Resistance in Black Popular Culture

This course examines the terrain of black popular culture and its enduring yet shifting relationship to forms of social and political resistance employed by African-Americans in the US. This course offers a deep dive into two complex, related questions central to the field of Black Cultural Studies: 1) what is "black popular culture" and what can we learn by studying it in a social context? 2) How do black popular cultural forms both reproduce the status quo as well as enable black people to resist the status quo? In this course, we will engage with major texts and key theoretical concepts from Black Cultural Studies to help us analyze black popular cultural works via in-class listening and viewing of popular media to consider both the normative and resistive dimensions of black popular culture in a social context.