Papers by Mark Anthony Neal
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2003
Niggas with knowledge is more dangerous than niggas with guns they make the guns easy to get and ... more Niggas with knowledge is more dangerous than niggas with guns they make the guns easy to get and try to keep niggas dumb (Talib Kweli ''The Proud'') On April 17, 2003, a group of scholars, journalists, and fans gathered at Harvard University to talk about hip-hop. The occasion was the symposium ''All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Modern Folk Hero.'' Jointly sponsored by the Hiphop Archive, located within the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, and the Program for Folklore and Mythology at Harvard, the event examined Tupac's legacy as an intellectual, a political figure, and an urban folk hero. The Hiphop Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, currently under the leadership of Harvard anthropologist Marcyliena Morgan, was launched in January of 2002 and is one of the first scholarly archives devoted solely to hip-hop music and culture. The symposium offered yet more evidence of the current engagement between American academics and the burgeoning culture that had its birth in urban centers throughout the United States 30 years ago. Scholars such as Michael Eric Dyson, who was the keynote speaker for the event, Tricia Rose, and Todd Boyd have made careers out of being hip-hop pundits. Dozens of courses focused on hip-hop culture are taught at the nation's colleges and universities every semester. The Hiphop Archive has documented the majority of these courses on their Web site. But ''Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Modern Hero'' struck a particularly strange chord because of its location at the
African American Review, 2007
liquid blackness, 2021
The essay explores how the invisibility and trauma of Black women are negotiated in Black sonic c... more The essay explores how the invisibility and trauma of Black women are negotiated in Black sonic culture, utilizing Ricardo Cortez Cruz's experimental novel Five Days of Bleeding (1995), in which the primary female character, Zu-Zu, speaks (and sings) primarily using obscure song lyrics and titles, largely drawn from an archive of Black women's performance.
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2003
The article highlights the symposium titled "All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Mo... more The article highlights the symposium titled "All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Modern Folk Here," which was held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 17, 2003. The symposium examined Tupac's legacy as an intellectual, a political figure, and an urban folk hero. It cited books read by Tupac including "Catcher in the Rye," by J.D. Salinger, "At the Bottom of the River," by Jamaica Kincaid, and "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville. This suggest that he was extraordinarily well read and well-rounded intellectually.
Socialism and Democracy , 2004
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 2014
This response paper considers the gender realities of the subjects in Isoke's Women, Hip Hop, and... more This response paper considers the gender realities of the subjects in Isoke's Women, Hip Hop, and Cultural Resistance in Dubai in relation to U.S. based hip hop artists who have recently begun to situate their work and image in larger international contexts. Neal argues that the while recent and publicized acts have begun to mark US hip hop artists as “citizens of the world,” in fact hip hop artist have always been cosmopolitian.
Palimpsest (Volume 2, Issue 2), 2013
The Western Journal of Black Studies (Vol. 22, Issue 4), 1998
The black popular music during the 1960s conveyed a sense of urgency as African-Americans' strugg... more The black popular music during the 1960s conveyed a sense of urgency as African-Americans' struggle for empowerment and equal rights intensified and migrated to the north. Marvin Gay's music highlighed the pressing issues facing the black population and summarized the hope and despair of an entire generation of freedom fighters. Full Text: Abstract As the organized struggles for African-American empowerment intensified and migrated north, the black popular music tradition began to convey the urgency of its historical moment.
Cultural Anthropology (Volume 28, Issue 3), 2013
The radical dissemination of the images of "blackness" throughout the globe has created a moment ... more The radical dissemination of the images of "blackness" throughout the globe has created a moment of crisis in some sectors of the black community. The basic tropes of "blackness"-black culture, black identity, black institutions-have been distorted, remixed, and undermined by the logic of the current global economy. At stake is the preservation of a "modern" blackness-that blackness which was posited and circulated as a buffer against white supremacy, political disenfranchisement, slavery, Jim Crow segregation and the collusion of racist imaginations and commercial culture in the early 20th century. In many sectors "blackness" is literally under siege. It is in this context that many of the contemporary tropes of "blackness" that circulate in commercial popular culture (niggas, hip-hop, the underclass, queers, etc.), particularly in popular music, film, and music video, are perceived as threats to blackness-as tropes of an erosive and inauthentic blackness that is as threatening to the Black Public proper as "death" itself. This sense of threat, has been, perhaps, most powerfully expressed in the debates over the use of the word "nigger" in popular culture. It is my contention that there is a distinct difference in the word "nigger" and the word "nigga" which circulates more widely in the context of American youth culture. The differences in the words and their uses highlight the largely generational divide in "blackness," a divide that hip-hop culture critically negotiates by articulating notions of "blackness" and an attendant black masculinity more in sync with the flow of global capital.
Popular Music & Society (Volume 21, Issue 3), 1997
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2015
Review of It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television, by Gayle Wald (Duke University ... more Review of It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television, by Gayle Wald (Duke University Press)
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (Volume 22), 2016
This essay explores the meaning potentials of the exportation of American commercial rap music (e... more This essay explores the meaning potentials of the exportation of American commercial rap music (exemplified via rap stars Kanye West and Jay Z) through the metaphorical lens of the discourse of exile. This perspective opens a view to Black aspirations as a vagabond, deviant, unsettled, search for the good life. Using, for example, the uptake of West and Jay Z's song, ‘Niggas in Paris,’ in a socialist party candidate's platform ad to attract aspiring immigrant communities in France, both privileged and disadvantaged diasporic Africans, or Afropolitans, as argued herein, are of the world; but do not, necessarily, experience first-class citizenship, despite the state of their mobility. Additional examinations of digital, sonic, lyrical and material art are undertaken by the author to reveal the search for deeper meaning and freedom among Afrodiasporic populations within the United States and globally.
Transforming Anthropology (14:1), 2006
In an essay, the author describes the costs of being poor and black that were revealed by the dev... more In an essay, the author describes the costs of being poor and black that were revealed by the devastation of New Orleans, Louisiana, by Hurricane Katrina. Many of those who have died and will still die will have done so simply because they were poor and/or because they were Black, Neal argues. For many poor people, there is an understanding that poverty has added costs--not only are you poor, but you are forced to live in environments that often lack vital resources, or at least the kinds of resources that those with significantly healthier economic profiles have come to take for granted, including houses less likely to be flooded.
Popular Music (Volume 24, Issue 3), 2005
There has been no greater tension within the tradition of black pop music than that associated wi... more There has been no greater tension within the tradition of black pop music than that associated with the performance of 'black' styles by white musicians and performers. In the past, it has been all too easy to identify many of these white artists under the rubric of 'blue-eyed soul'-a term that is as much a social construction of raced identities as it is a marketing ploy. Using Paul C. Taylor's essay 'Funky white boys and honorary soul sisters' as a reference, I'd like to argue that there are artists who transcend, to varying degrees, the kinds of 'affective obstacles' that make it difficult for some audiences to derive pleasures from so-called 'white' performances of black musical idioms.
Black Scholar (Volume 47, Issue 30), 2017
An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on the topic of ... more An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on the topic of possibilities and difficulties faced by digital work within existing academic publishing models and of restraining Black Code Studies to text form.
Criticism(Vol. 52, Issue 3-4), 2010
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Papers by Mark Anthony Neal