Mark Anthony Neal

Mark Anthony Neal is an American author and academic. He is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. Neal has written and lectured extensively on black popular culture, black masculinity, sexism and homophobia in Black communities, and the history of popular music.

Neal is the founder and managing editor of the blog NewBlackMan. He hosts the weekly webcast Left of Black in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. A frequent commentator for NPR, Neal contributes to several on-line media outlets, including Huff Post Black Voices and SeeingBlack.com.

In this work Neal interprets the vast array of issues and overlapping instances that create black music and culture. This book argues that there are two separate worlds in which this type of blackness exists. The first is black music as it exists alone. Here it confines itself to black people and the "formal and informal institutions of the Black Public Sphere." It sings in juke joints and travels around the Chitlin' Circuit separate from the (white) outside world. The other side of black culture Neal speaks of is the one that outsteps the Black Public Sphere and stretches into the mainstream. In the book he labels this as a "tumultuous marriage between black cultural production and mass consumerism-one in which black agency is largely subsumed by market interests." From this standpoint, Neal fleshes out the issues and ramifications of such a problematic "marriage."

Using the term post-soul to "describe the political, social, and cultural experiences of the African-American community since the end of the civil rights and Black Power movements,", Neal's Soul Babies explores the extent to which post-modernity can be applied to the African-American experience. Characterizing the black traditions of the civil rights era as modern, Neal argues that postmodern or post-soul expressions of blackness both borrow from black modern traditions and render these traditions dated and obsolete in the process of articulating their own identity. Much of this articulation is based on what Neal calls "a sense of familiarity," or the exploitation of familiar tropes of blackness in post-soul expressions that are meant to heighten the sense of fracture and difference of the contemporary narratives built around them.OutKast's song "Rosa Parks" exemplifies the aesthetic as the duo "bastardized" black history and culture, to create and alternative meaning.

...
Wikipedia