MARK ANTHONY NEAL
Tuesday, March 2
2:00 – 3:15 PM (EST)
The Beat of Black Resistance talk with Mark Anthony Neal
“There is a curious and provocative moment in the film Queen and Slim, where the main characters, on the run after shooting a police officer in self-defense, risk their freedom to spend a few moments on the dance floor at a Blues club. The scene is striking in its intimacy, in a film that is fundamentally grounded in a visual politics of movement and disruption. The film is one bookend to a period marked by the emergence of Covid-19, the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd (among so many others), and a siege on Democracy, in which the milestone of 500,000 deaths due to COVID-19 serves as the other bookend. That scene in Queen & Slim now serves as a harbinger for the ways in which Black music and the intimacy of community that it invokes would serve as a metaphor of quarantine in and of itself. This talk examines what I refer to as ‘Quarantine Soul,’ music produced of a group artists – Dinner Party, Tobe Nwigwe, Moses Sumney, Lianne La Havas, Jay Electronica, Ego Ella May, and Samora Pinderhughes among others – that both anticipates and responds to the crisis of isolation, precarity and vulnerability imposed by White Supremacy in the midst of a Global Pandemic.”
Presented by the Center for Black Visual Culture (CBVC)/Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA); Co-sponsored by Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 370J Project and Africana Studies/Department of Social and Cultural Analysis-NYU