Private Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway

Private Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.
 

Barnard Center for Research on Women 

The second event in BCRW’s newly inaugurated Salon Series features Karla FC Holloway, Tina Campt, Farah Griffin, Saidiya Hartman, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Alondra Nelson. These scholars, whose expertise lies at the cross-section of law, race, gender, and bioethics, respond to Karla FC Holloway’s book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Duke University Press, 2011), an important and groundbreaking work that examines instances where medical issues and information that would usually be seen as intimate, private matters are forced into the public sphere, calling for a new cultural bioethics that attends to the complex histories of race, gender, and class in the US. This salon took place on March 21, 2012 at Barnard College.

The Best of 'Left of Black" 2011

Left of Black, the weekly video webcast that I host in conjunction with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, is now in it’s second season.  The show is on holiday hiatus until January 9^th, when we will broadcast a new episode featuring Princeton University Professor Eddie Glaude and UCLA Sociologist Mingon Moore. Until then, here’s a collection of some of our best episodes from 2011.

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Left of Black S1:E19

w/ Hank Willis Thomas

January 31, 2011

In this special episode of Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas. Thomas’ works include Winter in America (2008), Branded(2008), ReBranded (2008), Black is Beautiful (2009), Fair Warning (2010) and UnBranded (2010) and he is the author of Pitch Blackness (2008). Neal and Thomas engage in a wide ranging conversation about Black masculinity, urban violence, the export of Black popular culture and Michael Jackson as well as a walk-thru of Thomas’ Hope Exhibition at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Left of Black S1:E23

w/Shana Tucker
February 21, 2011
 

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal welcomes independent artist and cellist Shana Tuckerinto the Left of Black studio at the John Hope Franklin Center.  Tucker and Neal discuss her new fan-financed CD SHiNE and a style of music that Tucker calls “Chamber Soul.”

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Left of Black Episode S1:E24

w/Pierre & Jamyla Bennu & Rebecca Walker

March 7, 2011

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by filmmaker and conceptual artist Pierre Bennu and his partner and natural beauty care producer Jamyla Bennu.  Later writer Rebecca Walker joins Neal, also via Skype, from her home in Hawaii.

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Left of Black S1:E28
w/ Rosa Clemente and 9th Wonder
March 21, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Rosa Clemente (via Skype), the 2008 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate in a conversation about the historic Green Party ticket in 2008, contemporary Black activism and Hip-Hop.  Later Neal is joined in-studio by Grammy Award winning producer, label head and educator 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit).

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Left of Black S1:E31
w/ Karla FC Holloway
April 25, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke UniversityProfessor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by fellow Duke University Professor Karla FC Holloway, author the new book Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Duke University Press).  Neal and Holloway discuss medical racism, the Tuskegee experiments and the late Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X.

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Left of Black S1:E32 

w/ Aishah Shahidah Simmons & Zaheer Ali

May 2, 2011

Left of Blackhost and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons in a discussion of sexual violence in Black communities, homophobia, and popular culture controversies surrounding Ashley Judd, Kobe Bryant and DJ Mister Cee.  Later Neal talks with historian Zaheer Ali, one of the lead researchers on the late Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Re-invention.

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Left of Black S2:E4 
w/ Julie Dash & Lizz Wright 
October 3, 2011 

Filmmaker Julie Dash joins host and Duke UniversityProfessor Mark Anthony Neal on Left of Black.  This year marks the 20^th Anniversary of the release of Dash’s ground-breaking film Daughters of the Dust which was the first feature by an African-American woman to gain national theatrical release.   The film draws on Dash’s South Carolina heritage and focuses on three generations of women with roots in the Sea Islands and Gullah culture. Dash discusses how she became a filmmaker and the challenges she faced along the way.  Dash also reveals her surprising view of filmmaker Tyler Perry. 

In the second segment, musical artist and vocalist Lizz Wrightjoins Neal. The Georgia born singer discusses how her family’s tradition in storytelling inspired her career as a vocalist.  Wright, whose music is difficult to place in one genre, talks about incorporating religion into her music as well.  Wright also identifies the musicians who influenced her and the inspiration her album artwork.  Finally Wright explains how she’s maintained control of her music.  Wright has released four full-length recordings, including the recent Fellowship. 

Left of Black S2:E6
w/ Dr. Kenneth Montague and Kellie Jones
October 17, 2011

Dr. Kenneth Montague, a Toronto-based dentist and the curator of Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection, joins Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal at the Nasher Museum in Durham, Carolina. The Windsor, Ontario born Montague has collected contemporary art since the 1990s, and was influenced by African American culture from across the Detroit River. Neal and Montague discuss some of the featured artists in the collection including Jamel Shabazz, Carrie Mae Weems, Malick Sidibé, and James VanDerZee, and the importance of collecting Black Art.

Later in the episode, Neal is joined via Skype© by Columbia UniversityArt Historian Kellie Jones, author of the new book Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art.   Neal and Jones discuss her famous parents, Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, and her work as curator of the new exhibit, Now Dig this! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

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Left of Black S2:E9
w/ Vijay Prashad and Leyla Farah
November 7, 2011

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Nealis joined via Skype© by Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College and author of the recent award winning book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, paperback 2008).  Neal and Prashad, discuss the impact of the #Occupy Movement and what role Left academics and intellectuals have to play in the movement.

Later Neal is joined by Leyla Farah, author of Black Gifted and Gay which profiles the lives and accomplishments of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community’s living icons—who  just happen to be of African descent.  Farah is a Founding Partner at Cause+Effect, a PR firm focused exclusively on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. 

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Left of Black S2:E13

“Acting White” in the “Post-Black” Era

w/ Professor Karolyn Tyson and Ytasha Womack 

December 5, 2011 

 

Left of Blackhost and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in-studio by Professor Karolyn Tyson, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White After Brown(Oxford University Press).  Neal and Tyson discuss the prevalence of the “Acting White” myth as it relates to Black high school students and how the myth obscures the more insidious practice of  “Racialized Tracking” in Public Education.

Later Neal is joined via Skype© by Ytasha Womack, journalist and author of Post-Black: How a Generation is Redefining African American Identity (Lawrence Hill Books).  Neal and Womack discuss the concept of “Post-Black” and what impact it has had on identity formation among the so-called “Post-Black” generation. 

Atelier@Duke: A Conversation with Touré – Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness

Atelier@Duke

A Conversation with Touré – Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness

Duke University

Goodson Chapel [Divinity School]

December 1, 2011

5:00pm

A conversation with Touré—American novelist, essayist, music journalist, cultural critic, and television personality based in New York City based on his book Who's Afraid of Post Blackness? joined by Duke faculty Mark Anthony Neal and Wahneema Lubiano, and North Carolina State University Historian Blair LM Kelley; Moderated by Duke Professor Maurice O. Wallace.

A Tale of Two Publics: Reflections on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Hearings

Anita Hill Defense Team including Charles Ogletree, Janet Napolitano & Kimberle Crenshaw

 

A Tale of Two Publics:   

Reflections on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Hearings

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

Twenty-years ago when Professor Anita Hill testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, investigating sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, I was in my first semester in graduate school.  Twenty-years later I recall those hearings as a foundational moment in my development as a feminist. As is so often the case with Blackness, the hearings resonated in contemporary American culture for years to come—largely as spectacle—continuing to frame many of our conversations about sexual harassment in the work place. Few in mainstream American culture seemed inclined to believe Professor Hill’s claim that she was harassed; Justice Thomas was confirmed in the closet vote in the history of Supreme Court confirmations. Yet such sentiment seemed even more palpable within Black publics, or what political scientist Lester Spence, Jr. calls the Black Parallel Public.

In her book Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character, literary and legal scholar Karla FC Holloway, notes that Professor Hill’s testimony “captures the visual and spoken dimension of a testimony of exile…the inquisition of her body and the interrogation of her words demonstrated the displaced subjectivity of an altered state of black identity.”  Considered another way, Holloway’s comments capture the distinctly different ways that the Hill-Thomas hearings were consumed along racial, gendered and class lines.  Most in White America were not privy to the rich and raucous debates over gender that raged in Black publics; that the Hill-Thomas hearings raised the ante in the form of public spectacle only highlights that for Black America, it was never simply about Justice Thomas replacing retired Justice Thurgood Marshall as the high court’s “Black” justice.

The Hill-Thomas hearings came on the heels of several high profile controversies regarding black female and male relations. Debates about Black gender politics became particularly virulent after the publication and subsequent film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple.  When the film premiered in December of 1985, journalist and talk-show host Tony Brown—who hadn’t read the book or seen the film—famously decried,  “I know that many of us who are male and black are too healthy to pay to be abused by a white man’s movie focusing on our failures,” helping to spearhead public protests at the film’s screenings.

A few years later, as heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson rose to the pinnacle of his sport, his marriage to actress Robin Givens established them as the first Black celebrity couple of the digital era—before Bobby and Whitney, Will and Jada, Beyonce and Shawn.  Tyson and Givens’ train-wreck of a relationship reached its most critical moment during a prime-time interview with Barbara Walters, where Givens admitted that Tyson physically abused her, while a contrite—and heavily medicated—Tyson simply nodded his head.   Black public opinion though, focused not on Tyson’s abuse—let a man, be a man, right?—but rather on Givens and her mother Ruth Roper, who were easily cast as duplicitous Black women aiming to undermine Tyson (and take his money), and by extension, Black patriarchy.  Givens and Roper’s ultimate crime was the airing of Tyson’s dirty laundry, a charge that resonated powerfully with some Black publics during the Hill-Thomas hearings.

Finally there was the case of Denise “Dee” Barnes, then host of the weekly music video program, Pump It Up.   Members of the group N.W.A., then led by producer Dr. Dre (Andre Young) and the late Eazy-E (Eric Wright), took offense when they perceived Barnes as allowing former NWA member Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson) to sleight them during her interview with him.  Rather than physically confront Ice Cube over his comments—they would famously exchange barbed lyrics instead—Dr. Dre confronted Barnes at an industry party and assaulted her, while his bodyguards kept on-lookers away.   Occurring ten months before the Hill-Thomas hearings,  the incident is perhaps most notable for the lack of response it generated, both within hip-hop circles and Black communities at large.  The silence led feminist writer and critic Pearl Cleage to opine, “There had been no outcry from the black women writers (including me) who are old enough to be [Barnes’] mother and who have participated in vocal and sustained defenses of sisters Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange and Gloria Naylor when they were attacked by black men for creating ‘negative images.’” 

Providing a finer perspective, Cleage further queries, “What if Amiri Baraka had taken physical issue with Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls… and punched her out at a reading at Oxford Bookstore?” Unspoken, yet clearly heard in Cleage’s observations is that fact that within a politics of Black respectability, where airing dirty laundry is a capital offense, often deserving or social death, the silence associated with Barnes’ assault, as well as the castigation of Walker, Givens and Roper, was a policing function, that would have ramifications as Professor Hill sat in judgment (as opposed to Thomas) in October of 1991. Cleage’s own work was in response to the popularity of Shaharazede Ali’s self-published pamphlet, The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwomen, which literally advocated hitting black women in the mouth for daring to speak critically about Black men.  While White America was oblivious to Ali (though the publishing industry would take notice), she was viewed in far too many Black publics as a trusted arbiter of Black gender relations.

Justice Thomas and his advisors clearly understood these dynamics, mounting a response that tapped into centuries’ old narratives about violence and Black masculinity. Thomas’s invocation that the hearings  functioned as a “high tech lynching” represented a specific gendered reference to racial violence that displaced the reality of gendered and racialized violence against Black women.  As Johnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall argue in their book Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities,  for many in Black communities, Thomas, “became yet another example of a Black man targeted by the system presumably for sexual crimes he did not commit,” adding that “Hill could not mobilize the Black community, including women, against a successful  Black man for the ‘lesser’ crime of sexual harassment—even if they were willing to acknowledge that Thomas was guilty.”

Thomas’s invoking of a “high tech lynching” is also a critical signpost of the emerging digital era.  In his book In Search for the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era political scientist Richard Iton notes that the burgeoning digital era of the late 1980s and early 1990 was marked by a hypervisibility of Blackness, tantamount to forms of surveillance.  What the Hill-Thomas hearings made clear was that notions of Black sexual pathology, even  amongst middle class figures like Professor Hill and Justice Thomas, would be intimately tethered to the new digital landscape.  ABC and NBC’s prime-time coverage of the hearings—on a Friday evening—drew a 40% television share, practically portending the coming of the 24-hour-news cycle.

The impact of the Hill-Thomas hearings could be witnessed seven years later, when Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky became public.  That many viewed such a relationship as a form of coercion on the part of the Commander-in-Chief was largely due to the ways that Anita Hill’s charges against Clarence Thomas altered the ways mainstream America viewed sexual discrimination and harassment in the work place.

Not surprisingly, such resonances were not quickly reflected within some Black publics, if we are to gauge responses to Mike Tyson’s rape trial and his subsequent conviction, the R Kelly rape trial and subsequent dismissal, the “Tip Drill” protest at Spelman College and the Duke Lacrosse case, where conventional wisdom placed focus on the culpability of the black women and girls involved.  As political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry observes in her book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America, these cases “hint at the continuing power of a common stereotype of black women as particularly promiscuous and sexually immoral,” adding that “while the myth of black women’s hypersexuality may have been historically created and perpetuated by white social, political and economic institutions, it’s contemporary manifestations are often seen just as clearly in the internal politics of African-American communities.” 

'Left of Black': Episode #31 featuring Karla FC Holloway

Left of Black #31
w/ Karla FC Holloway
April 25, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by fellow Duke University Professor Karla FC Holloway, author the new book Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Duke University Press).  Neal and Holloway discuss medical racism, the Tuskegee experiments and the new biography of Malcolm X.

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→Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. She also holds appointments in the Law School, Women’s Studies and African & African American Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on African American cultural studies, bicultural studies, gender, ethics and law. Professor Holloway is the author of eight books, including Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories (2002), BookMarks—Reading  in Black and White, A Memoir (2006) and the recent Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics.


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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Also Available @ iTunes U

Atelier@Duke: Private Bodies

Atelier@Duke: Private Bodies
February 25, 2011

Panelists at the Atelier@Duke symposium discuss "Private Bodies," the fourth of five panels at the Atelier@Duke, an event marking the 15th anniversary of the John Hope Franklin Research Center at Duke University Libraries.

Panelists include Harriet Washington (Author, Medical Apartheid), Charmaine Royal (Duke), Alondra Nelson (Columbia), Anne Lyerly (UNC-CH), and moderator Karla Holloway (Duke).

Live Taping of 'Left of Black' with Karla FC Holloway

Join Mark Anthony Neal for a live taping of Left of Black on Wednesday April 13, 2011 featuring Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke University and the author of the new book Private Bodies/Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Duke University Press, 2011). The special taping is being held in conjunction with the regular Wednesdays @ the Center programming at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. The Gothic Bookshop will have copies of Private Bodies/Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics for sale.

Wednesday @ The Center
Left of Black with Mark Anthony Neal and Karla FC Holloway
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
12:00 Noon

The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary & International Studies
2204 Erwin Road
Durham, NC 27708-0402
Room 240

New Book! Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics

Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics
by Karla FC Holloway
Duke University Press
248 Pages

Description

In Private Bodies, Public Texts, Karla FC Holloway examines instances where medical issues and information that would usually be seen as intimate, private matters are forced into the public sphere. As she demonstrates, the resulting social dramas often play out on the bodies of women and African Americans. Holloway discusses the spectacle of the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case and the injustice of medical researchers’ use of Henrietta Lacks’s cell line without her or her family’s knowledge or permission. She offers a provocative reading of the Tuskegee syphilis study and a haunting account of the ethical dilemmas that confronted physicians, patients, and families when a hospital became a space for dying rather than healing during Hurricane Katrina; even at that dire moment, race mattered. Private Bodies, Public Texts is a compelling call for a cultural bioethics that attends to the historical and social factors that render some populations more vulnerable than others in medical and legal contexts. Holloway proposes literature as a conceptual anchor for discussions of race, gender, bioethics, and the right to privacy. Literary narratives can accommodate thick description, multiple subjectivities, contradiction, and complexity.

Table of Contents

Preface xv
Acknowledgements xxi
Introduction. The Law of the Body 1
1. Bloodchild 25
2. Cartographies of Desire 67
3. Who's Got the Body? 101
4. Immortality in Cultures 137
Notes 173
Bibliography 199
Index 211

Endorsements

“Private Bodies/Public Texts is as powerful as it is beautifully written. Karla FC Holloway’s is a very different kind of bioethics, one that challenges us to think both more broadly and more specifically about what privacy and justice mean. And she reminds us, with sometimes piercing insight, just how critical gender and race can be in making meaning out of both.”
—Ruth R. Faden, Director, Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics

“Private Bodies/Public Texts is an illuminating meditation on the social construction of personal identity, with special focus on gender and racial categorizations in biomedical ethics. Drawing on diverse sources from medicine, law and literature, Karla FC Holloway shows how devalued gender and racial identities not only set the stage for past biomedical abuses but are ironically replicated in the paradigmatic examples that contemporary bioethics invokes in the supposed service of correcting those abuses. This is a subtle, challenging book.”
—Robert A. Burt, Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law, Yale University

“Karla FC Holloway has written an important book that challenges the objectification of patients’ stories that is so common in the practice of bioethics. She persuasively argues for a cultural ethics, an ethics which gives constitutive weight to the cultural context of those stories, especially the cultural contexts of race and gender identity. Using this approach, she presents crucial new insights into issues of reproduction, clinical trials, genomics and death and dying. Her discussion of the events at Memorial Medical Center after Katrina will become a classic in the field. But most importantly, she shows us that the practice of bioethics must change if it is to successfully relate to the issues raised by the thick narratives of reality.”
—Baruch A. Brody, Baylor College of Medicine

About The Author

Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, where she also holds appointments in the Law School, Women’s Studies, and African & African American Studies, and is an affiliated faculty with the Institute on Care at the End of Life and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine. She serves on the Greenwall Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics, was recently elected to the Hastings Center Fellows Association, and is the author of many books, including Bookmarks: Reading in Black and White; Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories, also published by Duke University Press; and Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character.

The Color Purple: On Location in North Carolina

On Location: The Color Purple

The State of Things
w/ Frank Stasio
WUNC-FM

Director Steven Spielberg took one look at Anson County, North Carolina and decided it was the perfect setting for the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple.” That was in 1985. Twenty-five years later, the little purple flowers that were planted by Spielberg’s production team still bloom in Anson County and the film that catapulted the careers of lead actresses Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey remains significant for its beautiful cinematography, powerful performances and controversial depictions of African-American life.

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the film, “The Color Purple,” host Frank Stasio talks to a panel of guests about the movie’s production, its connection to Walker’s written narrative, and how it challenges audiences with complex themes of race, family, gender and sexuality. Joining the conversation is Lu Ellen Huntley, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and a member of the family that owned the Anson County farm where the movie was filmed; Michael Connor, theater coordinator at Livingstone College who appears in the film; Charlene Regester, associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of “African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960”; L. Lamar Wilson, an English PhD student and Composition Teaching Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English and a professor of law at Duke University.

Listen HERE