Black in the City

Undergraduate / Graduate

From the art and science of the Great Migration to hip hop's contemporary renderings of cities now , this course will look at the ways Black artists and thinkers have staged encounters with urban life. From W.E.B Du Bois' sociological surveys and Gwendolyn Brooks' mid-century experiments in urban sight, to Spike Lee's staged urban explosions and Kendrick Lamar's Compton soundscapes, this course explores both the dreams and the despairs yoked to being Black in the city. ((Fiction, 20th/21st, Theory)