Webby Award-Nominated Duke Video Series Celebrates 15 Years of Showcasing Black Intellectuals on YouTube

DURHAM, NC — September 13^th, 2024 – Left of Black, Duke University's intrepid web series, begins its milestone fifteenth season in mid-October 2024, continuing its tradition of featuring Black Studies faculty along with visual artists, poets, activists, and musicians.

The show’s host Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, who started teaching at Duke’s African & African American Studies Department in 2004 and is now the Chair, envisioned the series to shine a much-needed spotlight on the leading minds in his field of Black Studies. This academic discipline deeply examines the history and culture of people of African descent globally and the social challenges they face.

“Before I had any idea what Black Studies was, it was [journalist] Gil Noble’s public affairs program Like It Is, on WABC-TV in New York City that introduced me to such important figures as the legendary polymath Paul Robeson, significant historians like John Henrik Clarke and Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and compelling Black artists like Abbey Lincoln, Sonia Sanchez and Bob Marley,” Neal said.

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Inspired by this model, Dr. Neal saw the need to reimagine how humanities research is conveyed and used, noting that academics tend to prioritize their own colleagues within the university. Putting the series on YouTube opened the intellectually rich discussions between Dr. Neal and his guests to a much broader public. One doesn’t need to be a college student to listen in –– a web link would suffice.

He continues, “In many ways, I launched Left of Black as a tribute to the sense of intellectual discourse that I found with Like It Is, but with the casualness that I’ve experienced all through my life witnessing similar discussions in Black barbershops.”

The fifteenth season will feature three live, in-person events with the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) at Duke. Called “Small Talk at FHI,” the first installment will be held Thursday, September 19, 2024 and welcomes Dr. Joan Morgan, an award-winning hip-hop scholar, Grammy-nominated songwriter and noted Black feminist. She is the current Program Director for the Center of Black Visual Culture at New York University. Dr. Morgan will come to Duke to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of her acclaimed book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, which looks at the life of the modern Black woman caught between progressive ways of thinking and traditional gender roles at home and work. Copies of her book will be given away free-of-charge on a first-come, first-serve basis. The event venue will be the Pink Parlor at the East Duke Building located at 1304 East Campus Drive from 6:30 to 8pm.

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This new season also marks the launch of the brand-new Left of Black website, which will be a repository of every series episode. The site will eventually feature blog posts from undergraduate and graduate students, who will reflect on pressing issues of the day and provide cultural commentary using the show’s deep video archive as a reference point.

To keep up with all the new developments on the horizon for Left of Black, viewers are invited to sign up for the brand-new newsletter. The newsletter will provide direct links to new episodes, exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and the burgeoning voices of graduate students in the field of Black Studies.