AMSA XVIII – Professor Mark Anthony Neal to Address Conference

Professor Mark Anthony Neal

Scholar and Teacher Mark Anthony Neal will deliver the luncheon address at the 2010 AMSA conference on Saturday, March 27th. His address is entitled “Coming Apart at the Seams: Black Masculinity and the Performance of Obama-Era Respectability.”

Professor Neal is the author of four books: What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005).

Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including SeeingBlack.com, The Root.com and theGrio.com.

Regarding his research interests, Professor Neal comments:  “I am engaged in interdisciplinary scholarly work in the fields of African-American, Cultural, and Gender Studies that draws upon modes of inquiry informed by the fields of literary theory, urban sociology, social history, postmodern philosophy, Queer theory and most notably popular culture. My broad project is to interrogate popular culture — music, television, film, and literature — produced within the context of Afro-diasporic expressive cultures. It is my belief that popular culture represents an arena of knowledge that has a profound impact on societal and cultural norms in the United States and globally, but one that has been largely underscrutinized as a “serious” site of scholarly and theoretical study. It is also my belief that commercial popular culture represents a distinct site of ideological production, thus my own work aims to engage the ideological undercurrents within commercial popular culture particularly within the context of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity.”

You may want to visit Professor Neal’s weblog NewBlackMan.