Decoding the Images of Black Women; and The Musical Life & Death of a Chocolate City on the October 8^th Left of Black

The election of Barack Obama helped inspire renewed interests in the lives and images of Black women, in no small part, due to the emergence of the First Lady, Michele Obama as an global icon of Black womanhood. But the election of President Obama also inspired an exploration of Black Washington, D.C., whether in references to Ben’s Chili Bowl, the Vanilla-lization of a once “Chocolate City” or the infectious beat, that has come to be known as the city’s soundtrack.

On the October 8^th episode of Left of Black, host and Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by Professor Lakesia D. Johnson, author of Iconic: Decoding Images of the Revolutionary Black Woman (Baylor University Press) and longtime Washington, D.C. based journalist, Dr. Natalie Hopkinson, author of Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City (Duke University Pres, 2012).

Johnson is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies and English at Grinnell College in Iowa and Hopkinson is contributing editor of The Root.com, teaches Journalism at Georgetown University, Director of the Future Arts and Society Project at the Interactivity Foundation in Washington, D.C., and Co-author with Natalie Y. Moore of Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation (Cleis Press, 2006)

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Left of Black airs at 1:30 p.m. (EST) on Mondays on the Ustream channel: http://tinyurl.com/LeftofBlack

Viewers are invited to participate in a Twitter conversation with Neal and featured guests while the show airs using hash tags #LeftofBlack or #dukelive.

Left of Black is recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

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