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Simone Drake

Ohio State University, African American and African Studies, Faculty Member

Ohio State University, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Associate Faculty

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OSU Moritz College of Law, MSL 2013
University of Maryland, PhD 2007
Ohio State University, Dual MA 2001
Denison University, BA 1997

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Western Sydney University

Central European University

University of Cologne

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Universität Bremen

Francisco Vazquez-Garcia

Universidad de Cadiz

Christiane Gruber

University of Michigan

University of St Andrews

Richard Jochelson

University of Manitoba

The University of Sydney

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Books by Simone Drake

Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century

Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century, 2020

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expand... more The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and Blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love Blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter century while offering new avenues for future scholarship.

Contributors. Takiyah Nur Amin, Patricia Hill Collins, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua, Simone C. Drake, Imani Johnson, Ralina L. Joseph, David J. Leonard, Emily Lordi, Nina Angela Mercer, Mark Anthony Neal, Ike Okafor-Newsum, Kinohi Nishikawa, Eric Pritchard, Richard Schur, Vincent Stephens, Lisa B. Thompson, Sheneese Thompson, Tracy Whiting-Sharpley

When We Imagine Grace

When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making

In When We Imagine Grace, Drake borrows from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to bring imagination to the ... more In When We Imagine Grace, Drake borrows from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to bring imagination to the center of black masculinity studies—allowing individual black men to exempt themselves and their fates from a hateful, ignorant society and open themselves up as active agents at the center of their own stories. Against a backdrop of crisis, Drake brings forth the narratives of black men who have imagined grace for themselves. We meet African American cowboy, Nat Love, and Drake’s own grandfather, who served in the first black military unit to fight in World War II. Synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies, Drake analyzes black fathers and daughters, the valorization of black criminals, the black entrepreneurial pursuits of Marcus Garvey, Berry Gordy, and Jay-Z, and the denigration and celebration of gay black men: Cornelius Eady, Antoine Dodson, and Kehinde Wiley. With a powerful command of its subjects and a passionate dedication to hope, When We Imagine Grace gives us a new way of seeing and knowing black masculinity—sophisticated in concept and bracingly vivid in telling.

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (Introduction)

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity

Essays by Simone Drake

Transnational Sisterhood: Beyoncé and Shakira Sexing the Difference

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity, 2014

He Said Nothing: Sonic Space and the Production of Quietude in Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight”

Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century, 2020

Well after a year since the release of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016), a film adaptation of Tar... more Well after a year since the release of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016), a film adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney's play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Black cultural and Black queer studies scholars remain enamored with a film that made a host of critical interventions in how Black cultural productions influence how society imagines, represents, sees, and empathizes with Black boys. One of those interventions is its break from protest rooted in macho, heteronormative repre sen ta tions of Black masculinity. This is not to propose that heretofore there have never been breaks; rather, the point is that Black masculine sensibilities of disruptiveness and protest have largely been understood as inherently physical and vocal acts. This phenomenon has held true even when critical attention is paid to sexual identity, when vocality around lgbt rights politics has also demanded vocal disruptiveness, particularly in the context of lesbian and gay aiDs activists

On Foremothers, Muses, and Black Feminist Theorizing

Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2023

My assertion here pays homage to Barbara Christian's classic essay "The Race for Theory" that cal... more

Chapter Three, Lest We Forget: Stories My Grandfather Told Me

When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making, 2016

Black servicemen in WWII and the Korean War consistently reveal embittered stories of segregation... more Black servicemen in WWII and the Korean War consistently reveal embittered stories of segregation, discrimination, and the hard fact of unequal protection and second-class citizenship, in spite of sacrificing their lives for a nation that refused them full citizenship. Constructed as a personal narrative, this chapter explores U.S. military documents used by the
author’s grandfather and other Buffalo Soldiers to develop an archive of unwritten and
unacknowledged military service. A scholarly book manuscript was published as a result of this 1980s “setting the record straight” campaign. This chapter tells a story about the counter-story a determined group of black men worked collaboratively to produce. It pushes readers to think about the limits and possibilities of black men “imagining grace” through militaristic service to a nation whose only interest in their [black men’s] best interest was by way of an interest
convergence. What emerges is a narrative of black pride and shame.

Discovering a Hidden Figure of Service and Leadership: The Reverend Charles Edgar Newsome, MD

by Simone Drake, Leta Hendricks, and Quinn Capers

Journal of the National Medical Association, 2020

Collaborative research between the University School of Medicine Office of Diversity and Inclusio... more Collaborative research between the University School of Medicine
Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Health Sciences Library and Department of African and African American Studies recently identified Dr. Charles Edgar Newsome as the institution’s first African American physician graduate in 1893. Born May 25, 1856 in the town of Buffalo within Putnam County of Northwest Virginia, he served for 3 years and 6 months as a member of the Regimental Band of the United States Army 25th Infantry, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, became Grand Master of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, and served communities of the state as a reverend, physician, and civic leader. Archival records and photographs uncover the remarkable life of Reverend Charles Edgar Newsome, MD, a hidden figure in history.

The Marketability of Black Joy: After "I Do" in Black Romance Film

Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 2019

An unprecedented number of films directed and often written and produced by African Americans off... more An unprecedented number of films directed and often written and produced by African Americans offering coupling conventions or the marriage plot as a trope began emerging at the close of the twentieth century and have continued with strong popularity into the twenty-first. The initial emergence of these films came on the tail of vicious debates and public rhetoric about dysfunctional African American families. As a means of talking back, or perhaps even conforming to social policy, black film embraced marriage plots. Most of the films, however, end with a wedding, which prevents audiences the opportunity to imagine a status-marriage-that the media, politicians, social scientists, and popular culture propose is antithetical to blackness. Ending with the wedding begs the question: What happens after "I do?" Malcolm Lee's The Best Man (1999) and its long-awaited sequel The Best Man Holiday (2013) offer spectators a fairytale story of black success and black love after "I do." Because Lee's film enterprise imagines black marriage after the wedding, it is a useful case study for how narratives of blackness in the realm of popular culture talk back to popular public sphere narratives of unmarriageable black women, criminalized black men, and wayward black children. Ultimately, The Best Man Holiday is a what I call a "black-black" film that, through its depiction of black marriage and black children, enables blackness to function as an analytic that gives meaning to black joy in twenty-first century popular culture.

A Meditation on the Soundscapes of Black Boyhood and Disruptive Imaginations

In this article I consider how discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it diffic... more In this article I consider how discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it difficult to imagine black boyhood. While both forms of intervention are guided by good intentions, they nonetheless stymie research and critical engagement with how black boys experience boyhood. This article considers how a speech by President Barack Obama functioning as a precursor to formal announcement of the My Brothers Keeper initiative demonstrates the difficulty with distinguishing black boys from black men and, therefore, from developing interventions and research, in general, that attends to the needs, interests, and ways of being of black boys. I propose that in the absence of discursively focused research and empirical data, the inner thoughts and lives of black boys can be located in culture, specifically soundscapes created by black male recording artists that offer disruptive imaginations.

More than Nationalism in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and Kasi Lemmons's Talk to Me

“A Space Beyond Beulah: Assessing the Mixed Race Body in Danzy Senna’s ‘The Land of Beulah.’’”

“’So I Decided to Quit It and Try Something Else for a While’: Reading Agency in Nat Love’s The Life and Adventure of Nat Love.”

“Gendering Diasporic Migration in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana”

Louisiana is not unlike many other historical recovery narratives produced by African diasporic w... more Louisiana is not unlike many other historical recovery narratives produced by African diasporic women during the 1970s and 1980s. The premise of the narrative is grounded in the need to tell an untold story that adds to, if not corrects, the larger historical narrative of the Americas. Scholars have attended to Erna Brodber's efforts to construct a pan-African community by positioning Garveyism at the root of the narrative. In "Reconnecting the

Craig Brewer and Kara Walker: Sexing the Difference and Rebuilding the South

Souls, Jan 1, 2009

" Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond

The 1970s were a prolific era for Black women&amp;amp;#x27;s writing. During what is now refe... more The 1970s were a prolific era for Black women&amp;amp;#x27;s writing. During what is now referred to as the Black Women&amp;amp;#x27;s Literary Renaissance, Black women writers worked to center Black women&amp;amp;#x27;s experiences in American and African American literary &amp;amp;quot;traditions&amp;amp;quot; that had theretofore ...

Papers by Simone Drake

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Improving Police Interactions with Black Civilians

Social Science Research Network, 2024

Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism

Routledge eBooks, Mar 26, 2024

Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century

Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century, 2020

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expand... more The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and Blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love Blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter century while offering new avenues for future scholarship.

Contributors. Takiyah Nur Amin, Patricia Hill Collins, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua, Simone C. Drake, Imani Johnson, Ralina L. Joseph, David J. Leonard, Emily Lordi, Nina Angela Mercer, Mark Anthony Neal, Ike Okafor-Newsum, Kinohi Nishikawa, Eric Pritchard, Richard Schur, Vincent Stephens, Lisa B. Thompson, Sheneese Thompson, Tracy Whiting-Sharpley

When We Imagine Grace

When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making

In When We Imagine Grace, Drake borrows from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to bring imagination to the ... more In When We Imagine Grace, Drake borrows from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to bring imagination to the center of black masculinity studies—allowing individual black men to exempt themselves and their fates from a hateful, ignorant society and open themselves up as active agents at the center of their own stories. Against a backdrop of crisis, Drake brings forth the narratives of black men who have imagined grace for themselves. We meet African American cowboy, Nat Love, and Drake’s own grandfather, who served in the first black military unit to fight in World War II. Synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies, Drake analyzes black fathers and daughters, the valorization of black criminals, the black entrepreneurial pursuits of Marcus Garvey, Berry Gordy, and Jay-Z, and the denigration and celebration of gay black men: Cornelius Eady, Antoine Dodson, and Kehinde Wiley. With a powerful command of its subjects and a passionate dedication to hope, When We Imagine Grace gives us a new way of seeing and knowing black masculinity—sophisticated in concept and bracingly vivid in telling.

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (Introduction)

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity

Transnational Sisterhood: Beyoncé and Shakira Sexing the Difference

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity, 2014

He Said Nothing: Sonic Space and the Production of Quietude in Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight”

Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century, 2020

Well after a year since the release of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016), a film adaptation of Tar... more Well after a year since the release of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016), a film adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney's play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Black cultural and Black queer studies scholars remain enamored with a film that made a host of critical interventions in how Black cultural productions influence how society imagines, represents, sees, and empathizes with Black boys. One of those interventions is its break from protest rooted in macho, heteronormative repre sen ta tions of Black masculinity. This is not to propose that heretofore there have never been breaks; rather, the point is that Black masculine sensibilities of disruptiveness and protest have largely been understood as inherently physical and vocal acts. This phenomenon has held true even when critical attention is paid to sexual identity, when vocality around lgbt rights politics has also demanded vocal disruptiveness, particularly in the context of lesbian and gay aiDs activists

On Foremothers, Muses, and Black Feminist Theorizing

Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2023

My assertion here pays homage to Barbara Christian's classic essay "The Race for Theory" that cal... more

Chapter Three, Lest We Forget: Stories My Grandfather Told Me

When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making, 2016

Black servicemen in WWII and the Korean War consistently reveal embittered stories of segregation... more Black servicemen in WWII and the Korean War consistently reveal embittered stories of segregation, discrimination, and the hard fact of unequal protection and second-class citizenship, in spite of sacrificing their lives for a nation that refused them full citizenship. Constructed as a personal narrative, this chapter explores U.S. military documents used by the
author’s grandfather and other Buffalo Soldiers to develop an archive of unwritten and
unacknowledged military service. A scholarly book manuscript was published as a result of this 1980s “setting the record straight” campaign. This chapter tells a story about the counter-story a determined group of black men worked collaboratively to produce. It pushes readers to think about the limits and possibilities of black men “imagining grace” through militaristic service to a nation whose only interest in their [black men’s] best interest was by way of an interest
convergence. What emerges is a narrative of black pride and shame.

Discovering a Hidden Figure of Service and Leadership: The Reverend Charles Edgar Newsome, MD

by Simone Drake, Leta Hendricks, and Quinn Capers

Journal of the National Medical Association, 2020

Collaborative research between the University School of Medicine Office of Diversity and Inclusio... more Collaborative research between the University School of Medicine
Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Health Sciences Library and Department of African and African American Studies recently identified Dr. Charles Edgar Newsome as the institution’s first African American physician graduate in 1893. Born May 25, 1856 in the town of Buffalo within Putnam County of Northwest Virginia, he served for 3 years and 6 months as a member of the Regimental Band of the United States Army 25th Infantry, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, became Grand Master of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, and served communities of the state as a reverend, physician, and civic leader. Archival records and photographs uncover the remarkable life of Reverend Charles Edgar Newsome, MD, a hidden figure in history.

The Marketability of Black Joy: After "I Do" in Black Romance Film

Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 2019

An unprecedented number of films directed and often written and produced by African Americans off... more An unprecedented number of films directed and often written and produced by African Americans offering coupling conventions or the marriage plot as a trope began emerging at the close of the twentieth century and have continued with strong popularity into the twenty-first. The initial emergence of these films came on the tail of vicious debates and public rhetoric about dysfunctional African American families. As a means of talking back, or perhaps even conforming to social policy, black film embraced marriage plots. Most of the films, however, end with a wedding, which prevents audiences the opportunity to imagine a status-marriage-that the media, politicians, social scientists, and popular culture propose is antithetical to blackness. Ending with the wedding begs the question: What happens after "I do?" Malcolm Lee's The Best Man (1999) and its long-awaited sequel The Best Man Holiday (2013) offer spectators a fairytale story of black success and black love after "I do." Because Lee's film enterprise imagines black marriage after the wedding, it is a useful case study for how narratives of blackness in the realm of popular culture talk back to popular public sphere narratives of unmarriageable black women, criminalized black men, and wayward black children. Ultimately, The Best Man Holiday is a what I call a "black-black" film that, through its depiction of black marriage and black children, enables blackness to function as an analytic that gives meaning to black joy in twenty-first century popular culture.

A Meditation on the Soundscapes of Black Boyhood and Disruptive Imaginations

In this article I consider how discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it diffic... more In this article I consider how discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it difficult to imagine black boyhood. While both forms of intervention are guided by good intentions, they nonetheless stymie research and critical engagement with how black boys experience boyhood. This article considers how a speech by President Barack Obama functioning as a precursor to formal announcement of the My Brothers Keeper initiative demonstrates the difficulty with distinguishing black boys from black men and, therefore, from developing interventions and research, in general, that attends to the needs, interests, and ways of being of black boys. I propose that in the absence of discursively focused research and empirical data, the inner thoughts and lives of black boys can be located in culture, specifically soundscapes created by black male recording artists that offer disruptive imaginations.

More than Nationalism in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and Kasi Lemmons's Talk to Me

“A Space Beyond Beulah: Assessing the Mixed Race Body in Danzy Senna’s ‘The Land of Beulah.’’”

“’So I Decided to Quit It and Try Something Else for a While’: Reading Agency in Nat Love’s The Life and Adventure of Nat Love.”

“Gendering Diasporic Migration in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana”

Louisiana is not unlike many other historical recovery narratives produced by African diasporic w... more Louisiana is not unlike many other historical recovery narratives produced by African diasporic women during the 1970s and 1980s. The premise of the narrative is grounded in the need to tell an untold story that adds to, if not corrects, the larger historical narrative of the Americas. Scholars have attended to Erna Brodber's efforts to construct a pan-African community by positioning Garveyism at the root of the narrative. In "Reconnecting the

Craig Brewer and Kara Walker: Sexing the Difference and Rebuilding the South

Souls, Jan 1, 2009

" Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond

The 1970s were a prolific era for Black women&amp;amp;#x27;s writing. During what is now refe... more The 1970s were a prolific era for Black women&amp;amp;#x27;s writing. During what is now referred to as the Black Women&amp;amp;#x27;s Literary Renaissance, Black women writers worked to center Black women&amp;amp;#x27;s experiences in American and African American literary &amp;amp;quot;traditions&amp;amp;quot; that had theretofore ...

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Improving Police Interactions with Black Civilians

Social Science Research Network, 2024

Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism

Routledge eBooks, Mar 26, 2024

On Foremothers, Muses, and Black Feminist Theorizing

Women's Studies

On Foremothers, Muses, and Black Feminist Theorizing

Women's Studies

4: Deliver Us from Evil

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2016

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2016

3: Lest We Forget

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2016

5: Twisted Criminalities

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2016

The Marketability of Black Joy: After “I Do” in Black Romance Film

Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 2019

An unprecedented number of films directed and often written and produced by African Americans off... more An unprecedented number of films directed and often written and produced by African Americans offering coupling conventions or the marriage plot as a trope began emerging at the close of the twentieth century and have continued with strong popularity into the twenty-first. The initial emergence of these films came on the tail of vicious debates and public rhetoric about dysfunctional African American families. As a means of talking back, or perhaps even conforming to social policy, black film embraced marriage plots. Most of the films, however, end with a wedding, which prevents audiences the opportunity to imagine a status—marriage—that the media, politicians, social scientists, and popular culture propose is antithetical to blackness. Ending with the wedding begs the question: What happens after “I do?” Malcolm Lee’s The Best Man (1999) and its long-awaited sequel The Best Man Holiday (2013) offer spectators a fairytale story of black success and black love after “I do.” Because L...

6: “I’m Not a Businessman, I’m a Business, Man”

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2016

Title of Document: "SOMETIMES FOLK NEED MORE": BLACK WOMEN WRITERS DWELLING IN THE BEYOND

When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making

Masculinities & Social Change, 2017

He Said Nothing

When We Imagine Grace

More than Nationalism in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and Kasi Lemmons's Talk to Me

Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, 2013

This article situates film as a critical framework for challenging scholars to use a Black femini... more This article situates film as a critical framework for challenging scholars to use a Black feminist methodology to complicate the notion of an inherent link between blackness, maleness, and crisis in the twenty-first century. Kasi Lemmons's Talk to Me (2007) offers a trans-historical context for considering the difference that both time and a Black feminist theoretical perspective contribute to a re-reading of Killer of Sheep (1977) through a post-nationalist lens. Killer of Sheep is both produced and set during the waning of the Black Nationalist era. Talk to Me begins during the waning of the civil rights movement and ends in the dawning of the post-national era, but it is produced in 2007. The thirty-year difference between the productions creates considerable possibility for viewing and imagining Black manhood in a way that allows Black men to be agents rather than victims. Reading these films through a Black feminist lens not only creates a space for Black male agency in these films, but it also reveals an unfamiliar narrative for wider examination—Black men as emotional, feeling human beings whose greatest acts of agency are rooted in their own humanness, fallibility, and "weakness."

A Meditation on the Soundscapes of Black Boyhood and Disruptive Imaginations

Souls, 2016

The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, w... more The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less "childlike" than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). We expected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being more responsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support for these hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods. We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These data represent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this research suggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities.

He Said Nothing

Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century, 2020

Well after a year since the release of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016), a film adaptation of Tar... more Well after a year since the release of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016), a film adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney's play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Black cultural and Black queer studies scholars remain enamored with a film that made a host of critical interventions in how Black cultural productions influence how society imagines, represents, sees, and empathizes with Black boys. One of those interventions is its break from protest rooted in macho, heteronormative repre sen ta tions of Black masculinity. This is not to propose that heretofore there have never been breaks; rather, the point is that Black masculine sensibilities of disruptiveness and protest have largely been understood as inherently physical and vocal acts. This phenomenon has held true even when critical attention is paid to sexual identity, when vocality around lgbt rights politics has also demanded vocal disruptiveness, particularly in the context of lesbian and gay aiDs activists

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity

Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century

In his classic essay, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Stuart Hall opens with a q... more

Discovering a Hidden Figure of Service and Leadership: The Reverend Charles Edgar Newsome, MD

Journal of the National Medical Association

Collaborative research between the University School of Medicine Office of Diversity and Inclusio... more Collaborative research between the University School of Medicine Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Health Sciences Library and Department of African and African American Studies recently identified Dr. Charles Edgar Newsome as the institution’s first African American physician graduate in 1893. Born May 25, 1856 in the town of Buffalo within Putnam County of Northwest Virginia, he served for 3 years and 6 months as a member of the Regimental Band of the United States Army 25th Infantry, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, became Grand Master of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, and served communities of the state as a reverend, physician, and civic leader. Archival records and photographs uncover the remarkable life of Reverend Charles Edgar Newsome, MD, a hidden figure in history.