Speakers
- Racquel Gates
- College of Staten Island, CUNY, Associate Professor
Racquel Gates is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. She received her PhD from Northwestern University’s department of Screen Cultures. She also holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.
Her research focuses on blackness and popular culture, with special attention to discourses of taste and quality. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke, 2018), which argues that some of the most disreputable representations of black people in popular media can strategically pose questions about blackness, black culture, and American society in ways that more respectable ones cannot. Some of her work appears in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, Television & New Media, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as other journals and collections.