Neal’s New Book On Black Popular Culture
By Carol Olechowski
Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of English at the University at Albany. With his second book, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (Routledge, 2002), he has also shown himself to be an adept interpreter of that culture.

Like those about whom his book is written, Neal is a “Soul Baby.” By that term, “I literally mean the ‘children of Soul,’ that generation of black thinkers and artists - like myself - who were born and bred during the waning moments of the Civil Rights or ‘Soul’ era, but who came of age just as hip-hop began to emerge as a visible social and cultural movement. Throughout the book, I argue that these ‘Soul Babies,’ or members of the Post-Soul generation, are the buffers between the traditional Civil Rights generation and the emerging ‘Hip-Hop generation’ - equally at home with the art and culture of both,” he explained.

Neal, a father of one, dedicated his most recent work to his parents, Arthur and Elsie; his wife, Gloria Taylor-Neal; and his little daughter, Misha Gabrielle. He wrote Soul Babies “as an attempt to put my own intellectual development and that of the Post-Soul generation into a context that spoke to our coming of age watching television shows such as ‘Good Times’ and ‘Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,’ or films such as Let’s Do It Again and Uptown Saturday Night. I wanted to speak from the vantage point of that first generation of young blacks who were introduced to ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘Roots’ as markers of a ‘brave new’ experiment in race management, and who experienced songs like ‘Rapper’s Delight’ or Run DMC’s ‘It’s Like That’ as if they were the rhythms of a world that we could in fact give voice to and thus change. In my opinion, the book would find a home not only in African-American and American studies classes, but in the kinds of cultural studies courses where issues of gender, race, and sexuality are dealt with rigorously.”

In Soul Babies, Neal offers an overview of the way blacks have been portrayed, from the late 1960s to the present, in television programs, motion pictures, and music. However, “I really wasn’t interested in the accuracy of images of black life and culture,” he said. “I don’t place a lot of stock in stereotypes because there is clearly some basic truth in them. More problematic is the idea that all folks of African descent fit neatly into those stereotypes. I was much more concerned with how these images circulate throughout popular culture as representations of the various issues of gender, class, and sexuality that the black ‘community’ confronts. Thus, Chapter 2, ‘Sweetback’s Revenge,’ looks at black middle-class anxieties as they are present in the films of Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby. Chapter 3, ‘Baby Mama (Drama) and Baby Daddy (Trauma),’ is a rather explicit look at the demonization of young single black mothers - ‘Baby Mamas’ - particularly in music videos.”

Neal’s epilogue, “A Soul Baby in Real Time,” provided “an opportunity for me to break away from ‘scholarly’ language and to write in my natural vernacular about my experience as a ‘Soul Baby’ confronting ‘Generation Hip-Hop’ in the classroom.” In that chapter, he writes: “. . . strivers probably make up the majority of black students on any given campus. These folks, who simply aspire to middle-class futures as lawyers, dentists, financial planners, and software designers, were once viewed as heirs to legitimate ‘Negrofied’ bourgeois classes . . . But strivers are incredibly diversified themselves and hardly conform to some [black sociologist E. Franklin] Frazier stereotype of self-hating, white-imitating Negroes. Though many of them are pressured to recreate middle-class lifestyles, some come from solid working-class and working poor environments. For the latter students, who are often first-generation college students, the attainment of a college degree is a conduit into mainstream middle-class success. Race may matter to them, but not enough to jeopardize their academic and professional goals.”

A bit further on, Neal observes: “But in reality many of these students are not so much rejecting their racial or ethnic heritage as they are trying to downplay the significance of race, to minimize the sense of difference from their white peers . . . At stake here is a campus experience not dominated by race . . .” This epilogue, he noted in an interview, “was also a product of my own fairly recent experiences as a young black man on predominately white campuses. I would want all students to recognize that popular culture is a legitimate ter-rain in which issues of race, gender, sexuality, and politics are articulated, and thus can also be challenged and critiqued. With regard to the book’s final section, I would hope that black students - and others - have an appreciation of the idea that there is some value in opening up the space of ‘blackness,’ as opposed to constructing ‘essentialist’ concepts of black identity that deny a full range of black identities that don’t fit nicely into little ‘black’ boxes.”

A “Boogie-down” (Bronx) native and self-described “SUNY Baby,” Neal earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from SUNY-Fredonia and his doctorate from the University at Buffalo’s American Studies Department. He has been a UAlbany faculty member since 1997. Currently, Neal teaches “a grad course, Queering Blackness, and what I believe is the first formal course in hip-hop at UAlbany - The Hip-Hop Aesthetic.”

Jarka M. Burian’s Work Highlights Leading Creators of Twentieth-Century Czech Theatre
By Carol Olechowski
In his latest book, University at Albany Professor Emeritus of Theatre Jarka M. Burian shines a spotlight on Czech theatrical directors, actors, and designers.

Leading Creators of Twen tieth-Century Czech Theatre (Routledge, 2002) focuses on such personages as directors K.H. Hilar, E.F. Burian [no relation to Jarka Burian], Alfred Radok, and Otomar Krejca; scenographer Josef Svoboda; and playwright and Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel. Burian’s Modern Czech Theatre: Reflector and Conscience of a Nation, published two years ago, examined Czech theatre in the context of the social, political, and historical changes that took place in the former Czechoslovakia during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Burian, who taught in UAlbany’s English and theatre departments from 1955 until his retirement in 1993, has been gathering material for his writings for nearly 40 years. After receiving a State Department grant in 1965, he visited Czechoslovakia numerous times to research the theatre. “I would occasionally publish an article relating to this theme. In the 1990s, I felt I had enough material to add to what I had already done,” he recalled.

Actually, Burian had enough material for two books: “an overview of the main periods and figures in Czech theatre from the late 1800s to the 1990s, and a work that included a series of portraits of major theatre artists.” The University of Iowa Press published Modern Czech Theatre in 2000. Routledge, a British publisher with subsidiaries in the United States, brought out Leading Creators in January.

Leading Creators offers glimpses into the artistic genius of Radok, one of the most renowned stage directors of the 20th century; and of Havel, the playwright and onetime brewery worker who took center stage in the international arena as a dissident and ultimately became president of Czechoslovakia in 1990, and of the Czech Republic three years later. Also included in the work is Svoboda, who parlayed his expertise as an architect into a distinguished career as a scenographer noted for making the stage setting and lighting integral parts of the drama, rather than mere backdrops.

For his next project, Burian will focus entirely on Svoboda. “He is going to be 82 and has stopped designing, but I wanted to have one more research contact with him regarding his work. From 1943 into the 1990s, Svoboda designed more than 600 productions, mainly in the Czech Republic, but also in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the U.S. I want to go back into the Czech National Theatre archives to compile a reliable register of his productions. Precisely, I want to document opening nights, directors - information that will be an objective, factual record of Svoboda’s work, rather than the fairly sketchy lists” that currently exist.

In addition to “clarifying and consistently recording matters of dating, location, collaborative artists, production concepts, scenographic techniques, and other relevant questions,” Burian will “elicit Svoboda’s observations on his career from the vantage point of 2002, taking into consideration the context of Czech and Western theatre, and the specific social and political realities of his homeland during his career. His autobiography, The Secret of Theatrical Space, touches on some of these matters but is limited in that it was composed prior to 1989, when the Communist regime was still in power,” Burian observed.

Svoboda has a unique connection with UAlbany, added Burian. “He guest-designed two productions for us, which I directed: Strindberg’s The Dream Play in 1980, and Gogol’s The Inspector General in 1991. As far as I know, these are the only productions Svoboda ever designed for a university theatre.”

To conduct his research on Svoboda, Burian will return to the Czech Republic later this year. A grant from the United States Institute for Theatre Technology will support a stay of several months in Prague for the retired professor and his wife, Grayce, who has also been a professional actor, director, and educator.

Burian, who twice chaired UAlbany’s Department of Theatre, recalls his 37 years of teaching and directing as “a great, rewarding, satisfying experience.” Many of his former students have gone on to careers in the theatre. They include New York State Theatre Institute founder Patricia Snyder; Langdon Brown, chair of the University’s theatre department since 1988; and John McTiernan, an Albany high school graduate who took a summer course at the University more than 30 years ago. “He played the leading role of Hamm for me in Beckett’s Endgame in our Arena summer theatre in the summer of 1968,” Burian remembered. McTiernan went on to direct such films as The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, and Last Action Hero.

Rachel Cohon, Innovative Teacher
By Carol Olechowski
Professor Rachel Cohon has a philosophy about - well, teaching philosophy. It’s this: “Teaching philosophy without discussion is like teaching cooking without real food.”

Cohon, who “fell in love with philosophy” as an undergraduate at Pomona College in California, was originally an English major who was “excited to discover a subject that dealt with the abstract issues that fascinated me. Is there a nonmaterial soul, or are we just our bodies? What makes me the same person as the tiny baby I used to be, even though I probably don’t have any of the same atoms in me that she had? How can a brain think and be conscious? What’s really valuable and worthwhile in a human life? Why must we do what’s right and not do what’s morally wrong?”

For three years, Cohon has pondered these topics with University at Albany students - and discussion has been an integral part of the classroom experience. Since earning her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1986 and continuing her teaching career at UC Irvine, she has taught courses in moral philosophy, irrational action, and health care ethics. Cohon currently teaches Introduction to Ethical Theory, “one of my favorites. I introduce students to theories of what kind of human life is worth living. I’m also teaching a graduate seminar on the ethical and political theories of the great Scottish philosopher David Hume. That’s the main subject of my current research, so I’m enjoying that a great deal. I frequently teach an advanced undergraduate course, Contemporary Ethical Theory, that introduces students to cutting-edge work in moral philosophy, most of it by living philosophers,” says the California native.

“My teaching methods focus on getting students to think critically and reason carefully. I encourage them to raise objections all the time. On occasion, I divide the class into groups and require each group to take a position, and then think of an objection to that position and rebut it.”

Written work and tests are also important components of Cohon’s classes. “In the paper topics that I assign, students are always required to explain what a philosopher says, to evaluate it in a certain respect, to give a careful argument to support the position they take, and then to discuss an objection to the position they hold. This often leads the student to change her mind about her position, because she thinks of an objection that she can’t refute. I also give open-book tests for which I hand out a list of questions in advance. The actual test questions are taken from the list. Students are always amazed at how tough these tests are! Letting them know what the questions will be and letting them use the books shifts all the emphasis to deep understanding of the philosophical views and to reconstructing the step-by-step reasoning. For many, this is a completely different type of test from any they are accustomed to. It involves so much thinking and such careful and explicit writing - they really have to think the problem through themselves just the way the philosophers we are studying did,” notes Cohon, who came to UAlbany from Stanford University.

Right now, Cohon is busy preparing an entry on Hume’s moral philosophy for the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and writing a paper for presentation at the Central Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association April 25. She is also revising an article for inclusion in a new anthology, Hume’s Treatise: A Critical Guide (edited by Donald Ainslie, to be published by Oxford University Press). Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant - Cohon was one of only about six philosophers nationwide to receive NEH funding for 2002-03 - she is still working on her book, Virtue Felt and Fabricated: A Study of Hume’s Ethics. Through the book, she hopes to “improve our understanding of Hume, and, in addition, contribute to the ongoing ethical discussion within the humanistic disciplines.” Later this year, she will write an entry about issues pertaining to disability for the Encyclopedia of Bioethics.

Bioethics, she points out, “is not my main area of research, and I’m not a fully qualified expert in it. It’s more a secondary area for me. But I do teach it, and last semester I taught a great deal: some in my undergraduate Moral Choices course, and an entire Bioethics graduate seminar. In the introductory-level course, we discussed the ethics of euthanasia, abortion, the use of animals for food and in medical research and product testing, and some issues pertaining to how society ought to treat people with disabilities. Not all of this is bioethics - ethics in medicine and the biological sciences - but all of it has some element that relates to it. In the graduate seminar, we discussed physician-assisted suicide, a whole set of ethical issues raised by the new genetics (such as the rightness or wrongness of genetically enhancing children, and the fair distribution of genetic-improvement resources in society), the ethical status of embryos and how that connects with cloning and stem cell research, and the ethics of prenatal testing for disabilities. That seminar was very lively.”

Keeping up with issues in bioethics, says Cohon, is “very hard, especially since it’s not my main focus. But it’s so interesting, I always read every news article I see about new developments in medicine and biomedical research. I was very interested in biology as an undergraduate, and that’s helped me to follow the new developments reasonably well. However, modern genetics is a whole new ball game since I was in college; I don’t have adequate scientific knowledge to understand all the changes in that field. Fortunately, I know geneticists who are happy to explain things to me.

Of the University, she observes: “I like it here. It’s great to be part of a department that contains philosophers and scholars with national and international reputations. They are all-around smart people, and we have very interesting discussions. I get to teach the areas of philosophy that I love, and I’m very impressed with how much the undergraduates learn and what they accomplish. I’ve had the chance to teach some majors who took courses from me every year since I came, and when they graduated they were really accomplished young philosophers. They knew so much! I had the chance to supervise an excellent honors student last year, which was wonderful. And I do have some time for research, although not enough - there’s never enough time!”

Still, Cohon has time for University service. A Phi Beta Kappa member, she serves on the UAlbany committee that selects new members to this “wonderful, quite old, and highly respected national honors society. I’m glad to be active in identifying the students who have earned this honor.”

If she could wish for just one thing, it would be additional resources. “I sometimes have to teach a very large lecture center course, with 200 students, and we don’t have funds to support section leaders for small discussion groups. Teaching philosophy without discussion, to me, is like teaching cooking without real food. Students can study the cookbook and take a test on what it says, but they can’t learn by doing. I teach best when I challenge the students with questions, and they get to challenge me and the philosophers I teach with their own questions and objections.”

Cohon knows she made the right move when she switched her undergraduate major from English to philosophy. In the latter field, “you have to defend your position, and it’s not worth anything if you don’t. I also had a taste for debate and the effort to refute a position I disagree with. If a thesis bothered me, I took great joy in showing that it was based on a fallacy or involved a contradiction. I thought about becoming a lawyer, as many philosophy majors do. But in the end, I preferred to use my taste for verbal sparring on issues of more cosmic importance.”

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