Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic

by Mark Anthony Neal

Overview

In Soul Babies, Mark Anthony Neal explains the complexities and contradictions of black life and culture after the end of the Civil Rights era. He traces the emergence of what he calls a "post-soul aesthetic," a transformation of values that marked a profound change in African American thought and experience. Lively and provocative, Soul Babies offers a valuable new way of thinking about black popular culture and the legacy of the sixties.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135290559
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African-American Studies at Duke University. Neal is the author of Whatthe Music Said, Soul Babies, and Songs in the Key ofBlack Life, all published by Routledge.

Table of Contents

Preface You Remind Me of Something: Towards a Post-Soul Aesthetic Chapter One Sweetback's Revenge: Gangsters, Blaxploitation, and Black Middle Class Identity Chapter Two Baby Mama (Drama) and Baby Daddy (Trauma): Post-Soul Gender Politics Chapter Three The Post-Soul Intelligentsia: Mass Media, Popular Culture and Social Praxis Chapter Four Native Tongues: Voices of the Post-Soul Intelligentsia Chapter Five A Soul Baby in Real Time: Generation Hip-hop on Campus Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

From Sanford and Son to Snoop Doggy Dog, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic looks at the last three decades of black images and representations. State University of New York, Albany, professor of English and Africana Studies Mark Anthony Neal focuses on the way that music, film and television were altered on the one hand by integration and on the other hand by the pessimism and social unrest among black Americans in the '70s and '80s. Neal also discusses the work of young black intellectuals of the "post-soul" generation, the first to be part of an integrated yet increasingly isolated academy. ( Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Neal (African American studies & English, SUNY, Albany; What the Music Said: Black Popular Music & Black Popular Culture) has written a provocative study of African American popular culture since the Black Power and Civil Rights era. Using his wide knowledge of popular culture and political events, he argues that the media's integration of blacks in the 1960s, with television shows like Julia and I Spy, was at best a partial bow. Introducing a new concept of "Post-Soul Aesthetic" to black cultural criticism, Neal thoughtfully asserts that contemporary black culture, especially rap and hip-hop music, provides a much more satisfying and varied, if often ambiguous and problematic, mirror of black values and models. His sources range from music to comic strips like Boondocks to comedians like Eddie Murphy. This is a very important work, marred only by a tendency to use too much postmodernist jargon, which will discourage general readers. Recommended for large academic libraries. A.O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"...validates Neal's intellectual and practical contribution to the fields of popular culture and Black cultural studies." — Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, American Studies
"[Neal] makes a significant theoretical contribution to the existing intellectual work on Black popular culture." — Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, American Studies
"...carves out a well-defined intellectual and theoretical space for the post-soul generation—the soul babies of history." — Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, American Studies
"Mark Anthony Neal is that rare and gifted writer and thinker who can move easily between street corners and academia, hip-hop heads and high-brow intellectuals, as well as pop cultural markers as different as "Good Times" and "Batman." Indeed, Soul Babies recalls the best iconoclastic work of W.E.B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, and bell hooks. Yes, Neal is that kind of intellectual giant-in-the-making: brutally honest with razor-sharp insights, and so ahead of his time that he is one of the voices we will look to many years from now for interpretations of these first days of the 21st century." — Kevin Powell, editor of Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature
"Writing in a prose that is as brilliant as it is accessible, Mark Anthony Neal not only makes a case for engaging black popular culture critically as a complex and crucial terrain of agency, engagement, and struggle, but also makes clear that the divergent realm of black cultural politics represents a site in which the performative and the political, cultural and educational, point to new possibilities for democratic social transformation. This is a breakthrough book and should be read by everyone concerned with black popular culture as a site of struggle, possibility, and transformation." — Henry A. Giroux, author of Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies
"Despite (or perhaps because of) its rather incongruous postmodernist intellectual underpinnings, this is a subtle and refreshing look at the aesthetic sensibilities of "Generation Hip-Hop," those children of the 1960s ("Soul Babies") who came of age in the post-Civil Rights era. Included are sections about "blaxploitation" movies, TV sitcoms (i.e., The PJs and Good Times ), gender politics, the black media, and the campus scene (from the perspectives of both students and the black intelligentsia)." — J. B. Lane, Indiana University in CHOICE, June 2002
"this is a subtle and refreshing look at the aesthetic sensibilities of "Generation Hip-Hop" . . ." — Choice

From the Publisher