"Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity"
John L. Jackson
Associate Professor at Duke University, NC
Department of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies
John L. Jackson Jr. is assistant professor of cultural anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. Before joining Duke's faculty in the fall of 2002, Jackson was a junior fellow in Harvard University's Society of Fellows. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University in 2000. His first book, Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press 2001), examines the interconnections between racial identity and socioeconomic status that define the lives of black folks today. In addition to this Harlem research, he has conducted three years of field-work in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and published several "experimental essays" based on this research, including "Ethnophysicality, or an Ethnography of Some Body" in Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure (NYU Press 1997) and "The Soles of Black Folk: These Reeboks Were Made for Runnin' from the White Man" in Race Consciousness: African American Studies in the Next Century (NYU Press 1996). As a film producer, he has also produced a nationally-distributed documentary, several internationally-screened film-shorts, and an award-winning 16mm feature film.