The longtime Village Voice cultural critic, pioneer of hip-hop journalism and adventurous music director is on hand for an illuminating talk that locates a crisis today in black creative self-conception and representation—an exigency now being countered by new black theater, Afropunk and young black visual artists. Tracing a history of the recent past, Tate’s incisive analysis connects the depoliticization and disenchantment of black performative expression to the hypercapitalist mass-marking of black cultural output that boomed in the 1990s. Tate has contributed to numerous magazines, journals and museum catalogues; his books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk and Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. He is currently working on a new book about the Godfather of Soul, provisionally entitled James Brown’s Body and the Revolution of the Mind. Tate is introduced by award-winning poet and performer Douglas Kearney, who also leads the post-lecture Q&A.