Queer Futures Series: Mark Anthony Neal Talks 'Looking for Leroy' @ Columbia University – October 10th

Queer Futures; Mark Anthony Neal on Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
October 10, 2013 – 4:30pm – 6:00pmColumbia University754 Schermerhorn Ext.
On Thursday, October 10, 2013, Professor Mark Anthony Neal will be speaking for IRWAG's Queer Futures series on his book Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities.  
Looking for Leroy is an analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most “legible” black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities.
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. He is the author of What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation, and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity.  

Reception to follow.  Copies of  Looking forLeroy  will be available for purchase.