AP/HUMA 3318 3.00

Black Popular Culture

This course analyzes Black popular cultural forms and expressions in the Americas including music, film, television, style, contemporary visual arts, and as taken up in Black cultural theory. Understood as an analysis and response to the conditions of contemporary Black life, to decolonizing and civil rights struggles, and as a resistant and/or liberatory politics, Black popular culture is also internationally influential.

Investigation will include issues of production, reception and commodification. The course will serve as an introduction to such theorists as Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, Paul Gilroy and Rinaldo Walcott. It will conclude with an introduction to Afrofuturism.