AP/ANTH 2020 6.00 Race, Racism & Popular Culture

What can popular culture tell us about the world we live in? For anthropologists, it turns out that it can tell us quite a lot!

This course takes an anthropological approach to how ideas of race, and processes of racialization, in particular, are expressed through various forms of popular culture, past & present. Scholars of all fields, including anthropology and related social sciences, have long studied how ideas about race are socially, culturally, and politically constructed, while at the same time considered how such ideas about race have profoundly impacted, structured, and stratified the world we live in. “Race” has become one particularly pervasive idea through which human beings and human difference have come to be imagined, classified, and ordered.

This course considers how various dimensions of race and racism (ideological and material, structural and representational) can be read and tracked across a long history of pop culture forms and expressions around the world. In looking at various areas of popular culture (including film, television, music, advertising, social media, news media, literature, video games, among many others), alongside a range of scholarly theoretical and ethnographic literature, we will work at situating such pop culture forms in their social, cultural, historical, and political contexts in order to think critically about what images, discourses, and underlying ideas they come to involve.

Section A / Section B Course Director: A. Chaudhuri - akc@yorku.ca