Synopses & Reviews
Here, collected for the first time, are interviews and essays representing Michael Eric Dyson's most important thinking on race and identity. Exploring such topics as "whiteness" as seen through a black man's eye, modernism and postmodernism in black culture, and the emancipating role of black music from the plantation to the ghetto, Open Mike is a perfect introduction to Dyson's work and a must-have for students and scholars in African American Studies and Cultural Studies.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 385-415) and index.
Synopsis
Essays and interviews from one of the most insightful and thought-provoking black intellectuals to emerge since the heyday of the civil rights movement.
About the Author
Michael Eric Dyson, named by Ebony as one of the hundred most influential black Americans, is the author of sixteen books, including Holler if You Hear Me, Is Bill Cosby Right? and I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. He is currently University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Table of Contents
Philosophy, theory and race. Not from some racial Zeus's head : my intellectual development. Textual acts and semiotic gestures : race, writing and technotopia. Baptizing theory, representing truth : religious discourse, poststructuralist theory and multiculturalism. More than academic : seamless theory, racial disruptions and public intellectuals in the ebony tower. Trump cards : racial paradigms, postcolonial theory and feminist thought. Giving whiteness a black eye : excavating white identities, ideologies and institutions. "Is it something I said?" : dissident speech, plantation Negro syndrome, and the politics of self-respect -- Cultural studies. Is postmodernism just modernism in drag? : Black identities in flux. The great next : jazz origins and the anatomy of improvisation. Black fists and sole brothers : the 1968 Olympics. Adjusting the color : television, race and culture. "I love Black people, but I hate niggas" : intellectuals, Black comedy and the politics of self-criticism -- Religious beliefs, theological arguments. "Searching for Black Jesus" : the Nietzschean quest of a metaphysical thug. "Speech is my hammer" : Black preaching, social justice and rap rhetoric. Ecstasy, excess and eschatology : Black religion in crisis. The anatomy of radical Christianity : tracing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dangerous legacy. Prophetic Black Islamic ethics : Malcolm X, spiritual warfare and angry Black love. Homotextualities : the Bible, sexual ethics and the theology of homoeroticism.