[Right Wing Assault]

Research

While seemingly disparate in topic, ranging from the prison industrial complex to the NBA, from post–Katrina hip-hop to Shawn’s Green’s religious/baseball identities, Leonard’s work is linked by its commitment to examining the ways in which racial meaning is constructed, transformed, and challenged across time and space. It focuses on the manner that representations and dominant discourses teach race within the popular imagination. His work also explores narratives and ideologies within a myriad of popular cultural spaces, examining the ways in which media culture becomes a space of contestation, rearticulation, reification, and even resistance. Dr. Leonard investigates popular culture as both a space of violence/white supremacist affirmation and opposition. Focusing on sports, he underscores the importance of the historic moment of production and consumption, thinking through what we can learn about race, gender, nation, and class through examining popular cultural representations and audience reception.
Research Interests

Comparative ethnic studies
African American studies
Video games
Popular culture/racialized representations
Cultural politics of sport
Race and sport (NBA)
Black popular culture (film, television, and hip-hop)
Social movements (grassroots organizing)
Black freedom struggle
Prison industrial complex

Teaching

While at Washington State University, Dr. Leonard has taught and/or developed a myriad of classes, including the following:

Introduction to Black Studies
Hip Hop around the Globe
From Malcolm to Black Panther Party
Cultural Politics of Sport
Black Freedom Struggle
Black Popular Culture
Cinematic Representation of Blackness
Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex
Race and Popular Culture
Global Inequality
Social Justice and American Culture
Theories of Racism and Ethnic Conflict

[aruanan]

While seemingly disparate in topic, ranging from the prison industrial complex to the NBA, from post–Katrina hip-hop to Shawn’s Green’s religious/baseball identities, Leonard’s work is linked by its commitment to examining the ways in which racial meaning is constructed, transformed, and challenged across time and space. It focuses on the manner that representations and dominant discourses teach race within the popular imagination. His work also explores narratives and ideologies within a myriad of popular cultural spaces, examining the ways in which media culture becomes a space of contestation, rearticulation, reification, and even resistance. Dr. Leonard investigates popular culture as both a space of violence/white supremacist affirmation and opposition. Focusing on sports, he underscores the importance of the historic moment of production and consumption, thinking through what we can learn about race, gender, nation, and class through examining popular cultural representations and audience reception.

Here are the relevant words for understanding what he's up to: identities, racial meaning, time and space, focuses on the manner, explores narratives and ideologies, popular cultural spaces, a space of contestation, a space of violence/white supremacist affirmation.

This means he defines everything evanescent in a culture's relationship to sports that can be described in terms of race, which terms he also defines according to his own predilections and imagination, and gets paid for it. The difference between his gig and the rambling, monomaniacal musings of "The End from the Giant Asteroid is Near" guy in a sandwich board on the street corner is that he is able to spin a slightly more sophisticated line of BS and that he appeals to and somewhat palliates the liberal guilt felt by his patrons. He's sort of like a practitioner of upper colonics: he defines the terms, he scares his clientele by it, and he gets paid to stick it to them in intimate, humiliating, and potentially dangerous ways that are mutually titillating and guaranteed to keep the process going.