Left of Black #33

w/ Lisa B. Thompson

May 9, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by scholar and playwright Lisa B. Thompson.  Neal and Thompson discuss the images of Black middle class women, the Tony Award nominated musical The Scottsboro Boys and the role of Black men in the production of Black women’s art.

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–>Lisa B. Thompson is a playwright and associate professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany where she teaches courses in African American literature, drama, theory, and cultural studies. Her book, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (2009), explores black middle class female sexuality through works by African American women authors. Her critically acclaimed off-Broadway play, Single Black Female, which was nominated for a 2005 LA Weekly Theatre Award for best comedy, has been produced throughout the US; in 2010 the play received its international debut in Toronto. Thompson is currently the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.