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In Defense of Terrible Television
May 28, 2020 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
The Ethics of Now with Adriane Lentz-Smith continues from home with a series of brief, thoughtful and timely conversations about the ethical dilemmas of this historic moment. This week, join Professor Lentz-Smith and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies Mark Anthony Neal for the conversation “In Defense of Terrible Television.” After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.
Thursday, May 28, 2020, 7pm
Mark Anthony Neal is Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies and the founding director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE) at Duke University where he offers courses on Black Masculinity, Popular Culture, and Digital Humanities, including signature courses on Michael Jackson & the Black Performance Tradition, and The History of Hip-Hop, which he co-teaches with Grammy Award Winning producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit).
He also co-directs the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity (DCORE).
He is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013). The 10th Anniversary edition of Neal’s New Black Man was published in February of 2015 by Routledge. Neal is co-editor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge), now in its second edition. Additionally Neal host of the video webcast Left of Black, which is produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke. You can follow him on Twitter at @NewBlackMan.
Adriane Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Duke University. Her interests lie in African American history, twentieth-century United States history, and the history of the U.S. and the world. Her 2009 book Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I looks at the black freedom struggle in the World War I years, with a particular focus on manhood, citizenship, and global encounters. More recently, she has been at work on a book tentatively entitled Afterlives: Sagon Penn, State Violence, and the Twilight of Civil Rights. The book looks at dramatic moments of violent encounters between African Americans and the police to explore the role of violence in sustaining and opposing white supremacy in the two decades following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She is also interested in how African Americans engaged the world in the age of Cold War civil rights, and how their participation in the project of U.S. state and empire set the horizons of their freedom struggles.
The Ethics of Now is a series of conversations between Duke historian Adriane Lentz Smith and a range of artists, advocates, and authors that explore the ethical challenges facing the Durham and Duke communities.”