Storytelling Hip-Hop

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Storytelling and Hip-Hop: Traditions Remixed This course uses an intersectional lens to explore narrative and poetic forms and themes in hip-hop’s literary cultures. Through intensive analysis of hip hop lyrics, audiovisual performance, digital media, and film informed by Black Queer Feminist perspectives, we will consider how artists from the late twentieth century onward have used hip-hop to extend, engage, and complicate key concerns of African American and African Diaspora literature, particularly around questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and power. How do literary tropes such as the cautionary tale, the coming-of-age narrative, the quest narrative, the redemption tale, the protest narrative, legal storytelling, and the queer coming-out story influence hip-hop texts? What possibilities do these forms of hip-hop storytelling open for our analysis of cultural and political life in our current moment? We will take up these questions through an analysis of hip-hop texts from the late 1970s to today, including works by Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, Public Enemy, Notorious B.I.G., Krudxs Cubensi, Nitty Scott, 2Pac, KripHop Nation, OutKast, Young M.A., Megan Thee Stallion, GloRilla, and others. Reading these alongside stories by writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Walker, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Janelle Monáe, we will examine how hip-hop intervenes in narratives about nation, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic location, disability, and power across space, time, and genre. Through a series of visits with contemporary artists, writers, and community organizers, we will consider how hip-hop’s cultural and poetic complexity allows for a rich intersectional analysis of multiple storytelling traditions.