African American Music and US Popular Culture

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course is an interdisciplinary analysis of the aesthetics and politics of the US through a focus on Black popular music since WWII with an emphasis on the “Black Awakening” of the 1960s. With the African American experience at the center, this course will explore constructions of whiteness through the lens of jazz, disco and hip hop identity formation, as well as works of members of the Asian American and Latinx musical communities in the US as they impacted and were influenced by the Black music world.