Daniel McNeil - Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation

A must-read for all committed to a critically engaged approach to the study of race, inequality, and counter-cultural musings. Daniel McNeil offers a lucid, smart, well-written, and wonderfully novel contribution to twenty-first-century Black studies scholarship. It is truly a superb reflection on the deep histories of Black Atlantic intellectual thought.

Kamari Maxine Clarke , distinguished professor, University of Toronto

A thoroughly original account of two mavericks of Black public intellectualism who, while vastly different in tone, temperament, and politics, are both witness to the complex, ludic, and ultimately loving promise of the Black radical archive. Thinking While Black is a testament to deep anti-racist political yearnings that are challenging but not contrarian, strident but not polemical, errant but not wayward, and utopian but never naive. A serious book by a serious thinker.

Sivamohan Valluvan , author of The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-first-century Britain

McNeil has created an expansive chronicle of Black history and pop culture in both the US and UK over the past 50 years, and a powerful story about sameness, difference, and shared sense of purpose that is destined to become an invaluable resource in contemporary cultural studies.

Kenneth Montague , The Wedge Collection

Daniel McNeil has undertaken a heroic endeavour. Through the low-end frequencies of his own soulful voice, he has reminded us of something we once had: a genuine open-air forum for intellectual reflection on the politics of popular culture. Paul Gilroy and Armond White are ideal characters for the drama of ideas McNeil presents on the page, driven by noble commitments yet deploying an uncompromising zeal in their aesthetic judgments. Thinking While Black is a hell of a book, and it just might offer us the chance to break out of our current hellish predicament in the world of cultural criticism.

Dhanveer Singh Brar , lecturer in Black British history, University of Leeds (UK)

With insurgency as an analytical anchor, Thinking While Black is an impressive study of how Black intellectual life is generated through hopeful contestations. Offering a deep reading of provocations offered by Paul Gilroy and Armond White, this text beautifully historicizes the soul rebel as a figure of capacious and rigorous critique that seeks out promising and fantastic futures.

Katherine McKittrick , author of Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle

Thinking While Black provides a critical assessment of two prominent cultural critics. In comparing and contrasting Paul Gilroy and Armond White, McNeil avoids hagiography in his thoughtful, scholarly, and yet accessible appraisal of the two influential intellectuals from two different sides of the Black Atlantic. The result is an insightful reflection on the politics and aesthetics of cultural criticism.

David Austin , author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution and Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal

In Thinking While Black, Daniel McNeil explains why the radical approaches inherent in the intellectual journeys of Gilroy and White matter, re/constructs the sociocultural contexts within which each emerged, and examines the processes and consequences of their evolutions from young soul rebels into middle-aged mavericks. His attentive and meticulous analysis of the ambitions, accomplishments, and trajectories of these two Black thinkers complicates any simple categorization of Black intellectualism.

Michele A. Johnson , professor, Department of History, York University

Daniel M c Neil

Between the Lines
Toronto

Thinking While Black

2022 Daniel McNeil

First published in 2022 by

Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281

Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 Canada

1-800-718-7201 www.btlbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for copying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 69 Yonge Street, Suite 1100, Toronto, ON M5E 1K3.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Thinking while Black : translating the politics and popular culture of a rebel generation / Daniel McNeil.

Names: McNeil, Daniel, author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220150230 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220161690 | ISBN 9781771136075 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771136082 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: African AmericansIntellectual life. | LCSH: Black peopleGreat BritainIntellectual life. | LCSH: White, Armond. | LCSH: Gilroy, Paul, 1956- | LCSH: African American film criticsUnited States. | LCSH: Film criticsUnited States. | LCSH: IntellectualsGreat Britain. | LCSH: African AmericansRace identity. | LCSH: Black peopleRace identityGreat Britain.

Classification: LCC E185.89.I56 M35 2022 | DDC 305.896/073dc23

Cover and text design by DEEVE

Printed in Canada

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities: the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and Ontario Creates.

To Sheilas memory, and to Alexs future

The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century.

Stuart Hall (1993)

The basic humanistic mission today, whether in music, literature, or any of the arts or the humanities, has to do with the preservation of difference without, at the same time, sinking into the desire to dominate.

Edward Said (2002)

This book explores the aspirations and achievements of a political and cultural generation that consumed images of rebellion and revolution around the world as young Black teenagers in the late 1960s, and began asserting their ideas about individual self-fashioning and collective liberation in public arenas in North America and Europe during the 1970s and early 80s. The transnational dimensions of this cohort are often overlooked in US-centric discussions about the political struggles and legislative achievements of a civil rights generation, on the one hand, and the individual advancement and digital cultures of a postcivil rights generation, on the other.

Thinking While Black maps the journeys of intellectual discovery taken by two contemporaries of Johnson whose creative energy, utopian visions, and humanist commitments have made them intriguing agents and avatars of a rebel generation. One is Armond White, a film and culture critic born in Detroit in 1953 who believes that if you cut him open in search of his motivations, ethics, and beliefs, youll find the Holy Trinity of Motown, Bible verses, and the movies.