Prof Michael Birenbaum Quintero’s New Course for Summer I, MH331: The Poetics and Politics of Hip Hop
New Course by Professor Michael Birenbaum Quintero: The Poetics and Politics of Hip Hop
May 22, 2018 to June 29, 2018, T/Th 1-4:30pm
Description: Provides students with a history of hip hop music, including major trends, changes in technique and musicianship, important artists and albums, regional styles, and relationship with the larger sociocultural context of African-American and U.S. politics, cultural production, and daily life. Students examine the construction of canons of hip hop greatness and engage in remaking them. Explores how hip hop engages with and is shaped by the politics of race, class, and gender issues in ways that have ramifications for a broader understanding of the role of these factors in U.S. society. Students are encouraged to reflect on their own positionality as social and political actors and global citizens. Students will engage directly with both primary sources (recordings, music videos, films, album art, reviews) and secondary sources (scholarly and journalistic texts), applying the listening, viewing, and reading skills necessary to examine these sources critically, and bring their analyses of these sources to bear in discussion and in- and out-of-class assignments. No prerequisites or prior skills required.