Decontructing Tyrone

Join the Public Square at the IHC; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago; and the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago for…

Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation

Saturday
February 24, 2006
12:00-2:00 P.M.
West Englewood Branch of Chicago Public Library
1745 West 63rd Street
Free. Open to the public.
Reservations required. Space is limited.
Register on-line or call 312.422.5580.

Journalists Natalie Hopkinson and Natalie Moore will explore various expressions of Black male masculinity in the hip-hop generation through the figure of “Tyrone” from Erykah Badu’s 1997 hit song. For the authors, “Tyrone” represents Black men as they are seen in the media, through stereotypes, as well as from the perspective of Black women. In eleven chapters, Moore and Hopkinson discuss subjects like Etan Thomas, an NBA basketball player and political poet; Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, known as the “Hip-Hop Mayor;” the complicated relationship between women and hip-hop culture; and gay Black men on the so-called “down low.”

Through rich insights into a diverse range of perspectives and experiences, Moore and Hopkinson complicate dominant images of Black men as violent and hypersexualized and open up the complex topic of Black male masculinity for a lively public discussion.

Copies of Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation will be available for purchase at the event or you may purchase the book on-line through BarnesandNoble.com.

More About the Authors:

Natalie Y. Moore is a freelance journalist who has worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Detroit News, and the Associated Press. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Reporter, Bitch Magazine, Black Enterprise, and In These Times. She is a graduate of Howard University, has a Master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and is an adjunct instructor of media studies at Columbia College.

A graduate of Howard University, Natalie Hopkinson is a staff writer at the Washington Post and a Scripps Howard doctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, where she is also a visiting professor of journalism.

This event is part of the Public Square at the IHC’s “Know More: Conversations that Matter” series. “Know More”is designed to bridge the gap between the arts and social issues that are of current concern to Chicago’s Englewood community. Programming has included visits from hip hop artists, activists, and scholars Jeff Chang, David Stovall, and Lavie Raven; Africana Studies scholar William Santiago Valles; performer Will Power; and poet Elizabeth Alexander.

Co-sponsors for this event include: Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago and the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago.

If you need a sign interpreter or require other arrangements to fully participate, please call 312.422.5580. For parking locations near the facility, please visit Chicago Parking Map.com.

the nature of blogging

I have found myself intrigued with the question of blogging! Last night, over some desert in Andersonville, a friend of mine questioned me on “why I blog?” My friend questioned me saying, “How can you say these things to the world? I understood this question in this way:  How can I publish something so raw and perhaps questionable–like my Mitt Romney post?!  We even entered a discussion concerning how can relationships or community exist in a virtual “world…?” I think this is an interesting question, especially considering the rise in websites and blogs. So, why? Why are there blogs? Why the strengthening of virtual communities, and how do blogs foster or cultivate a sense of voice? I will answer the question from both personal experience and a critical perspective.

I have historically thought that text is a way of creating and using voice [whether written on conventional paper and now written virtually]. While blogging tends to be constrictive in the sense that a blog resides in the “virtual world,” blogs seem to embody a sort of power at encouraging conversation–certainly virtual conversation, but also real live conversation.  I have the distinct sense that when these “voices” gather [whether live or virtual], we socialize knowledge.  My friend questioned me as to whether I mean democratizing knowledge or socializing knowledge?  I thought this an important and interesting query, and I responded by suggesting that I felt that blogging is a way of socializing knowledge.  Perhaps there is a democratization of knowledge?

When I consider my own efforts at finding my own voice and furthermore constructing critical evaluations and responses, over against simply stream of consciousness writing, blogging becomes a real live and very public tool.  Situating myself in the struggle for women finding and using their voices along side the communities of people of color and queers, blogging becomes perhaps the tool that enables both the finding of one’s voice and using one’s voice in a very, very public way.  This has been my experirence in terms of voice and actively using my voice publicly.

Though answering out of the order that I listed it above, how does blogging strengthen the idea of community and why the active effort to stregthen virtual communities?  With the varrying blogging “rings” and other blog engines, the pursuit, act, and discipline of blogging creates webs of conversation [again, both live and virtual].  And so, each day that I add a link to my site, I participate in both the creation and strengthening of virtual communities–the nexus of life.

Does this capture the nature of blogging for you who is reading this?