Contact Information:

227 Williams Building

dikard@fsu.edu

 

Dr. Ikard's blog:
"Nation of Cowards"

DAVID IKARD, Associate Professor, Ph.D, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2002), specializes in twentieth century literature (with a specialty in African American), black feminist criticism, hip hop culture, and black masculinity studies. In 2007, he published his first book, Breaking The Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism and was also awarded a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship. Co-authored with Martell Teasley, Ikard's forthcoming book Nation of Cowards: Black Activism in Barack Obama's Post-Racial America, explores the disconnect between the national hype over Barack Obama's historical election to the presidency and the ever-increasing economic distress of the black community that Attorney General Eric Holder broached in his controversial "race speech" in 2008. Ikard recently co-edited a special edition on black male feminism with Mark Anthony Neal in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. He is also near completion on a monograph, Wrestling with Angels: Reconsidering Black Empowerment in the Twenty-First Century, that builds on and extends his engagement with gendered, classed, and raced forms of complicity in Breaking the Silence. Wrestling with the Angels considers whether a non-hierarchical strategy of empowerment is even feasible in the twenty-first century given the surge of socioeconomic incentives for African Americans to accommodate the status quo. From a cultural standpoint, it investigates the nuanced ways in which African American writers and artists across various creative media have negotiated this dilemma of incentives over time, paying close attention to "unorthodox" patterns of resistance that typically fall off the radar of intellectual consideration.

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