MUSIC9

This course explores the interplay between film and music as sites of cultural meaning, identity formation, and social resistance, focusing primarily on African American experiences. We will contemplate how different media- ranging from mainstream Hollywood films and biopics to lesser-known documentaries - shape understandings of, challenge, and reimagine Blackness. Our repertory includes slave and prison songs, jazz, civil rights music, rock & roll, and fusional music. Primary and secondary readings in African American studies, musicology, and performance studies will ground our analytic frames as we explore interiority/exteriority, minstrelsy, respectability politics, identity, and the sonic color line. Students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds are welcome; formal experience with music is neither required nor expected.

Aesthetic and Interpretive Inquiry (AII), Exploring Difference and Power (EDP)