Looking for Leroy
Illegible Black Masculinities
Format:Hardback
Publisher:New York University Press
Published:22nd Apr '13
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£21.99(9780814758366)
Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most “legible” black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities.
Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies—those bodies that are all too real for us—as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies—those versions of black masculinity that we can’t believe are real—as legible. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men. Looking for Leroy features close readings of contemporary black masculinity and popular culture, highlighting both the complexity and accessibility of black men and boys through visual and sonic cues within American culture, media, and public policy. By rendering legible the illegible, Neal maps the range of identifications and anxieties that have marked the performance and reception of post-Civil Rights era African American masculinity.
Leroymines the contradiction between epistemologies and realness of self-making in relation to black men in popular culture. Neal has crafted an accessible text that creatively renders our understanding of black men as alien, offering complex connections between spatiality, cosmopolitanism, sound, and desire.-,r -- Jared Richardson * The Black Scholar *
Looking for Leroyis a fascinating study of Black masculinity. -- Abdul Ali * The Crisis Magazine *
Mark Anthony Neal is one of our most consistently interesting and inspiring critics of contemporary black popular culture and music, to whichLooking for Leroyis brilliant testament. It showcases Neals masterful ability to take iconic figures of black masculinity, from Avery Brookss neo-cool Hawk to Shawn Carters neo-queer Jay-Z, and show them to us in an entirely new light. This is an incredibly powerful little book, and readers will never look at R. Kelly or Luther Vandrossthe same way again.- -- John L. Jackson, Jr.,author of Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness
Mark Anthony Neal takes us on a fantastic journey searching for the meaning of black masculinity in the USA. As we join him inLooking for Leroy, we find queer and feminist answers to questions about legibility and illegibility, visibility and invisibility, violation and vulnerability. No one writes with more passion, power and speculative brilliance about black masculinity than Neal and no one but Neal would manage to produce a theory of black masculinity capable of explaining the smoothness of Luther Vandross, the cosmopolitan genius of Jay-Z, the enigma of Leroy fromFame, and the sheer brute force of Snoop fromThe Wire. Genius.- -- Jack Halberstam,author of Female Masculinity (1998) and Gaga Feminism (2012)
Whiteness and White privilege, Jay Z's entrance into the Pace Gallery recalls a scene nearly 30 years earlier, when three young Black men, clad in black leather jackets and black brims walked into another art space and were told, 'You guys don't belong here.' Just as Run DMC was breaking down commercial barriersMTV then as resistant to Black bodies as any high-end art galleryJean-Michael Basquiat was breaking down barriers in the art world. Although Picasso is the signifier that brings every one togetherand to our worst fears about Picasso and appropriating, dare I say colonizing, spaceit is Basquiat who clearly haunts this space. -- Mark Anthony Neal * Art Papers *
This is an important new book for gay and straight alike. * Windy City Times *
Looking for Leroychallenges readers to view black masculinity outside the scope in which it is imagined...Neal achieves his goal of radically rescripting accepted notions of a heteronormative black masculinity. * American Studies *
Looking for Leroyis very much an act of self-exploration; the men examined offer different variations of the type of black man Neal sees himself to be.This introspection adds to rather than detracts from an intriguing and thought-provoking addition to the growing research on black masculinity in the post-segregationist eraone that blurs the line and closes the gap between heteronormative scholarship and queer studies. * Cinema Journal *
Looking for Leroycontinues Mark Anthony Neals work of offering a nuanced, critical understanding of African American culture, in particular the ways African American culture constructs masculinity * Journal of American Studies of Turkey *
Neal's critique of black masculinity in the U.S. confronts the enormous pressure placed on black males by society's assumptions. Through a pop-culture lens, he shows how the perpetuation of racial stereotypes continues to neutralize the potential of black men and boys. * Ms. Magazine *
ISBN: 9780814758359
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages