This year’s text will be Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984) or Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1999), depending on availability, by poet Sonia Sanchez, author of 16 books, including poetry, short fiction, and children’s stories, as well as plays and essays. A distinct, female voice in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (BAM), Ms. Sanchez helped to found the Black Arts Repertoire Theater; the first black studies program in the U.S., at San Francisco State University in 1968; and the first course on the black woman, at the University of Pittsburgh. Other books include Shake Loose My Skin, Homecoming, Under a Soprano Sky, and Does Your House Have Lions? Full Moon of Sonia, her latest CD, features her poetry with jazz, R&B, gospel, blues, Afro-Cuban, and hip hop music. A journal, B’Ma, at www.pages.drexel.edu/~delancfe/index-old.htm, was created to focus exclusively on Sanchez’ work and the Black Arts Movement.

Students will learn the common text in close reading, discussion and preliminary essay exercises. The idea is to develop an intimate relationship with a text, learn about yourself as a writer from your responses to it, and then, by creating a mini-course syllabus and lesson plans, learn how to help readers at different stages in life and literacy find their own ways to enter the text. Learning the work takes three to four weeks; teaching requires four to six, with some overlap. Students teach in several urban learning sites, each with its own challenges and charisma: high school English classes, a church-based book group, adult education centers, a recovery house, and homeless shelters. In April students attend a reading by Sonia Sanchez at Art Sanctuary, a North Philadelphia arts organization at the Church of the Advocate (www.artsanctuary.org).

Topics include: community, crime and injustice, economics, education, family, history, identity, language, politics, sports, race and racism, sex and sexism. Particular emphasis will be placed on the importance of hip hop in framing urban youth identity.

The second half of the class is structured as a series of case studies. We begin with printing and then spend a week looking in-depth at music making in the United States. On August 5th, a guest speaker will lead a discussion about television and film as mass media and popular culture. The following class period will be spent examining the role of media in the construction of events and meaning associated with last year’s terrorist attacks. We’ll also spend a week looking at tourism as a manifestation of popular culture. The final class meeting will be devoted to a final exam.

The evolution of hip hop will also concern us as we consider not only the lyrics and music, but also other cultural forms in which it manifests itself for example, graffiti art, DJ culture, and fashion. Though our chief emphasis will be on your own writing, much of our class time and most of the readings will focus on the subject matter.

In addition to the readings, we will regularly listen to the music and view assorted film clips and music videos. For each paper assignment, students will turn in a topic proposal, a final draft, a critique of a peer’s paper, and an optional rewrite. This class will be taught in a computer classroom, so students should be familiar with basic Web-browser and e-mail functions. A few class periods will consist of hands-on workshops to learn other computer applications.

In this course, we will take up these questions (and others) as we read and write about rap, arguably, one of today’s most compelling pop-cultural art forms. A substantial writing component, the course challenges the students to write critically on rap’s explosive lyrics and rhythmic style. We’ll look for instance, at the poignant messages of a Public Enemy, Fugees, or Ice Cube and the intricate styles of a Snoop, Method Man, or Bahamadia. We’ll also consider controversial issues like the alleged sexism and violence of “gangsta” rap. While critical essay writing will be a major focus of the course, students can also expect to do a substantial amount of reading. We’ll read and discuss texts on hip hop history, culture, politics, and general b-boy/b-girl attitude. Both the reading and writing assignments are designed to stimulate energetic and provocative thought on rap, its rhetoric and poetics.

“Hip hop” has become the buzzword in academic circles, galvanizing fields as diverse as Linguistics, English, Religious Studies, Anthropology, and Philosophy. Courses that examine the Hip Hop Cultural Movement have, of course, been offered in many universities nation-wide (and world-wide), such as Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Massachusetts, UCLA, Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, and various universities in France, Germany, South Africa and England, among others. Few courses focus specifically on language use within the hip hop community, though language is perhaps the primary tool with which one can gain a thorough understanding of the culture. What is the relationship between language and identity in the hip hop community? Can we define a language variety known as Hip Hop Nation Language [HHNL]? How does language use within the hip hop community confirm or challenge our knowledge of African American Language, and how have other global languages and cultures been impacted by hip hop culture and communication? How does HHNL disturb our notions of race and language? What can we gain by examining the communicative modes and codes of this dynamic cultural community?

This course will explore hip hop culture through the study of language. While a background in linguistics is not required (though it may be helpful), a love for hip hop is. We will be examining this Black-street-culture-turned-global-culture through the various lenses of discourse analysis: speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversational analysis, and variation analysis. Students will gain an introduction to these various frameworks in the sociolinguistic analysis of discourse, and will be expected to apply and expand these frameworks and methodologies in their own work. We will focus on both theory and field research.

Hip-hop also influences slam poetry, a new, renegade take on the work of America’s classic bards and scribes. This form of lyricism incorporates the tenets of traditional verse, but lends equal credence to the attitude and aggressiveness of hip-hop, albeit with a greater sense of civic responsibility.
In studying the evolution of these, the class will also evaluate urban lifestyles. Hip-hop and slam poetry are sounding boards for discussions on health, education, crime and employment in urban areas. The art forms compliment the tone and tenor of urban America, so there is a natural link.

This course will explore the relationship between black sacred and secular music from the Civil Rights Movement to the present. It is hard to imagine the Civil Rights Movement without the freedom and protest music, and in other periods of American history, black music has performed a similar foundational role. Specifically, we will examine the freedom songs of the Civil Rights Movement, Soul music of the 70s, traditional and contemporary Gospel music, and the emergence of Hip-Hop. At some level, we will find that all of these genres are vehicles for social commentary regarding the state of the black community. Students will do research into the different genres of African-American music and show how this music functioned in its socio-cultural contexts.