Daniel Mcneil

Biography

Daniel McNeil joined Carleton in 2014 as a strategic hire to enhance the university’s research, teaching and program development in Migration and Diaspora Studies. Before joining Carleton, he held the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Professorship in African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University in Chicago and taught Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Hull and Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. McNeil’s research traverses national and disciplinary boundaries to examine the cultural and intellectual history of the transatlantic world post-1865. His recent publications include chapters in Film Criticism in the Digital Age, American Shame: Stigma and the Body Politic and Slavery, Memory, Citizenship. He is also the author of Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs, which is the first volume in Routledge’s series on the African and Black Diaspora and the first monograph to analyse the history of mixed-race self-fashioning using a transatlantic lens. Drawing on a diverse range of sources and characters – from the diaries, letters, novels and plays of femme fatales in Congo and the United States to the advertisements, dissertations, oral histories and political speeches of Black Power activists in Canada and the United Kingdom – the book provides readers with a timely rejoinder to academics, artists, journalists and politicians who misappropriate the mixed-race label in order to celebrate prophets, berate delinquents, and market “new” national icons for contemporary forms of corporate multiculturalism. McNeil’s forthcoming book project, A Tale of Two Critics: Structures of Feeling in the Black Atlantic, will also explore the shape and contours of a transnational cultural formation forged, in the first instance, by the transatlantic slave trade. It pays particular attention to the creative artistry, cultural criticism and politically infused acts of pleasure of a diasporic generation that came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Resisting attempts to integrate and gentrify the restless, dissident work of this cohort into generic discussions of baby boomers, or parochial accounts of a post-civil rights generation in the United States, A Tale of Two Critics explores the explorative, provocative and suggestive work of writers who have expanded our sense of Black Consciousness as/and Modern Consciousness.

Research Interest

cultural and intellectual history of the transatlantic world