Upcoming Events

Feb
12

Humanity Speaker Series:
Dr. Kimberly Mack
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

"Brown Sugar Blues:
The Pleasure and Pain of Loving Rock as a Black Girl"

In this presentation, Kimberly Mack considers the reasons and costs of Black women’s erasure from rock through the analysis of a controversial song that engages Black women and race, sex, power, and violence more directly than perhaps any other 1970s-era rock tune: “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. Kimberly tells the story of her mom’s uncritical love of the song, as well as her own unwitting participation in her mother's fandom, as a toddler, in 1971. Alongside this conversation about “Brown Sugar” is the story of how rock music--a site of simultaneous pleasure, empowerment, and alienation--complicated Kimberly's budding awareness of her own sexuality as a young Black girl.

Kimberly Mack is is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, part of Bloomsbury’s acclaimed 33 1/3 book series, was published in May 2023. She is also the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), which won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio’s Nancy Dasher Award and was a finalist for the 2022 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie First Book Award. Kimberly is writing another book, tentatively titled The Untold History of American Rock Criticism (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic), about the BIPoC and White women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. Kimberly is a memoirist and music writer, and her public-facing and scholarly articles and essays have appeared in Longreads, No Depression, Hot Press, PopMatters, Relix, African American Review, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and elsewhere.

5:30pm, Escondido Theater, Student Union Building