Rap Sessions
Rap Sessions
Check out the Rap Sessions Highlight video on YouTube!
From Precious II For Colored Girls: The Black Image in the American Mind
April 26, 6:00pm Reception, 6:30pm Program
Conaway Center, 1104 S. Wabash, 1st Floor.
FREE
For the fifth year, the Institute partners with Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues, bringing a distinguished panel of scholars, journalists and activists for a townhall-style meeting addressing important issues in our communities.
Rap Sessions is led by critically-acclaimed journalist, activist, political analyst, and Institute Fellow, Bakari Kitwana.
This year's panel explores contemporary moments in popular culture and political debates where race, image and identity come center stage. Recent films like Precious, For Colored Girls, and TV shows like The Wire and Treme, as well as current political issues such as immigration and others, are among the hot button issues to be addressed in this context.
PANELISTS:
Elizabeth Méndez Berry (journalist and author, The Obama Generation, Revisited, featured in The Nation)
John Jennings (Professor, Visual Studies, SUNY Buffalo, and co-author of Black Comix: African American Independent Comix and Culture)
Joan Morgan (journalist, cultural critic, and author, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost)
Mark Anthony Neal (Professor, Black Popular Culture, Duke University, and author of New Black Man)
Vijay Prashad (Director, International Studies, Trinity College, and author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of The Third World).
Moderated by: Bakari Kitwana
BIOS
Elizabeth Méndez Berry is a journalist who has written about culture, education and criminal justice for the Washington Post, Vibe, The Nation, Latina and Time. A former editor at Vibe Magazine, her investigative article on domestic violence in the hip-hop industry, “Love Hurts," won ASCAP's Deems Taylor award for music reporting, and was included in Da Capo's Best Music Writing anthology. She has lectured at Duke University, Fordham and Princeton and is has been an adjunct professor of music journalism at NYU. An op-ed she wrote for New York’s El Diario helped spur the country’s first ever city council hearings on street harassment, in October 2010. In his book Decoded, Jay-Z cited an essay of hers as inspiring the song “P.S.A.” on The Black Album.
John Jennings is an Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the State University of New York-Buffalo. His research and teaching focus on the analysis, explication, and disruption of African American stereotypes in popular visual media. He is an accomplished designer, curator, illustrator, cartoonist and author of the award-winning graphic novel The Hole. His work overlaps into various disciplines including American Studies, African-American Studies, Design History, Media Studies, Sociology, Women and Gender Studies, and Literature. Black Comix: African American Independent Comics and Culture, which he co-authored is his latest book.
Joan Morgan is the author of the bestselling When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist. Since she published the book in 1998, Morgan has been a widely sought after lecturer and commentator on hip-hop and feminism. An award-winning journalist, a provocative cultural critic and a self-confessed hip-hop junkie, she began her professional writing career freelancing for The Village Voice before having her work published by Vibe, Madison, Interview, MS, More, Spin, and numerous others. Formerly the Executive Editor of Essence, she’s taught hip-hop journalism at Duke University and has been a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University.
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books, including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), and New BlackMan (2005). He has lectured on hip-hop and gender around the country, including the Ford Foundation, Stanford University and at the groundbreaking 2005 Hip-Hop and Feminism conference at the University of Chicago. Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African-American Studies at Duke University, Neal is a frequent commentator on NPR and contributes to the on-line media outlets SeeingBlack.com and theLoop21.com. Looking for Leroy: Legible Black Masculinities (2011) is his forthcoming book.
Vijay Prashad is Professor and Director of the International Studies Program at Trinity College. He is the author of a dozen books, including most recently The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007). The Village Voice chose two of his previous books as books of the year (Karma of Brown Folk, 2000; Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, 2001). He is a contributing editor for Himal South Asia (Kathamandu, Nepal), Amerasia Journal (Los Angeles), and Left History (Canada). A regular columnist for www.counterpunch.org, Prashad is on the board of the Center for Third World Organizing, United for a Fair Economy, and the National Priorities Project.
Bakari Kitwana (Moderator and CEO of Rap Sessions) is a Spring 2009 Institute Fellow, and a journalist, activist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have appeared on CNN, Fox News (O’Reilly Factor), C-Span, PBS (The Tavis Smiley Show), and heard on NPR. He is CEO of Rap Sessions and Senior Media Fellow at the Harvard Law based Think Tank, The Jamestown Project. His 2002 book The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture has been adopted as a coursebook in classrooms at over 100 colleges and universities. The former Executive Editor of the Source, he has taught in the political science department at the University of Chicago, and is co-founder of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention. Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2011) is his most recent book.
This program is co-presented by the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, and Rap Sessions. It is sponsored in part by the Leadership Donors of the Institute; Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Office of Multicultural Affairs and Critical Encounters: Image & Implication.
For information, or to request ASL services (48 hrs notice): or 312-369-8829.
Related Program
Remixing the Art of Social Change: Chicago's Inaugural Hip-Hop Teach-In
May 5th - 8th
For More information: www.wblinc.org
Bakari Kitwana interviews Mark Anthony Neal
Institute Fellow, and moderator of the upcoming Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues, Bakari Kitwana interviews Mark Anthony Neal, Rap Sessions panelist about Nicki Minaj and images of black women in media, they discuss the tame media response to the provocative image of Black women, as well as the predictable knee-jerk response regarding stereotypes. Listen here
