Black Music Seminar: Hiphop History, Culture and Politics

This course is designed to engage scholars in a process of discovering and developing critical analytical skills within the context of Hiphop history, culture, and politics. This course will explore Hiphop culture as a manifestation of Africana visual, performance and oral tradition. It will explore Africana (Africana is inclusive of the multiethnic diaspora; Latino/a, Caribbean)cultural practices that have given rise to the numerous manifestations of Hiphop and its contested validity over its thirty-plus year history in the United States and abroad. Hiphop has affected/infected all facets of popular culture from the classroom to the corporate boardroom. This course examines the development, contradictions and various representations of Hiphop culture & the rap industry. This course is designed to increase students’ depth of knowledge of Hiphop within the context of Africana cultural practices, the histories and various positions about what Hiphop is and provide opportunities for dialogue and further study.