Welcome to the Party: Black Nightlife and the Making of Race in America

3 units

This course examines the relationship between black nightlife and race in the United States. Spanning from slavery to the present, it examines how nightlife has been both a site of racial oppression as well as a ground of playfulness, joy, resistance, self-making, and artistic innovation. Using theoretical insights from the fields of literary studies, black studies, and performance studies, our explorations will range widely, from plantation parties, juke joints, and rent parties to ballroom competitions and queer night clubs to virtual parties hosted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Studying literature, visual art, music, social media, and other modes of black expressive culture, students will better understand how nightlife-often seen as a site of immorality and a space outside of the normal operations of the world-has been vital to the making of race and U.S. democracy.