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Start date: Monday, September 6, 2004 |
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End date: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 |
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Mode of Instruction: In Person |
Course Description:
This course will examine the evolution of hip hop music and culture (Graffiti art, B-boying [break-dancing], DJ-ing, and MC-ing) from its birth in 1970s New York to its global and commercial explosion during the late 1990s. Students will learn how to think critically about hip hop culture, and also about the historical, commercial, and political contexts in which hip hop culture took, and continues to take, shape. In the broadest sense then, this is a course explores what happens when art, capitalism, identity, and democracy all run headlong into one another, illuminating, in the process, some of the specific limits, contradictions, and possibilities of what, at one time, mistakenly, one might have called this very American collision. Particular attention will be paid to questions of race, masculinity, authenticity, consumption, commodification, globalization, and good, old-fashioned funkiness. |