Texas Tech University
2508 15th Street
Escondido Theater – Student Union Building

Thursday, February 12th
5:30pm

This talk is open to all audiences

Join the Humanities Center this Thursday at 5:30pm in the Escondido Theater of the Student Union Building when our year-long Humanity Speaker Series continues with a talk by Dr. Kimberly Mack of the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

Dr. Mack will deliver “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 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.

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