Pioneering spirit: Afrika Bambaataa, left, Bronx DJ credited as the godfather of hip-hop, on stage with rap artist Flavor Flav in 1990

© S.I.N. / Corbis

Earlier this spring, the movement to institutionalize the study of hip-hop in academe received a boost. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History announced that it would enshrine hip-hop culture with an extensive exhibit tracing its evolution from a Bronx pastime in the 1970s to today's global juggernaut.

Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor of black popular culture in the African and African American Studies Program at Duke, has explored the effects of hip-hop culture on black popular culture, black women, and black intellectual production through both his studies and his writing. His four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture; Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic; Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation; and, most recently, New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity, have earned him praise for his ability to bridge the divide between academe and the public. Critic Michael Eric Dyson has characterized him as "one of the most brilliant cultural critics of his generation" and says that Neal "writes gracefully, thinks sharply, speaks cogently, and is old school and new school at once."

In April Neal, who is also a regular contributor to seeingblack.com and to National Public Radio's News and Notes, had a public conversation with Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, director of the program in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, at the fourth annual Duke Magazine Campus Forum. Sharpley-Whiting teaches a variety of subjects, including comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, critical race studies, feminist theory, and film and hip-hop culture. She is also a professor of French and director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies and has written several books: Negritude Women; Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narrative in French; and Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms.

At the forum, the two scholars sought to investigate how hip-hop culture influences a wide spectrum of human interaction, ranging from the idea of the strip club as a new "church" to the tension between artistry and commercial values in music. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

On his intellectual "alter ego"

I want you to talk a little bit about your "thugniggerintellectual" concept. You know that is going to rattle some people.

I have an alter ego--my intellectual alter ego. My intellectual alter ego is thugniggerintellectual--one word. And it's been something I've been playing with for a while, because I've been trying to work through in my mind a way to make the life of the mind available and accessible to people who would never think about it as such.

I just became really attracted to this notion of where we look for intellectual production. And it's not always in the places where we think we're going to find it. So, I began to try to work through this kind of persona. It's come to me at different moments, particularly, in the past, doing my work in Starbucks. And folks just fundamentally don't have an understanding of why I'm there at two o'clock in the afternoon with a laptop and a bunch of books.

Folks are saying things to me, like, are you a numbers runner? Are you taking bets? Are you a DJ? Do you sell mix tapes? The last thing they're thinking about is that this cat is an intellectual. So, I actually think of myself differently than people may perceive me. I understand that. But folks will be more apt to think of me as a thug and a nigger before they would ever think about me as an intellectual. In fact, thinking of me as an intellectual is the more dangerous thing because they have no grasp on that. I mean all kinds of things that come up except this idea I'm an intellectual.

I wanted to embody this figure that comes into intellectual spaces like a thug, who literally is fearful and menacing. I wanted to use this idea of this intellectual persona to do some real kind of "gangster" scholarship, if you will. All right, just hard, hard-core intellectual thuggery. And what it really personifies is how I'm thinking about being in these spaces when I'm not trying to fit into these spaces. When I'm not trying to be the collegial colleague. When I'm not trying to sell books. When I'm not trying to get students into my classes. When I'm not trying to be politically correct. This is this other persona. I wanted to really do a book project that spoke to raising these kinds of questions, ultimately, within this guise that, in some ways, identity is all performance. And thugniggerintellecutal is just one of the identities that I perform.

But there are those who, of course, are quite resistant to the idea of the black intellectual intervening in this space and talking over the dialogue of hip-hop. And so, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about that and what kind of interventions do we make, specifically, with respect to hip-hop?

Folks like Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., Cornel West, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson--black intellectuals, public intellectuals--were called to duty to provide the labor to explain what these new urban phenomena were.

So, whether it was the race riots in L.A. in 1992 or the case of Skip Gates and 2 Live Crew recording a song that some felt was vulgar or the O.J. Simpson trial, these folks were called to duty to explain the significance of what this stuff was. And in some ways, black, public intellectuals are able to dictate what kind of conversations are going to happen in our society around race and class and popular culture. The best example of that recently is Michael Eric Dyson's very timely book on Hurricane Katrina [Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster]. He's still out there trying to push his book, and, of course, selling his ideas, but at the same time keeping the focus on what happened and what didn't happen last September.

He understands better than anybody that part of selling your ideas in the marketplace is selling the person behind the ideas. The only way the ideas circulate is if a person does. And part of that is about celebrity and personality culture. And so much of contemporary hip-hop journalism, really, is about celebrity journalism. But then, when you have that attention, what do you do with it? What do we do when we have that kind of significant space?

We always have to [ask] ourselves, when we're dealing with the bright lights, are we still having the kind of conversations that allow us to bring the kind of ideas that we're committed to politically into a wider forum?