Trap Music and the Black Arts

Trap Music and the Black Arts
This course puts "Trap Music" i.e. contemporary hip hop from Black lumpenproletariat/underclass cultures into conversation with poetry, plays and film from the Longue dure Black Arts/Black Power movement -- a Black cultural, intellectual and artistic movement identified with the work of Black artists such as Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez of the 1960s and 1970s but extending beyond these decades. This course invites students to be scholars, requiring that they draw from their own knowledge of trap music, subject it to critical analysis and situate it in the intellectual history of the Black political thought. We will read them together to discuss commonalities and divergences, aesthetic choices, gender, race, colorism and class issues and ask what art reveals about political conditions and what political work art attempts. The course aims to have students critically examine the music they might listen to as art, ideology and political tract and at the same time brings Black popular (ized) lumpen culture into conversation with Black Power/ Black Studies not merely as an object to study but a peer in conversations about Blackness and Black futures.