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Building my syllabus for this class that starts Monday and I'm both very excited and a little overwhelmed. lol.
Literature in the Age of Hip-Hop
Literature in the Age of Hip-Hop
This class is only 3.5 weeks long but the books we're gonna focus on are:
@NifMuhammad Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.
@ericadawsonpoet When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Sister Souljah. The Coldest Winter Ever.
Ta-Nehisi Coates The Beautiful Struggle.
@NifMuhammad Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.
@ericadawsonpoet When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Sister Souljah. The Coldest Winter Ever.
Ta-Nehisi Coates The Beautiful Struggle.
Still figuring out the exact essays/excerpts but they'll also deal with some stuff from @imaniperry, @ProfTriciaRose, Joan Morgan, @zentronix, and others.
I'm excited but it could be interesting/challenging because I don't think ANY of the students (as far as I can tell from photos) are Black so I'll really have to work to make sure they don't read a bunch of BS into the work and have enough cultural/historical context.
The texts for this course were incredibly difficult to pick but I had a few organizing principles.
1. Prioritize Black writers.
2. Representation across genre.
3. Wanted books that felt moored in the sociopolitical context of the last 40 years w/o being str8 history texts.
1. Prioritize Black writers.
2. Representation across genre.
3. Wanted books that felt moored in the sociopolitical context of the last 40 years w/o being str8 history texts.
A little on each book.
@NifMuhammad stays writing books that make me weep but in particular the Tribe book is brilliant in situating ATCQ in the larger history of the genre/blk music and it does some useful work in situating how this music impacted listeners beyond the coasts.
@NifMuhammad stays writing books that make me weep but in particular the Tribe book is brilliant in situating ATCQ in the larger history of the genre/blk music and it does some useful work in situating how this music impacted listeners beyond the coasts.
@ericadawsonpoet a beautiful long poem. I think the long poem is understudied esp outside of poetry-specific contexts. I'm also really in love with how the poem uses allusion in ways that honor/build on the allusive tradition in hip-hop and Black culture more broadly.
Sister Souljah's TCWE is one of those novels that is feels like mad Black youth of a certain age just had in the crib, even if they weren't readers. Ghetto Harry Potter shit. Also Souljah herself became such an important figure in the larger culture's imagination of hip-hop.
TNC's Beautiful Struggle is a deeply underrated book from maybe the most well known Black writer this decade. For my money his most interesting joint. Does some useful work contextualizing Hip-Hop is a history connected to Black Power/Black books. Also a 2Pac teen cameo.
There's obviously more I could say on all these joints but I'll hold off for now. Maybe I'll use this thread to give updates on the course as it develops.
I've had some thought partners of mine ask why I want to prioritize Black writers esp in this class. My answers are a few things...
1. i teach at an overwhelmingly white college. If a class has more than 2 black students that is a very black class here. Given that I want my students to have a sense of Black people as thought leaders even if they are often absent from their spaces.
2. A lot of the people who get credit for being "hip-hop thinkers" are not Black. I know some of those folks and love some but they benefit deeply from a society that doesn't want to see Black folks as experts so I'm not fucking with that.
3. On a practical note requiring a book means sales for a writer and if the deck is stacked against Black writers in many ways I'm gonna be thoughtful about directing sales their way when I can.
4. Hip-Hop is Black American Culture. Yes influenced and built and contributed to by many many others but its foundation is what it is. In recent years I've noted and become suspicious of how some non-Black artists deploy "hip-hop" as a way to have access to Blackness...
without having to be seen as an outsider. That's some bullshit. So I'm prioritizing writers that don't have those hangups/things to think through. I will assign some supplemental stuff thinking about non-Black identity in hip-hop since that will be most/all of my students exp.
This will be fun though. I've co-taught a course about the history & politics of hip-hop at my previous institution but this will be the first time I'm teaching a lit course rooted in the culture so I hope to learn a lot from it.
Aight I threw versions of all the course materials in this open google folder.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OQB9yOo9fVfbdLTcVnc3ibryWSY5z9id/view?usp=sharing
If you want to read for tomorrow there's selections from @imaniperry, @adammansbach, @proseb4bros, and @zentronix.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OQB9yOo9fVfbdLTcVnc3ibryWSY5z9id/view?usp=sharing
If you want to read for tomorrow there's selections from @imaniperry, @adammansbach, @proseb4bros, and @zentronix.
Wednesday we'll do a class listening session with spotify premium and the JQBX app so you're welcome to join us at 9:15 AM mountain for that.
Thursday we read the first 6 chapters of @NifMuhammad's Go Ahead In The Rain.
Thursday we read the first 6 chapters of @NifMuhammad's Go Ahead In The Rain.
One small note for all the reading. I'm asking my students that if a song/artist is mentioned and you don't know it then pause and take a listen. It helps.
Having students watch Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme
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Follow along if you feel it.
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Follow along if you feel it.
Tomorrow we'll be listening to Masta Ace's A Long Hot Summer using JQBX and Spotify Premium. I'll post a link if y'all tryna listen.
a little update. Today we discussed the first half of Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle. It's such a rich text that I know my students are missing a lot (which is okay and almost always the case with any text). A thing I'm thinking about though is how little
we're taught about Black people as historical subjects in the US, especially if you happen to have not been Black in the US. There was a paragraph about JFK and the military as things Black folks of a certain time/ideology were down with and I more or less had to explain
real quick and dirty the history of Black military history from Crispus Attucks to present lol. And explain who JFK was in the mind of some Black folks. whew. lol.
Friends this is what we call earning a damn paycheck. lol.
oh also here's some additional things I gave them in class. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/fbi-black-bookstores/553598/
http://www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/BPP_Ten_Point_Program.pdf
also I read the part of 'Between The World And Me' where Coates introduces the idea of "The Mecca."
also I read the part of 'Between The World And Me' where Coates introduces the idea of "The Mecca."
also I had to more or less explain who Rakim was in the historical development of hip-hop lyricism which is... a really cool/fun thing to do but kind of hard to explain if you don't have a lot of context. Shoutout to my nephew this summer for being a guinea pig. lol
