HHIS-253: Black Politics and Culture

This course explores African American integration into mass culture since the sixties. We will focus on the origins and evolution of Hip Hop from a local urban working-class sub-culture into a national and international genre and industry. We will examine a twenty-year period (1972-1992) of unprecedented expansion of black representation in television, cinema and popular music, but also of new social crises facing black communities, such as the interrelated problems of joblessness, crime, hyperpolicing and mass incarceration. Required Text: Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press/ University Press of New England, 1994).