AFAM 226NCritical Approaches to Hip-Hop

3 credits · African American Studies · Penn State

This course will examine the politics of hip-hop art and culture. To do so, we will place hip-hop in broad historical context and trace its aesthetic and cultural roots from Africa to Jamaica to 1970s New York City and then forward to 1980s gangsta rap and former President Barack Obama's iPod. We will think through the implications of hip-hop's addiction to Italian-American mobsters, bling, and all-things keepin' it real. We will also search for hip-hop's political foundations in funk records, 1960s community organizing, and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. All the while, we will analyze the varieties of hip-hop politics by paying close attention to how hip-hoppers vie for authenticity, recognition, and power through cultural practices--b-boying/girling, graffiti art, emceeing, djing, e.g.-at odds with the State, inequality, and injustice. We will also situate hip-hop politics within the ongoing history of American social movements. To avoid over-romanticizing, we will equally examine hip-hop's appetite for conspicuous consumption, misogyny, homophobia, trappin', and criminality. A deep understanding of hip-hop politics, then, requires examining its contradictions as well as the ways race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography shape hip-hop--and therefore American-culture, art, and identity. To get at these and other ideas, we will read, listen, and think broadly about why a full understanding of hip-hop truly matters.