BLACK MUSIC AND AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY

MUSIC 417

Examination of jazz history with an emphasis on scholarship, criticism, and fictional representations of jazz culture especially as they relate to the African American diaspora. Emphasis on relationship between the history of racial inequality in the United States and the development of jazz and jazz scholarship.

AFRICAN 409

Introduces the phenomenon of "musical blackness" as a US-based, transnational cultural form and practice. Explores (topics will vary) how US-based, racially specified black musical forms, together with global forms also identified as "black," were constituted as part of the legacies of European colonial encounter and US imperial expansion; the categories of "traditional" music and popular style took shape and have been experienced as something part and parcel of this historical process. Gives close consideration to genre, style, and performance practice, in order to understand the many ways in which musical sound and social/political ideas are inextricably linked.

AFROAMER 271

Introductory level course on specific topics in African American culture.

AFROAMER 154

The aesthetic and political evolution of hip-hop culture and its relationship to contemporary social issues.

AFROAMER 338

Focuses on the notion of blackness as it is developed in the poetry and drama of key figures of the 1960s Black Arts Movement. Emphasizes the emergence of a critical discourse specific to a "new" black aesthetic.