Black Ephemera - by Mark Anthony Neal (Paperback)

About the Book

"Black Ephemera explores the crisis and the challenge of the Black Musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global import, yet the cultural DNA of that culture is becoming obscured in the transformation from analog to digital"--

Book Synopsis

PROSE Award- Music and Performing Arts Category Winner

A framework for understanding the deep archive of Black performance in the digital era

In an era of Big Data and algorithms, our easy access to the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness is unprecedented. That iterations of Black visual art, such as Bert Williams's 1916 silent film short "A Natural Born Gambler" or the performances of Josephine Baker from the 1920s, are merely a quick YouTube search away has transformed how scholars teach and research Black performance.

While Black Ephemera celebrates this new access, it also questions the crisis and the challenge of the Black musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global export. Using music and sound as its primary texts, Black Ephemera argues that the cultural DNA of Black America has become obscured in the transformation from analog to digital. Through a cross-reading of the relationship between the digital era and culture produced in the pre-digital era, Neal argues that Black music has itself been reduced to ephemera, at best, and at worst to the background sounds of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black culture. The crisis and challenges of Black archives are not simply questions of knowledge, but of how knowledge moves and manifests itself within Blackness that is obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly digital.

Black Ephemera is a reminder that for every great leap forward there is a necessary return to the archive. Through this work, Neal offers a new framework for thinking about Black culture in the digital world.

Review Quotes

"Mark Anthony Neal's provocative Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive implores scholars to recognize the liberatory, self-aware nature of the archival impulse that has animated decades of Black popular musical culture. Neal's book is also, at its heart, a polemic about the state of recent academic and public-facing scholarship on Black cultural production."-- "ALH Online Review"

"Black music is part of the cultural fabric of society, and Neal offers critical insights into how one can think and learn about it. Valuable for artists, archivists, and historians as well as music students and enthusiasts."--J. T. Pekarek, Indiana University Northwest "CHOICE"

"A majestic study of the idea and practice of Black archives. As Mark Anthony Neal analyzes the sonic, digital, literary, and visual, he unveils the power of Black maroon archives, which preserve the opacities, sonic disruptions, and glimpses of possibility that are not meant to be consumed. Black Studies needs this brilliant analysis of the uncontainable wind of Black culture, the wind that blows through open windows."-- "Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics"

"Covers, citations, and samples spill over the boundaries of form and technology in order to differently reveal the irrepressible, transformative Black archive. Neal displays his archeological talents in demonstration of Black music's ability to return, to sustain, and to answer. Vibrating with relation, Black Ephemera reveals the fact of Black genius and the dense possibility of Black forever through those wise and committed enough to listen"-- "Shana L. Redmond, author of Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson"

"In Black Ephemera, Neal conducts an impressive symphony of memory work. The digital frontier transformed what an archive looks like, how it functions, where it lives, and who gets access to it ... As chapters diverge in theme and latitude, the book assumes the feel of a mixtape. There's one on the pioneering Memphis record label Stax. There's another chapter on the distillation of Black women's trauma through pop culture, and one about how collective Black mourning is produced, shared, and preserved digitally. The whole is an impressive totem, and guide, to the importance of holding on to things forgotten in our haste to the future."-- "Wired"

About the Author

Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor at Duke University. He is the founding director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADC) at Duke, and co-directs the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity. He is the author of Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, New Black Man, 2nd edition, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, and What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. He is co-editor of That's the Joint: The Hip Hop Studies Reader, Second edition. He is the host of the video webcast Left of Black.