BLST 094A. Student Run: Hip Hop, Community, and Identity

This course will be a space for students to engage critically and deeply with Hip Hop in a way they might not have the opportunity to elsewhere in their coursework. In the course, we are hoping to make use of various different forms of source material (songs, song lyrics, music videos, films/documentaries, other visual media, journal articles, essays, and book chapters) to guide our discussions on different themes around Hip Hop such as religion and spirituality, gender and the politics of desire, and class and accessibility.

We will start off the semester speaking and learning together about Hip Hop’s origins and foundations in the United States. We will spend some of the semester talking about the ways in which we see identity show up in Hip Hop, and we will have conversations about how systems of power manifest in Hip Hop. We will also spend some of the semester focusing on Afrocentric themes (of Afrofuturism, African conceptions of time, Black Spiritualities, etc.). Towards the end of the course, we will be discussing topics related to the music industry, popular culture, and so on. Our  intention is for our conversations around all these different themes and topics to overlap as we progress through the semester.
1
Eligible for BLST
Spring 2020. Student

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