Dean of Duke Chapel and Associate Professor of the Practice of Homiletics
Don Taylor | Associate Professor of Public Policy and Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine, DUMC.
Karla FC Holloway, Moderator | James B. Duke Professor of English. Professor of Law and African American Studies; member: Institute of Medicine Commitee on Care at the End of Life #IOMEndOfLife

''Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell' -- A Film Trailer from DrGuyMusiQology

DrGuyMusiQology
Film trailer for Guthrie Ramsey, Jr.'s forthcoming documentary Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop. The trailer for Amazing, a film about Bud Powell from DrGuyMusiQology on Vimeo.

Talks at Google: Edward E. Baptist-- Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Talks at Google
Historian Edward E. Baptist visited Google's Cambridge, MA office to discuss his book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. As he shows in the book, slavery and its expansion were central to the evolution and modernization of our nation in the 18th and 19th centuries, catapulting the US into a modern, industrial and capitalist economy. Dr. Baptist is Associate Professor of History at Cornell. The Half Has Never Been Told is his second book; his first was Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War.
In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a sub-continental cotton empire. By 1861 it had five times as many slaves as it had during the Revolution, and was producing two billion pounds of cotton a year. It was through slavery and slavery alone that the United States achieved a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and was transformed into a global power rivaled only by England. 

With Two Funky New Albums, Prince Still Putting in Work

With Two Funky New Albums, Prince Still Putting in Workby Frank Paul, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
For his fans, Prince Rogers Nelson occupies a uniquely personal space thanks to his ability to stay relevant in five different decades, by building a tapestry of songs spanning our phases of life. Scan his canon and folks-of-a-certain age find joints that were edgy in high school (e.g. “Little Red Corvette”), seductive soundtracks in college dorm rooms (“International Lover”; “Adore”), political commentary in formative adult years (“Money Don’t Matter 2 Night”) and today’s "That's My Jam!" karaoke fodder  (“Kiss”, “Lets Go Crazy”, “Rasberry Beret”, etc.)
So it is with a dubious ear that one approaches Art Official Age and Plectrumelectrum, albums number 30-something and 30-something-plus-one from Prince, who no doubt saw indefatigable icons like James Brown (who cranked out more than 70 albums) as a hero. But James’ groove tended to circle a particular orbit - he had a “sound”.
Like several of the aliases he has assumed in his career, Prince’s product tends to be a wildcard -- his “sounds” are many: you never know which one to expect, and it's always hard to think he can match his much-loved hits. Perhaps that is what makes the 56-year-old musician’s two new albums, the second a collaboration with all-female band 3rd Eye Girl, such a worthwhile challenge.
To be sure, these are works Prince fans will embrace far sooner than some pop-radio sampler, someone looking for a companion to Meghan Trainor’s “All About that Bass” (even though the sassy superhit recalls Prince’s “Daddy Pop” and “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad.”) In fact, Art Official Age and Plectrumelectrum represent the dawn of Prince’s new amiable relationship with Warner Music, after nearly 20 years of ugly legal wrangling. That seems to have freed him to unlock that vault of songs about which he has boasted.
Myriad phases of Prince can be heard here: Guitar-raking electric Prince ("Aintturninround”, “Fixurlifeup”); ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Prince (“Tic Tac Toe”); Wendy and Lisa-era Prince (“White Caps”) and some of that “Purple Rain”-style -ish that makes no sense the first three times it runs through your head (“Art Official Cage”, “Marz”), but clicks on the fourth. With radio-ready joints like “The Gold Standard”, “This Could Be Us”, and “Clouds”, the artist shows he can still drop falsetto-frosted rhythm and blues gems, rich with grown-folk talk:  
“Everybody knows/That a woman needs love/Like a river flows (inside)/If it’s good thats all she thinking of/Sleep alone if you wanna/But like a new pair of shoes/You gonna wanna show me off to your friends when I..OOH/You are the cage to my dove/Forever and ever in love/This could be us.”
The recently Afro-coiffed Prince even slips in his pro-black agenda, sort of. While a far cry from historical haymaker “Family Name” (from 2001’s The Rainbow Children), he does stretch from sexy whimsy in “Breakfast Can Wait” (“You can’t leave a black man in this state/Come here baby/let me put you on my plate/Breakfast can wait”), to losing a fast food job (for giving away too much food to hungry young brothers and sisters) and suggesting there’s another Great Migration in order, in “Marz”: “If a rocket ship didn't cost more than a car/The brotherhood might just move to Mars."
Prince lets the members of 3rd Eye Girl -- Hannah Ford, Donna Grantis and Ida Nielsen -- flex on a few cuts, including the gentle “Stop This Train,” energetic “Another Love” and “White Caps”, where one singer sounds eerily like Haley Williams of the rock-pop group Paramour. That’s a problem, since on this 3rd Eye Girl album, its hard to tell which of the musicians is featured at any moment, especially since we know Prince can do it all himself.
Ambiguity of origin, if such a sin exists, is perhaps the project’s most glaring question mark. Prince’s deep cache of songs leads to moments when you wonder if a song was recorded when Mr. Nelson was performing as Prince, The Man with No Name, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or “Prince” post-2001.  
No matter. On albums number 30-something and 30-something-plus-one, Mr. Nelson proves to be the manifestation of his 2001 tune “The Work, Pt. 1”, an homage to James Brown’s legacy, in which Prince insists: “I’m willing to do the work/Do what I gotta do.” Its possible religious subtext aside, this could be his mantra to the artistic process since the late 1970’s. Five decades later, Prince is still doing the work.
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Frank Paul, Jr. is Americas Desk Editor at Thomson Reuters