Mark Anthony Neal
Scholar of African American studies at Duke University and cultural critic; author of a 2026 essay revisiting Mailer's 'The White Negro.'
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University and a cultural critic. His 2026 essay for Level, Revisiting Norman Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ Essay, reads The White Negro (1957) as an intellectualized form of cultural appropriation, setting Mailer’s romance of Black danger against Ralph Ellison and the longer history of blackface minstrelsy.