'Multicultural Snake Oil' and Black Cultural Criticism

摘要

On December 17, 2020, the Canadian Journal of Communication met with DanielMcNeil via Zoom. McNeil’s teaching and scholarship bring together history, culturalstudies, diaspora studies, and cognate fields of inquiry to explore the complexitiesof global Black communities. After receiving his PhD in history from theUniversity of Toronto in 2007, he was a lecturer in media and cultural studies atthe University of Hull (2007–2010) and Newcastle University (2010–2012).Between 2012 and 2014 he was the Ida B. Wells-Barnett visiting professor of Africanand Black diaspora studies at DePaul University in Chicago. McNeil returned toCanada in 2014 as an associate professor of history and chair of the migration anddiaspora studies initiative at Carleton University. In 2019–2020, he was the inauguralvisiting public humanities faculty fellow at the University of Toronto, a positionopen to citizens of all countries who are tenured faculty members with ahistory of research achievement and who have the capacity to present their researchacross disciplinary and institutional boundaries; a demonstrated trackrecord of bringing humanities research into the public realm for discussion, debate,and examination; and a promise of continued excellence. McNeil is currently aprofessor at Queen’s University and Queen’s National Scholar Chair in Blackstudies with a focus on interdisciplinary studies of liberation and decolonial praxis.Thinking While Black, his book about the political aspirations and cultural achievementsof soul rebels, Black Atlantic intellectuals, and planetary humanists overthe past fifty years, will be published by Rutgers University Press and Between theLines in 2022.