Jay-Z's Cosmopolitanism: Notes from Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy

After reading the introduction of Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy, I decided to jump ahead and read the chapter on Jay-Z entitled "'My Passport Says Shawn': Toward a Hip-Hop Cosmopolitanism." Of the figures -- Gene Anthony Ray, Avery Brooks, R. Kelly, Denzel Washington, Barack Obama, Luther Vandross, and characters from The Wire -- that Neal covers in his book, I've probably followed and paid attention to Jay-Z the closest and for the longest amount of time.

I've read several profiles on Jay-Z over the years, and now I'm inclined to add Neal's piece somewhere at the top of the list. Of course, it's more than a profile, engaging academic discourse more than the journalist  pieces would, but the scope of Neal's coverage and his attention to rap lyrics, back-stories, music videos, news items, and contemporary matters related to his subject align his work with something beyond the conventional scholarly essay.

Neal makes the case that Jay-Z is increasingly cosmopolitan, a concept signaling the extent to which figures participate in global experience, or, in the words of a much noted book on the subject by Timothy Brennan, cosmopolitanism refers to being "at home in the world." Given Jay-Z's beginnings in an impoverished corner of the world, his rise as a global icon and world traveler is even more notable. Neal goes farther and notes that in addition to Jay-Z having access to the world, the world also now has access to Brooklyn, to hip hop, to aspects of black culture through Jay-Z. 

By explaining how Jay-Z and his productions disrupt multiple, conventional readings, Neal extends the overall project of his work of "rending 'legible' black male bodies...illegible, while simultaneously rendering so-called illegible male bodies...legible."    

Related:
• A Notebook Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy 

Reading Mark Anthony Neal (a quick look back)

As a graduate student at Penn State over 10 years ago, I was primarily working on topics related to the Black Arts Movement, that is, when I wasn't fulfilling the general English requirements. In the spare time that I had from studying writings related to the 1960s and 1970s, I recall beginning to read 4 writers whom I've now consistently followed since that time.

There was Colson Whitehead and Aaron McGruder on the artistic side and Alondra Nelson and Mark Anthony Neal in scholarly realms. Nelson was moderating the Afrofuturism list; she co-edited and edited books on technology; and her essay "Afrofuturism: Past Future Visions" became one of my favorites. Around that same time period, Neal had written three books -- Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002),
What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998) -- that signaled and solidified his

I viewed Neal as producing a contemporary history of Rhythm and Blues, and he was also providing important cultural commentary on a range of artistic works being produced from the 1980s onward,  or what some refer to as the Post-Civil Rights era. He was also one of the first scholars I encountered who wrote about The Boondocks. Over the years, he has been a consistently engaged commentator, writer (in multiple formats), and moderator concerning black popular culture and African American studies, broadly conceived.         

I ordered Neal's latest work Looking for Leroy last week, and when it finally arrived a few days ago, I was excited about the opportunity of extending my journey reading his work.

Related:
• A Notebook Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy 

A Notebook Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy

This notebook comprises a series of short writings on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013). I'm not providing a full-fledged review. Instead, I'm mostly taking notes on topics from his book that really catch my attention and assist with the work that I'm doing concerning black men writers on the one hand and collegiate black men on the other.

Here's a write-up about the book:

Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative 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.

Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies—those bodies that are all too real for us—as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies—those versions of black masculinity that we can’t believe are real—as legible.

I'm looking forward to checking out his work on these topics.

Entries:
• Reading Mark Anthony Neal (a quick look back)
• Jay-Z's Cosmopolitanism: Notes from Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy 

Related:
• Mark Anthony Neal 

Black Studies Readings for AALCI in June 2013

Next month, at the University of Texas San Antonio, I'll work with fellows in the African American Literatures and Cultures Institute, a program founded and directed by literary scholar and all-around-extraordinaire Joycelyn Moody. I handle the day-to-day seminar duties and reading assignments for the program.

Here are, for the most part, the works we'll read.

• Alexander, Michelle. from The New Jim Crow
• Anderson, Elijah. "Emmett and Trayvon: How racial prejudice in America has changed in the last sixty years"
• Bambara, Toni Cade. From The Black Woman: An Anthology
• Black Panther Party Platforms 1966 & 1972
• Black poetry packet
• Black poetry: A timeline, 1854 - 2013
• Combahee River Collective Statement
• DuBois, W. E. B. “On Being Crazy.”
• -----, Tom Pomplun, and Kyle Baker. “On Being Crazy.”
• Fryer, Roland. “Acting White”
• Gladwell, Malcolm. "Creation Myth"
• -----. "Small Change"
• -----. "The Tweaker"
• Harris, Trudier. “Black Nerds”
• Johnson, Charles. "The Transmission"
• Keywords List
• Knight, Keith. from Are We Feeling Safer Yet?
• Malcolm X “Message to the Grassroots”
• McGruder, Aaron. Aaron. from A Right to Be Hostile
• Middleton, Harris. The Black Book
• Morrison, Toni. “Behind the Making of the Black Book"
• Nelson, Alondra. "Afrofuturism: Past Future Vision"
• Patton, Stacey. "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future"
• Randall, Alice. "Black Women and Fat"
• Rediker, Marcus From The Slave Ship: A Human History
• Reed, Ishmael. "Flight to Canada"
• Rooks, Noliwe. "Do Black Women Really Want to Be Fat?"
• Rose, Tricia. From The Hip Hop Wars
• Sawyer, Keith. From Explaining Creativity
• Schuessler, Jennifer. “Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate”
• Shenk, David. “The 32 Million Word Gap”
• Trethewey, Natasha. “Native Guard.”
• Whitehead, Colson. "A Psychotronic Childhood: Learning from B-movies"
• Wilson, William J. "The Economic Plight of Inner-City Black Males"

*******
• Black Studies Readings for AALCI in June 2012

Black Poetry: A Timeline, 1854 - 2013

What follows is a partial, developing timeline on the histories of black poetry:

1854 - Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's volume of poetry Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects is published. 
1864 - Frances E. W. Harper's poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" is published in Liberator, January 14.
1893 - Paul Laurence Dunbar's first collection of poems Oak and Ivy is published.
1895 - Alice Moore's Violets and other tales is published.
1896 - Dunbar's Majors and Minors and then his Lyrics of Lowly Life are published.
1900 -  "Lift Every Voice and Sing," written by James Weldon Johnson, is performed for Booker T. Washington.
1905 - John Johnson, brother of James Weldon Johnson, sets "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to music.
1913 - Fenton Johnson's first volume A Little Dreaming is published.
1918 - Georgia Douglas Johnson's The Heart of a Woman is published. "The Heart of a Woman."
1919 - The NAACP adopts "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as "The Negro National Anthem."
1919 - Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is published in the July issue of Liberator. 
1921  - Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is published in the June issue of The Crisis magazine.
1922  - The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson, is published.
1923 - Jean Toomer's Cane is published.
1925 - The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, is published.
1925 - Countee Cullen's first volume Color is published.
1926 - Langston Hughes's first volume The Weary Blues is published by Knopf.
1926 - Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" appears in the June issue of The Nation. 
1932 - Sterling A. Brown's Southern Road is published.
1937 - Margaret Walker's "For My People" is published in the number 1937 issue of Poetry magazine.
1942 - Margaret Walker's For My People,  recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, is published.
1945 - Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville is published by Harper & Row. 

25 poems widely anthologized poems

• Amiri Baraka -- “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” “A Poem for Black Hearts,” “Black Art”
• Gwendolyn Brooks -- “We Real Cool,” “a song in the front yard,” “kitchenette building”
• Cullen, Countee -- “Incident,” “Yet do I Marvel”
• Paul Laurence Dunbar -- “We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy”
• Nikki Giovanni -- “Ego-Tripping,” “Nikki-Rosa”
• Frances Harper -- “Bury Me in a Free Land,” “The Slave mother”
• Robert Hayden -- “Frederick Douglass,” “Runagate Runagate,” “Those Winter Sundays”
• Langston Hughes -- “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” “I, Too”
• Helen Johnson -- “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”
• Claude McKay -- “If We Must Die,” “The Lynching”
• Margaret Walker -- “For My People”
• Phillis Wheatley -- “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

Related: 
• Poetry Lists

Poems about slavery or "liberation" poems: Framing Black Poetry

Nat Turner plots revolt

This coming fall semester, what if I teach some of the same poems I have in the past that focus on slavery, but instead of referring to the pieces as poems about slavery, I tell the students that we'll be reading "liberation poems"? What difference will it make in how the students experience the poems and view the poets?

Defining the pieces as liberation poems will not be too tough of a sell since we have so many instances of modern and contemporary poets looking back on moments when black people were enslaved and writing pieces about how those people took steps to either free themselves or at least talk back in rebellious or liberating ways to their captives.  In addition, poets tend to write most often about insubordinate or unruly formerly enslaved people such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner. Saying that poets produced "liberation poems" will of course give a sense of agency to those enslaved as well as the writers.

Referring to the poetry as "liberation poems" or even referring to slave narratives as "liberation narratives" assists in raising the issue of framing and how such practices influence interpretations. Of course, the implications of framing go even further or are already with us when we decide to refer to the works we're reading as "poetry," "black poetry," or "African American poetry." As I was noting early last week, over the decades, editors have gone from framing collections of poems as "black" to "African American," a shift that likely has subtle yet far-ranging implications for how audiences view groups of poems and individual poets.  

In a literature course that highlights concepts such as "Black Power," "the Black Freedom Struggle," "the Black Arts Movement," "black rage," "black resistance," black aesthetics, and other terms associated with the word "black" and concepts related to agency, the move to frame or label certain kinds of poetry as "liberation poems" might serve as an important connecting point for students.

Related: 
• African American Poetry and Kanye West's "New Slaves"  
• 50 Poems about Slavery, Struggles for Freedom
• Poetry, Slavery & Creativity
• 150+ Years of Antislavery Poems by Black Poets 
• Ishmael Reed's Funny Ex-slave Poem
• Evie Shockley and This Douglass Poetry Discourse 

The Big Chop

Immediately after the "big chop"

 By Briana Whiteside 

On May 17, 2013, at 12:15pm, I big chopped. I transitioned for nine long months which were planned and thought out, but spontaneously on that cloudy Saturday afternoon, out of frustration, I sat in the mirror and cut the relaxed hair off. For me, the process of cutting my hair was a symbolic ceremony of letting go of the old me and coming into a new woman. I think of it as a birthing ceremony.

[Related: On Natural Hair]

The transitioning months surprisingly taught me a lot about myself. It was through that stage that I became aware of how much I used my hair—let’s not forget the false lashes, which I’m letting go of too—as a crutch to enhance my physical appearance. While I loved the illusion of healthy, thick, beautiful hair, the truth is that my hair was unhealthy, filled with split ends and unmanageable breakage. It was time for a change because I wanted thick beautiful hair and the option of going to the gym and not worrying about sweating out my relaxer.

A few days after the big chop

The decision to big chop was easy; my hair actually made the decision for me. After long months of transitioning, using lots of moisturizers, and shea butter based products, the relaxed hair began to shed uncontrollably. I tried a protective style, the Senegalese twists for three weeks to try to manipulate my hair, but it had a mind of its own. When I took my hair out of the twists on May 16th, I noticed that the relaxed hair was missing in large sections, and it just looked horrible. The next day when I got off work I cut the stringy pieces of hair off.

If I said that I was completely confident with my big chop, I’d be lying. Though I am not completely confident and I am still learning my hair because it is new to me, I can’t help but embrace it. This was an important decision for me because I needed to let go of the crutches that I thought defined me as a person. Now that those crutches are gone, people can get to know and see the real me.

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Briana Whiteside is a graduate student in English at SIUE and a contributing writer for the Black Studies Program.