Nominated for 3 Emmys, 'Misfits' Book Dropping Sept. 7, Michaela Coel Joins Black Panther

Michaela Coel photographer by Gareth McConnell for The New ork Times Magazine Best Actors Review, December 13, 2021

Michaela Coel’s 3 Emmy Nominations

The Michaela Coel show continues to roll on, with the news that the actor, director, screenwriter received three nominations for ‘I May Destroy You’. Broadcast on Sunday, September 19 on CBS, Coel has been nominated for Outstanding Directing For A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie - 2021; Outstanding Lead Actress In A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie - 2021; and Outstanding Writing For A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie - 2021.

In December 2020, Michaela Coel was part of an impressive creative presentation by The New York Times Magazine, with its focus on today’s best actors. The magazine writes: “With ‘I May Destroy You,’ she set out to disturb, first by making us laugh, then by going to all kinds of extremes.”

‘Misfits’ Book Out September 7

The talented creative’s book ‘Misfits: A Personal Manifesto’ is due out September 7, 2021 in British and American bookstores.

The book will focus on topics covered in Coel’s MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018. In her speech, which drew audible gasps from the audience, Coel spoke in astounding clarity and factual detail about the barriers and racism she had experienced as a young black woman working in the television industry, as well as her own sexual assault.

A video of the speech is embedded in AOC. The Guardian quotes British publisher Ebury saying that in the book [Coel] “makes a compelling case for radical honesty”. It will be a rousing and bold case against fitting in and a powerful manifesto on how speaking your truth and owning your differences can transform your life.”

Michaela Coel Goes to Wakanda

Variety broke the news on July 21 that Micaela Coel has joined the cast of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’. Details of her character are in the lock box, but the actor as joined “director Ryan Coogler at Atlanta’s Pinewood Studios, where production began last month,” writes Matt Donnelly.

Lastly — for the moment — the BBC UK said in May that Michaela Coel is working on a new television series.

“It’s truly in Michaela’s head and it’s not for me to second guess that too much at this point,” the network’s drama chief Piers Wenger responded to questions about the plot’s potential ties to ‘I May Destroy You."‘ “It’s at relatively early stages, but I wanted to let the fans of ‘I May Destroy You’ know that there is a new show coming along…What relationship that show will have with the original series, [is for Michaela to decide].”

Related MIchaela Coel articles on AOC.

Hip-hop Prof A.D. Carson Invites Dialogue with World's First Peer-Reviewed Rap Album

Hip-hop professor A.D. Carson. Dan Addison, CC BY.

By A.D. Carson, Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop, University of Virginia. First published on The Conversation.

As a rap artist who is also a professor of hip-hop, I always make it a point to have my songs reviewed by other artists I admire.

So when I released “i used to love to dream” – my latest album – in 2020, I turned to Phonte Coleman, one half of the trailblazing rap group Little Brother.

“Just listened to the album. S— is dope!” Phonte texted me after he checked it out. “Salute!”

I responded with sincere appreciation for his encouraging words. I told him they meant a lot to me, especially coming from him.

“Nah, bro. The bars are on point,” he replied. “Much love and respect.”

This informal conversation with a highly esteemed rapper – one whose work I’ve studied and hold in high regard – is perhaps the most resounding affirmation I can ask for as an artist.

The situation is similar in academia. That is, in order to establish oneself as a serious scholar, an academic must get their work – typically some sort of written product – published in a peer-reviewed journal, which is a journal in which works are evaluated by others in a given field to ensure their relevance and quality.

As a rap artist and academic, I wondered if I could do the same thing with my new album. Could I get my album “published” through an academic press?

Thankfully, I have discovered that the answer was “yes.” In August 2020, my album became what Michigan Publishing described as the “first ever peer-reviewed rap album published by a university press.” This is a development that I believe could open doors for scholars from all kinds of different backgrounds – including but not limited to hip-hop scholars – to contribute new forms of knowledge.

New Methods

“With this new form of scholarship comes a new approach to the peer review and production process,” the University of Michigan Press stated in an article about my work.

But in order to get a peer-reviewed rap album, it’s not like I just went into the studio, rapped over some beats and hoped for the best. I presented liner notes and created a documentary about how I made the album, which I refer to as a “mixtap/e/ssay” – an amalgamation of the words “mixtape,” which is a sampling of an array of select songs, and “essay.” I also submitted articles that help explain how the music relates to certain academic conversations, events in society and my own life.

For instance, since the album is semi-autobiographical and I am from Decatur, Illinois, I note how in May 2020, my hometown was listed as America’s third-fastest shrinking city. Since my album deals with Black life, I note how USA Today ranked Decatur as one of “the 15 worst cities in America for Black people” in terms of various metrics, such as household income, educational attainment, homeownership, incarceration and life spans.

My album – which is free and open source – deals with topics that range from race and justice to identity and citizenship.

Confronting Societal Ills

In the lyrics, I reflect from where I am now – in my career as an assistant professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville – on my memories growing up and living in the central Illinois town.

The content of the album demonstrates this, covering issues like the war on drugs and its legacy in the 1980s and 1990s and contrasting it with the current opioid crisis on the song “crack, usa”; the seeming inevitability of police killings of Black people and how we might prepare ourselves and our loved ones on “just in case”; and the trap of incarceration and institutionalization presented on “nword gem.” It also provides space for processing mental health matters like trauma, alienation, alcoholism and depression with tracks like “ampersand,” “stage fright” and “asterisk.”

I published my album with University of Michigan Press because I believe it’s important that hip-hop – and hip-hop scholarship – occupies a space that’s not an “exotic other” and, instead, functions as a way of knowing, similar to, but distinct from, other resources such as a peer-reviewed paper or book.

Professor A.D. Carson and students in the Rap Lab at the University of Virginia. Miguel 'MiG' Martinez, CC BY

In order to review my album as an academic work, the academic publisher had to “come up with appropriate questions for the evaluation of a sonic, rather than written, work.”

“The press’s standard peer review questions consider purpose, organization, and audience,” the University of Michigan Press has stated. “While many of those general themes were captured in the questions developed for ‘i used to love to dream,’ the process for coming up with new questions was much more collaborative.”

Is Higher Ed Ready?

I must admit – both before and during my doctoral studies – I was skeptical of the formal peer-review process. My thought was, what is the university to ask hip-hop to prove itself?

But my skepticism faded once I saw the responses from the anonymous scholars who reviewed my album. Based on their insightful feedback, I got the sense that they truly understood Black music and Black rhetoric. They encouraged me to consider how to present the album online in a way that would help audiences better understand the content, which is part of the reason I included the short documentary about the making of the album.

I appreciate that hip-hop is sometimes celebrated in the academic world, but it seems to me that a lot of the excitement focuses on hip-hop as a particular kind of content rather than what it teaches people about other things in the world, many of which aren’t hip-hop.

For me, hip-hop is like a telescope, and the topics I discuss are like celestial bodies and galaxies. Taking that astronomical analogy a step farther, I would ask: Does it make sense to spend more time talking about the telescope that brought those faraway objects into focus and a sharper view? Or should more time be devoted to discussing the actual phenomena that the telescope enables people to see?

I can fully understand and appreciate how hip-hop – being not just a telescope but a powerful telescope – would generate a fair amount of discussion as a magnifier. At the same time, at some point society should be able to both focus on the potency of the lens of hip-hop and also concentrate on what hip-hop brings into view.

Stars Align In Alabama: Emmett Till; Four Birmingham, Alabama Church-Going Girls; Doug Jones; Dana Schutz & Racial Reconciliation

Toyin Ojih Odutola, Representatives of State (2016/2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Nigerian-born, Huntsville-raised, U of Alabama grad Toyin Ojih Odutola first got the attention of Vogue magazine when the poet Claudia Rankine published as essay in Aperture magazine, "A New Grammar for Blackness'. 

A year later, Toyin Ojih Odutola has mounted a solo show 'To Wander Determined' at the Whitney Museum in New York. Upon entering the show, visitors see a letter written by Odutola in the persona of the 'Deputy Private Secretary' for two aristocratic families in Lagos. 

artNet writes: "For Ojih Odutola, their images form a corrective to a Eurocentric art history that thinks of both court portraiture and genre paintings as belonging to a primarily white world, with black characters as footnotes—cast as servants, slaves, or left out completely.."

The topic of black identity, colonialism, and cultural appropriation have lived front and center in our national -- and international -- dialogue in 2017. 

Zanzibar-born, 2017 Turner Prize Winner, British artist Lubaina Himid also explores black identities in a historical and contemporary web of global prejudice.

On Wednesday Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta were named curators of the 2019 Whitney Bienniale. 

Panetta joined the Whitney in 2010 and has curated solo presentations by Willa Nasatir and MacArthur “Genius” Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Hockley, who was came to the museum in March 2017, co-curated the highly acclaimed Brooklyn Museum show “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.” At the Whitney, she has so far co-curated “Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined,” , on view at the Whitney until February 25, 2018, as well as the ongoing group show “An Incomplete History of Protest.”

Linking the dots here, we have the backdrop of a year that comes at the end of a year marked by intense controversies around cultural appropriation in the art world. Among the most divisive arguments was the public maelstrom around Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket. The painting prompted open letters calling for the removal and even destruction of the painting, silent protests in front of the work, and demands that other works ALL of Dana Shutz's paintings be banned from a show in Boston as punishment for her offense of the Emmett Till painting. 

AOC has written extensively on this controversy, standing on the history of my own long-held commitment to civil rights. Note that I do believe the demands that Dana Schutz, white woman artist, not be allowed to show her artwork and be banished from painting are both chilling and absurd. That pov is expressed in my writing. (See Shutz controversy articles at end of this article.) 

The Whitney's appointment of Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta to curate the 2019 biennial seem to be a direct response to the controversy and a willingness to address the critical topic of activism in the age of Trump's America -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

In the art world, the questions of black identity, white power, cultural appropriation, racism and politics are grounded in the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi.  In 2017 Toyin Ojih Odutola's Whitney show 'To Wander Determined' opened against the political backdrop of Charlottesville and the Roy Moore/Doug Jones race for a US Senate seat in Alabama. 

I became deeply involved in this Senate race, both as a symbol of hope if we could beat back Republican theocrat Roy Moore, who believes that God triumphs the US Constitution and that America was happiest when America's families were rock-solid in a Confederacy built on the backs of slaves and women didn't have the right to vote. This is Trump's own idyllic vision for America, based on his embrace of white nationalism.

Tuesday night's Doug Jones upset victory in Alabama astonished all of America, and that includes me, who felt suddenly plunged into a Kentucky Derby race as the voter tide turned for Jones.

In the age of Trump and America's love affair with Trump buddy Steve Bannon's white nationalism, the good guy won. Alabama's new senator, Democrat Doug Jones has a long history with civil rights in the state of Alabama. 

There are many sad chapters in the history of slavery, racism and segregation in America, and especially in states like Alabama and Mississippi. The brutal lynching of Emmett Till shares the spotlight with another horrific crime in the state of Alabama: the September 15, 1963 Birmingham Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by white supremacists -- the KKK, who is much weaker today but very much devoted to the Trump presidency and the white men carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville, Va. 

Described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity, the church explosion killed four young girls and injured 22 others.  Those four girls were Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.

Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.

In 1965, the FBI concluded that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was the work of four known Ku Klux Klansmen and white segregationists -- Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry. 

At the time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his investigators knew the attackers' names and even had secret recordings to prove that the four men were behind the Birmingham church bombing. Because Hoover himself was a segregationist and white nationalist, he sealed those files away, making it much more difficult to prosecute the crime. 

While I write a separate article sharing all the details of how the cases proceeded -- when our focus is on the artwork of Huntsville-raised,  U of Alabama grad Toyin Ojih Odutola -- it was the new Democratic senator from Alabama Doug Jones who successfully prosecuted the two remaining living Klansmen Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., convicted in 2001; and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2002.

According to Sharony A. Green, a professor of history at the University of Alabama, Jones’ victory is particularly significant given the state’s racial politics: Jones, a man who made his name prosecuting the KKK, beat an opponent who, when asked when American was last “great,” replied: “I think it was great at the time when families were united, even though we had slavery.”

Against this political and artistic landscape, Whitney Biennial curators Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta have an outstanding and unique opportunity to use the highest level of artistic activism in years for the public good -- and to discuss public morality and American values.

Many hope that Trump will be impeached as a result of the Mueller investigation and Trump-family ties to Russia. I say "no" because such an action sets up the presidency of current VP Mike Pence, who is an even more dangerous threat to American values. Pence is a true theocrat -- Roy Moore made palatable to Republicans. 

“To Wander Determined” is on view at the Whitney Museum through February 25. 

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Excavations (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Wall of Ambassadors (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Winter Dispatch (2016). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Surveying the Family Seat (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Installation view, “To Wander Determined” at the Whitney Museum. Left: The Missionary (2017), R: By Her Design (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Industry (Husband and Wife) (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Newlyweds On Holiday (2016). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.