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. Upending narratives of racial essentialism that persist in discourses about music, the course challenges students to reconsider their assumptions about cultural and personal identity by exploring two foundational stories in the United States: that music crosses racial boundaries, and that music bolsters racial boundaries. By engaging with primary source materials and reflecting on texts, films, and songs, 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.