Music & Race in the United States

This course explores how the politics of race are made audible in twentieth and twenty-first century American popular music. By engaging with primary source materials and reflecting on weekly texts, films, and listening assignments, students will develop critical listening and thinking skills and use those skills to understand the contested nature of American musical identity through familiar and unfamiliar histories of musical belonging and cultural solidarity, alongside sounds and stories of racial intolerance, discrimination, and exoticism in the music industry. Upending simplistic narratives of racial essentialism that persist in discourses about music, the course will challenge students to reconsider their assumptions about how ideas of race and ethnicity are sounded and heard in the performance of American popular music.