Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 942

Left of Black S3:E8 | Recalling Legacy of Queer Gender-Bending Harlem Renaissance Performer Gladys Bentley

Left of Black S3:E8 | Recalling Legacy of Queer Gender-Bending Harlem Renaissance Performer Gladys Bentley
November 5, 2012
For many Gladys Bentley is a long forgotten footnote to the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age.  Bentley’s willingness to challenge the racial, sexual and gender status quo of the 20thCentury is recalled in the work of Durham-based artist Shirlette Ammons on her new recording Twilight for Gladys Bentley.  Ammons and Duke University Professor Sharon Patricia Holland join Left of Black Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Nealin studio to talk about “Bentley Mode,” the tradition of “raunchy” Black Music (“f*ckable feminist”) and Holland’s new book The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press).
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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.
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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in  @ iTunes U

Haiti's Government Feels Destruction of Hurricane Sandy

AlJazeeraEnglish  Storm Sandy killed more than 50 people in Haiti and left behind a cholera outbreak and food shortages. It has added to discontent over a government that critics say has failed to improve Haitian's lives. Al Jazeera's Rachel Levin reports from Port au Prince.

After Sandy, Occupy Movement Re-Emerges as Relief Hub for Residents in Need

Democracy Now
In addition to the National Guard and FEMA, one of the more active relief efforts in New York City has been a volunteer effort organized by alumnae of Occupy Wall Street called Occupy Sandy Relief. Along with groups like 350.org and Recovers.org, Occupy activists quickly mobilized hundreds, and then thousands, of people to help affected areas of New York City. Democracy Now! senior producer Mike Burke speaks with Occupy organizer Catherine Yeager in the Rockaways about Occupy Wall Street's transformation into Occupy Sandy Relief.

‘Left of Black Goes’ “Bentley Mode” on the November 5th Episode with Artist Shirlette Ammons and Sharon Patricia Holland

‘Left of Black Goes’ “Bentley Mode” on the November 5th Episode with Artist Shirlette Ammons and Sharon Patricia Holland
For many Gladys Bentley is a long forgotten footnote to the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age.  The Harlem-based performer was an out-Lesbian, who often performed in men’s clothing—a signature white top-hat and tails—who challenged the sexual, racial and gender conventions of the period.  As such, she was targeted by the everyday racism and everyday homophobia of the era, ultimately forced to perform a life of “living straight” as the McCarthyism produced suspects out of anyone who colored outside the lines.
Gladys Bentley’s life and spirit is recalled in a new project by Durham, North Carolina base artist Shirlette Ammons, Twilight for Gladys Bentley.  Ammons, visits the Left of Black studios to talk about being in “Bentley Mode,” the challenges of being a Queer Independent artist (gonna talk a bit about Mr. Ocean) and that thing she calls a “F*ckable Feminism.”  Ammons is joined by Duke English Professor Sharon Patricia Holland, author of the new book The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press).
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Left of Black airs at 1:30 p.m. (EST) on Mondays on the Ustream channel: http://tinyurl.com/LeftofBlack
Viewers are invited to participate in a Twitter conversation with Neal and featured guests while the show airs using hash tags #LeftofBlack or #dukelive.  
Left of Black is recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.
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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlackFollow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackManFollow Shirlette Ammons on Twitter: @ShirletteAmmons

Al Jazeera English: Tavis Smiley Calls 'Poverty' Greatest Threat to Democracy

AlJazeeraEnglish  Speaking to Al Jazeera's Tony Harris, Tavis Smiley, US talk show host and author, says the US presidential election this year has been dominated by money.

Smiley says the 46 million people living at or below the poverty line in the US should now be regarded as a matter of national security for Washington.

The greatest threat to American democracy ... one per cent of the American people cannot continue to own and control 42 per cent of the wealth

Smiley says though poverty figures showing a growing gap between the rich and poor in the United States, were released in September, there has been "no real conversation about poverty" neither in this election, nor in the 2008 election.

‘I Ain’t Never Left Baltimore’: Meditations on Love and Charm City

‘I Ain’t Never Left Baltimore’: Meditations on Love and Charm City by Isaiah M. Wooden | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Shamrock : We done gone so far from Baltimore, we're losing the station. Yo', try a Philly station or some shit like that
Bodie: The radio in Philly is different?
Shamrock : Nigga, please. You gotta be fucking with me, right? You ain't never heard a station outside of Baltimore?
Bodie : Yo' man, I ain't never left Baltimore except that Boys Village shit one day, and I wasn't tryin' to hear no radio up in that bitch.—“Ebb  Tide,” Season 2, Episode 1 of The Wire
I.
A funny thing happens on the way to Philadelphia in the season two opener of David Simon and Ed Burns’s generally lauded television drama series, The Wire: static. While traveling up I-95 in a white utility vehicle to pick up a package of drugs, Bodie Broadus (J.D. Williams) and Sean “Shamrock” McGinty (Richard Burton), two drug dealers in the fictional “Barksdale organization,” encounter an unexpected challenge: the interruption of their favorite Baltimore radio station by the scratches and clicks that often accompany a weak FM signal. The noise prompts Bodie to conclude that there is something wrong with the radio—that it is not properly working. Shamrock, however, knows better. He explains to Bodie that the problem is not with the radio, but with the signal: “We’re losing it…We’re losing the station, man…We done gone so far from Baltimore, we're losing the station.” Boadie is confounded by this explanation because, as he reveals in the subsequent exchange, he had no knowledge that people in other cities listened to different radio stations. Save for a one-day stint in Boys Village, a juvenile detention center located in Prince George’s County, MD, he, in fact, has never left Baltimore. Thus, his radio stations have never failed him. In fact, his inability to find a suitable station for the ride northward leaves him questioning why anyone would ever leave Baltimore.
The scene renders Boadie—who, across four seasons of The Wire, serves as a proxy for the many youth conscripted into the subterranean economies fueled by the drug trade—as provincial. His naïveté is meant to prompt laughter; his genuine surprise is meant to induce ridicule. And yet, in revisiting the scene nearly nine years after its original airing, Bodie’s incredulousness about the source of the radio static stirs something else, something more profound, in me. I find myself deeply moved by his expression of love for a city, a space, a particular geography that has provided him with years of uninterrupted radio. I am moved because, despite now living nearly 3000 miles away, I realize that, like Boadie, I ain’t never left Baltimore or, rather, Baltimore has never left me.

II.
I passed much of my youth as a kind of flâneur, wandering the blocks between 25th Street and North Avenue on Baltimore’s eastside. Barclay Street and Greenmount Avenue also bounded my youthful strolls in the city. The three-story red brick row house where I was raised with two other rambunctious little boys—my brothers—was the launching ground for many adventures. Often, while my brothers bounced and pounced, I traipsed. Our house, with its narrow staircase and its cement backyard, held a lot of family history within its colorful walls. My mother had also been raised there. Its off-white linoleum floors carried the traces of her childhood too. But, for her, it was not always the most hospitable or even bearable place. In fact, when at fifteen she became pregnant with my oldest brother, it refused to accommodate her at all. This perhaps accounted for her tireless efforts to make that house, taller than it was wide, comfortable—a home—for my siblings and me. My father, in his best moments, proved an ideal co-conspirator. He too had a long history with what we affectionately called “445.”
Raised with five of his siblings in a three-bedroom, two-story house located on the opposite side of the street, my father, much to the chagrin of my maternal grandmother, would knock on 445’s front door every morning to ensure that my mother was ready for school. His parents had determined that all of their children would graduate from high school. My father had determined that my mother needed to do the same. He knocked. My grandmother cursed. My mother graduated. Thereafter, the two of them attempted to create a life together in the Barclay neighborhood that raised them: the same Barclay neighborhood that would later become my playground—the scene of my youth; the backdrop for my meanderings. Their creative process was not without its struggles, however. Indeed, they endured many challenges. Family squabbles, financial difficulties, heroin addiction, cocaine abuse, domestic violence, depression, death, all, threatened to swallow them up at various moments. And yet, their commitment to each other, to their neighborhood, and to the wellbeing of their children never wavered. Together, they endeavored to fill my childhood with bright greens and purples and oranges, not cloudy grays or weary blues. I was allowed to wander and to wonder. I was encouraged to imagine.
Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of my father sweating profusely while sweeping our block from top to bottom. He would place the trash he collected in the very large brown paper bags he lifted from his job as a sanitation worker. Often, with a beer in his left hand and with his work done, he would say to me that if he could spend his days picking up trash in other people’s communities, then he could certainly do the same in his own. As my father sweated and swept, I usually raced up and down the street with my neighborhood friends. There were a lot of children living on my block and, provided that we were not in the midst of some puerile conflict, we functioned like a family. We played block ball, spades, and hide-n-go-seek. We danced to club music in basements. We did back flips on the mattresses dumped in the back of Greenmount Recreation Center. We ate fried chicken wings and French fries and gravy from the Chinese carry-out. We dodged bullets that threatened to cancel our lives too soon. Mostly, though, we laughed. I remember smashing my little body into a car traveling up East 23rd Street once. I was in a hurry to rejoin my friends after being summoned to the house by my mother. In my haste, I failed to look for oncoming traffic and so I hit the moving vehicle. It hurt. I survived. We laughed.
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I bid farewell to Baltimore in 1996, the year I moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. to attend a tony boarding school replete with a nine-hole golf course. My body rejected the scene change. Most days, I was plagued by anxiety so intense I feared I would permanently lose my breath. I longed to return to the community that had become so well practiced in cradling me. I seemed to only make it back there for major holidays. And then, during my sophomore year, an announcement: my mother decided she wanted to move to a different house in a different neighborhood. Much like Lena Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, she had always dreamed of owning a home filled with a lot of sunlight. The grim pall cast by daily gun violence in our community was making it nearly impossible for her to even imagine the sun. So, she moved. My father resisted. She dragged him along anyway. My visits home became less and less frequent after that. This was, in part, due to the demands of college and early adulthood. My intense love affair with the nation’s capital did not help, however. I relished the independence D.C. offered. I liked its radio stations too. After years of artfully negotiating D.C.’s convolutedly mapped streets, Baltimore had come to represent static to me.
I lived in the D.C. Metropolitan area for eight blissful years before moving to the suburbs of Northern California to attend graduate school. The suburbs, I now know, do not suit me. My family remained in Baltimore. They continue to make their lives there. Despite a rather peripatetic existence, I, too, still consider that city home. Wondering and worrying often mark my returns, however. I often wonder if I have gone so far that, like Bodie and Shamrock, I have lost the station. I often worry if I will be able to find 92Q, Baltimore’s home for hip-hop and R&B music, again or, really, if it will be able to find me. I often wonder and worry if I’ll be able to feel my father’s presence. In the summer of 2008—the summer before I ventured west to take up residence on what was formerly farmland—my father, the man who passed many days sweating and sweeping, succumbed to the melancholia that often whelmed him. His broken heart, though shocked several times by a host of doctors, refused mending. My heart broke too. I have been wondering and worrying about feeling ever since.
Compelled by a need to feel, I went looking for the three-story red brick row house that gave life to my imagination on a recent visit home. Despite searching high and low, I could not find it anywhere. It was not in the place that I thought I had left it. Where were its palimpsestic walls? They had been turned into dust to make way for urban renewal—something new. I wept. I wept because the block that raised me, a block that was at one time so vital, was now oddly empty and quiet. It felt haunted. Cities do often traffic in ghosts. I felt haunted. And, then, I felt my father. I saw him: sweating and sweeping. I wept. He reminded me that, despite my distance from it, I had never really left Baltimore and, indeed, Baltimore had never really left me. I should stop worrying, he said: he had never left me either. He then proceeded to paint the empty space where the three-story red brick row house once stood with the bright greens and purples and oranges that were so omnipresent during my youth. And with each stroke, he renewed my love for Charm City.
III.
Often when I tell people that I was raised in Baltimore, they begin to wax poetically about their deep appreciation for The Wire. The show’s searing depiction of urban life, decline, inequality and inequities is unmatched in television history, they say. Indeed, they are impressed that any televisual representation could so facilely capture the complexities of the drug trade, the shipping and manufacturing industries, urban school systems, the print media enterprise, and government bureaucracy all while interrogating the ways issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, age and ability inform and inflect modern life. Usually, there’s some talk of Avon’s guile, Stringer’s savvy, Omar’s fearlessness, Marlo’s ruthlessness, and Bubbles’s heart. Brother Mouzone, the bespectacled and sharply dressed hit man from New York with a gift for elegantly turning a phrase, frequently warrants a mention too. They go on and on…and so on. Inevitably, an elision between the real and the representational happens. The conversation turns to Baltimore’s “danger.” Various scenes from The Wirerecounted as evidence of this. I try to offer a different perspective, my narrative about my time growing up in Charm City, but it’s often to no avail. What people really want is for me to confirm their belief in  The Wire’s veracity—its realism—and Baltimore’s infirmities. When I remark that I think the show fails as ethnography—or that I don’t think ethnography was a desired goal for its creators—they still demand that I do an accounting of the ways its fictional depictions document lived experiences. I stammer. I want to relay the stories of my youth with the nuance that they merit. I stutter. I certainly knew boys like Bodie growing up. We ate popcorn together and trash-talked after school at the Franciscan Youth Center. Their lives, however, didn’t unfold against the seemingly endless shades of gray that frame much of the action in The Wire. They unfolded in Technicolor. Indeed, like mine, they were more precise. I struggle. I want to narrate them with that precision.
Baltimore has proven a compelling site for gritty, urban dramas—from Homicide: Life on the Streets to The Corner to The Wire—time and time again. And while television shows like One on One and its spin-off Cuts have tried to recuperate the city as a site for boundless laughter, it circulates in the popular imaginary as a place devoid of life, of light and, crucially, of love. But there is a lot of love in the city. I love in the city. I love the city. It was not until recently, however, that I found the language to express the fullness of that love. It was a stroll through some of my favorite spots in Baltimore via the delightfully whimsical music video for Gregory Porter’s “Be Good” that allowed me to uncouple the shackles of silence and to be birthed into a new idiom. From the opening image of a little girl’s hands accessorized with cracked fingernail polish, a metallic purple bangle and a few charms to the subway-tiled walls of Penn Station framing large, olive green windows and long, horizontal, honey-colored benches—from the row of houses in Charles Village trimmed in every hue of the rainbow to the postmodern dance down stone sidewalks staged against a backdrop of modern sculpture—Porter’s “Be Good” video, which Pierre Bennu directed and for which Dirk Joseph provided playful and witty props, inspired me to make eloquent my deep and spiritual connection to Baltimore. I watched the video over and over again, enchanted by its vibrant greens and purples and oranges: the colors of my youth. As Porter’s agile baritone voice filled the air and etched the words “be good, be good, be good,” in my mind, I remembered.
I remembered: I ain’t never left Baltimore. I remembered: I love that city.
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Isaiah M. Wooden is a writer, performance-maker, and doctoral candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. He was born and raised in the great city of Baltimore, MD.

James Braxton Peterson Discusses Voter Suppression and Intimidation

In this segment Dr. James Braxton Peterson discusses Voter Intimidation and other disenfranchisement strategies in the 2012 Presidential Election. [image error]

At the Borderlands of Mass Incarceration: A Review of Middle of Nowhere

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text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i><span style="font-family: Times;">At the Borderlands of Mass Incarceration: </span></i></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i><span style="font-family: Times;">A Review of Middle of Nowhere</span></i></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">by David J. Leonard | <b>NewBlackMan (in Exile)</b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">With all the talk within social media circles since Ava DuVernay won best director at the Sundance Film Festival, I cannot remember anticipating a film as much I anticipated <i>Middle of Nowhere</i>.  While a testament to the film’s use of social media, my excitement reflected its storyline and its offering of a humanizing story.  <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/mov... New York Times</i></a> aptly described the film as follows: a “</span><span style="font-family: Times;">poignant portrait of Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi), a nurse doing hard time in emotional limbo while her husband serves a prison sentence.” </span><span style="font-family: Times;"><a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/... Los Angeles Times</i></a></span><i><span style="font-family: Times;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: Times;">summarizes the film’s story as somewhat classic with a story of marital crossroads, personal transformation, and self discovery:<i> “</i>the focus is on the couple's relationship and, gradually, on a different kind of journey that Ruby is making, the classic one of self-actualization, of finding yourself when you feel emotionally in the middle of nowhere, a journey that allows for no shortcuts or easy answers.”  While the film does play upon dominant themes, its embrace of tropes and themes specific to the history of African American film, and its intervention in the hegemony of dehumanizing narratives, especially those surrounding prisons, illustrates a film that is battling and challenging in a myriad of ways.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Times;">Middle of Nowhere</span></i><span style="font-family: Times;"> gives voice to an all-too-familiar circumstance facing million of American families, particularly those of color.  It chronicles the impact of mass incarceration on families, living on the outside, with relatives on the inside. According to a report entitled <a href="http://www.ncsl.org/documents/cyf/chi... of Incarcerated Parents,”</a> in 2007 America was home to 1.7 million children (under 18) whose parent was being held in state or federal prison – that is 2.3 percent of American children will likely be celebrating father’s day away from dad.  Despite hegemonic clamoring about family values, the prison industrial complex continues to ravage American families.  Since 1991, the number of children with a father in prison has increased from 881,500 to 1.5 million in 2007.  Over this same time period, children of incarcerated mothers increased from 63,900 to 147,400.  Roughly half of these children are younger than 9, with 32 percent between the ages of 10 and 14.  This reality is not just about children but about families forced to live at a crossroads between lack – of contact, lack of physical contact – and desire – to be free, to touch, to be with family.  It is a reality that separates families and pushes members farther and farther apart.  On average, children live 100 miles away from their incarcerated parents.  This is the same of partners, and other family members, who are dislocated, punished and literally left out in the cold. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Chronicling the story of Ruby and Derek (Omari Hardwick) <i>Middle of Nowhere</i> shines a spotlight on trickle down incarceration, whereupon arrests and imprisonment travel downstream to the detriment of both families and communities.  From Ruby’s conflict with her mother over her decision to wait for her husband to be released from prison to her choice to forgo medical school for a career in nursing because of their financial needs; from Derek’s inability to pay child support to his daughter’s mom, to the amount of time families must spend on buses just to remain connected to their loved ones; <i>Middle of Nowhere</i>brilliantly reveals the costs and consequences of mass incarceration.  Derek is literally stuck in the middle of nowhere, detached geographically, physically, emotionally – he cannot see his daughter; his wife cannot kiss him.  With no his release precarious at best and his future bleak given the lifetime sentences resulting from felony convictions, Derek is resigned to the middle of nowhere, existing without any paths toward freedom or even existence. It is not just Derek and his fellow incarcerated men and women housed in places like Victorville are confined to the middle of nowhere, hidden behind barbered wire fences, walls, and isolation, but their families as well.   </span></span></div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Ruby is also stuck in the middle of nowhere, at the borderlands of the prison industrial complex.  Waiting for her partner to emerge from the shackles of mass incarceration, yet wanting to move forward with her life, Ruby is stuck; wanting to be touched and loved, but denied the pleasure principle of happiness she shared with her husband, Ruby must confront her precarious position.  She must reconcile her location, which is of no fault of her own.  She struggles to reconcile her loyalty and love for Derek with her yearning to be free; to exist outside a place called nowhere.  </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Falling for another man, she realizes that she cannot remain in the racks between two worlds, torn by guilt and desire, freedom and emotional emptiness.  The film’s subtlety, its ability to capture the nowheredness embodied in the gap she lives within represents the film’s power.  She is stuck in a space between freedom and the unfreedom; the past and the future; the rural and the city; the mobile and immobile; the inability to be touched versus the ability to feel; and love and happiness.  She is in the middle of nowhere.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Rudy struggles to reconcile her desires, navigating the messiness resulting from mass incarceration.  The film makes clear how incarceration and the desires of movement prove incompatible not just for Derek but Ruby and her entire family.  After kissing him goodbye, in violation of the rules, she offers the following soliloquy: “You were with me.  Now it’s scary.  We are somewhere in between in between the forgotten and the foreseen.  In the middle of some place.  That scares me.” Powerful, indeed.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">A common trope within the history of African American cinema has been movement.  Given the history of slavery, Jim Crow, migration, de facto segregation, stop-and-frisk, and racial profiling, movement has been central to the representational field.  <i>Middle of Nowhere</i> most certainly adds to this cinematic landscape.  The constraints on movement, the violence directed at bodies of color defines the era of mass incarceration.  Yet, the film pushes viewers beyond the immobility and isolation resulting from the prison industrial complex.  Reflecting a certain level of irony, Ruby takes a bus to the “middle of nowhere” with dozens of other women and children.  The bus, in this instance, is not the inversion of the Underground Railroad taking her from her unfree life in Los Angeles, to the capital of confinement.  Yet, the bus, which transports her from work to home, is where she finds the necessary tools to move forward, leading her not to another man, but to a space of independence and power.   </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Clearly <i>Middle of Nowhere</i> ties movement to feeling, emotion, and pleasure.  The ability to be moved spiritually, lovingly, physically, and sensually is all constrained by incarceration.  This is evident not just in the denied kisses and connection that results from imprisonment, but the film’s ability to capture the passion and sexual energy between Ruby and Brian (David Oyelowo).  With shots of their embrace and their connected bodies, <i>Middle of Nowhere</i> repels Hollywood’s tendency to define love and attraction through graphic sex scenes. It moves beyond the erased realities of black love within the history of Hollywood.  Challenging Hollywood’s male gaze, which privileges heterosexual desire to consume feminine nakedness on screen, <i>Middle of Nowhere</i> defines the passion and meaning of their relationship through subtle and humanizing cues.  It leaves viewers feeling not just the sexual passion but also the psychological and emotional connection.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Another source of power with <i>Middle of Nowhere</i> rests with DuVernay’s use of silence.  The sight of Ruby sitting in darkness contemplating life’s horrors encapsulates its emotionality, its effort, and its ability to compel viewers to feel pain, anxiety, and fear.  Resulting from brilliant acting performances, gripping cinematography and DuVernay’s genius directorial eye, <i>Middle of Nowhere</i> is 90+ minutes of sheer emotion; it is emblematic of what makes film so powerful.  With its appeal to emotionality, it’s deployment of humanizing narratives, and its point of entry into our era of mass incarceration, <i>Middle of Nowhere </i>leaves viewers with not just a lot to think about but even more to feel. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">***</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Times;">David J. Leonard</span></b><span style="font-family: Times;"> is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book <a href="http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5321-after... Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness</i></a> was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt;"></span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com...' alt='' /></div>

The Stream: Are Memes Overtaking the 2012 US Presidential Election?

AlJazeeraEnglish

Are memes overtaking the 2012 US presidential election and replacing substance with the silly?

Black Feminism Today: Beverly Guy-Sheftall on WUNC's 'The State of Things'

The State of Things w/ Frank Stasio | WUNC 91.5 Black Feminism Today
In 1970, Beverly Guy-Sheftall helped create the first women’s studies department at Spelman College, and it became the first and only department of its kind at a historically Black college. Throughout her career, Guy-Sheftall shed light on and encouraged the work of Black feminism around the globe. Host Frank Stasiotalks about the importance of Black feminism with Beverly Guy-Sheftall, professor of women’s studies and founder and director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College.
Listen HERE