Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: This study focuses on the role of the Black father in the nurturing relationships of their Black sons. Also, the study examines the child-rearing experiences of Black men that play significant and permanent roles in the lives of their sons. The purpose of the study is to identify the diversity of parenting experiences and likewise identify, from a Black male perspective, dominant issues associated with these experiences.

Publication Type: Individual Presentation
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement, and Black Studies occurred at the same time, in many of the same geographic areas, involving many of the same artists, activists, and intellectuals. Despite these commonalities, few scholars ever discuss these three movements together. Instead, they usually discuss them independently or, at best, in conjunction with one other movement. This seems almost impossible since they are so undeniably interrelated that none of the movements would even exist if it was not for the influence and motivation of the other two. This is why the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement, and Black Studies will be presented in this presentation as identical sides of an equilateral triangle. Because the angles on this type of triangle are exactly the same, each angle will represent the equal influence each movement had on both society and on each other.

Although Black people have always utilized an African worldview and/or the Black Aesthetic in Black Literature, it is during this time period when the Black Aesthetic is formally articulated, developed, and debated by various artists, intellectuals, and activists. Therefore, in order to understand the Black Aesthetic, one has to understand the movements that birthed it. Even though it may look like the Black Arts Movement directly birthed the Black Aesthetic, it must be remembered that there would be no Black Arts Movement without the Black Power Movement or Black Studies. Therefore, all three movements must be understood in order to truly understand the Black Aesthetic because they all equally gave it life. The Black Power Movement provided the ideology, Black Studies provided the articulation, and the Black Arts Movement provided the application.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: My paper will discuss the theoretical insights and possible cultural impact of a new off-Broadway musical, Passing Strange, an uproarious, irreverent, and insightful meditation on the predicaments of middle class black life and “post-black” culture. Mark Stewart, aka “STEW,” is the front man for the band “The Negro Problem,” and the narrator, bandleader, and co-creator of the new musical. The play is a semi-autobiographical song cycle dramatized by a cast of six young black actors surrounded by a rock band of four white, mostly-middle aged musicians. STEW takes his place on stage as a kind of ring master in the story of how a youth, called Youth, rebels at the spiritual vapidity of his bourgeois Los Angeles Baptist church, smokes pot with the closeted choir director, becomes a punk rocker and sets out to find the ever-elusive “real” in the pot-drenched fleshpots of 1980’s Amsterdam and the speed-fueled and surface-obsessed electronica of Berlin’s anarchist art-squats. Referencing the paths of black artists before him who went to Europe to find themselves and fulfill their desires, Passing Strange meditates on the strangeness of “black folks passing for black folks,” adding a novel twist to the much more common treatments of traditional racial passing. The play’s anti-essentialism is fresh, hilarious, and thought provoking, filled with wry and generous observations about human character and human life. Only time will tell if Passing Strange represents a watershed moment in American culture by humorously loosening the straightjacket of racial essentialism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This presentation examines the relationship between black residents expectations of their black mayors and the mayors' responsiveness in the context of non-majority black cities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper tries to explore the concept of capital accumulation through crafts, self-employment, and micro enterprises. In particular I will delineate emergence of black women entrepreneurs in the urban contexts, these women proved to be the most imaginative and success tasting black capitalists. Whites have had "affirmative action," so long built into the system that they sanctimoniously talk of as free enterprise. This they translate as ability, individual initiative, and skillful business techniques as though they were endowed with them at birth and ordained with clever means of making money. Coming to the modern period, the story revolves around many enterprising such as Mary Kay, Oprah Winfrey, Sylvia to a new wave of immigrants. _x000d_I will then examine the linkages and interconnections between labor, race and democracy with reference to industrialization and postwar development. The paper will try to grapple with the examination of capital accumulation revolving around Fordist to the deindustrialization of the post Fordist era; how industrial capital relegates black capitalism to the periphery, and how that impacted the subsequent division of labor from globalization through neoliberal globalization.