After Work Drinks: Black Culture Edition
D'Angelo inspired readings with Mark Anthony Neal, Clyde Woods and more during Office Hours this week
Thank you to those who joined the live (special love to Schuyler Esprit, Randelle Lenoir, and Kai Minosh Pyle).
If you missed the conversation, a short audio clip of me reading from Mark Anthony Neal in the midst of stanning for Black popular culture as a global Black love language of healing, politics and critique is below (for paid subscribers a longer video clip of me discussing the late Clyde Woods, beloved mentor and Black studies genius, is below the fold—thank you for supporting the work).
Topics Discussed
Rest in peace beautiful soul….this one hurts.
Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017).
Bettina Judd, Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022).
Lindsey Stewart, The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic (2025).
Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (Routledge, 2013).
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Meredith D. Clark, We Tried to Tell Y’All: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Catherine Knight Steele, Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press, 2021).
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (Amistad Books, 2008).
Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class Simon and Schuster, 1996).
If I missed any topics, let me know.
Next Wednesday:
I’ll be back on at 12:00 EST. Leave a comment or a chat with topics you want to hear discussed.
And thank you for coming to the kitchen table and into this experiment with me. I hope it feeds you.
Lives and post-live videos are still only for paid subscribers, something like a limited preview, just for y’all, of something wild and raw that I am still trying out. I am grateful for your support, patience, and generosity in these times of cruelty and hyper critique. Let’s keep having fun with this together.
But I will keep posting audio clips and topics for all. xo. jmj