"Mark Anthony Neal is that rare and gifted writer and thinker who can move easily between street corners and academia, hip-hop heads and highbrow intellectuals, as well as pop cultural markers as different as Good Times and Batman. Soul Babies recalls the best iconoclastic work of W.E. B. Dubois, E. Franklin Frazier, and bell hooks. Yes, Neal is that kind of intellectual giant in the making: brutally honest, with razor-sharp insights, and so ahead of his time that he is one of the voices we will look to many years from now for interpretation of these first days of the twenty-first century." 
-- Kevin Powell, editor of Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature

 "Soul Babies is a book for our generation--it reads across an incredible spectrum of media and keeps you turning the pages. It will be a classic that we return to again and again. As usual, Neal reads as a black feminist. And he reminds the reader that in order to understand the complexity and beauty of African-American life and letters we will have to borrow from what we know and create something where there is nothing to get the job done." 
-- Sharon Patricia Holland, author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity.

1. "You Remind Me of Something": Toward a Post-Soul Aesthetic
2. Sweet back’s Revenge: Gangsters, Blaxploitation, and Black Middle-Class Identity
3. Baby Mama (Drama) and Baby Daddy (Trauma): Post-Soul Gender Politics
4. The Post-Soul Intelligentsia: Mass Media, Popular Culture, and Social Praxis
5. Native Tongues: Voices of the Post-Soul Intelligentsia