Pop sensation Beyoncé, who has received a record 99 Grammy nominations and is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians in music history, will be the focus of a new course at Yale University next year.
“Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music,” a one-credit course, will cover the years from her 2013 self-titled album to this year’s genre-bending.
“Cowboy Carter” and how the well-known singer, songwriter, and businesswoman has raised awareness of and participation in social and political causes.
Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American Studies at Yale University, plans to utilize the performer’s extensive repertoire—which includes video of her live performances—as a “portal” .
For students to learn about Black thinkers, such as Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass. “We’re going to be taking seriously the ways in which the critical work,
The intellectual work of some of our greatest thinkers in American culture resonates with Beyoncé’s music and thinking about the ways in which we can apply their philosophies to her work” and the way.
It has at times clashed with those “Black radical intellectual tradition,” said Brooks. Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, better known by her stage name,
Is not the first singer to be the focus of a college-level course. Singer and songwriter Bob Dylan has been the subject of courses throughout the years,
While Taylor Swift, her songs, and her impact on pop culture have lately been the subject of seminars at a number of schools and institutions.
This includes legal academics who want to use a well-known celebrity like Swift to contextualize complex, real-world ideas in order to engage a new generation of attorneys.
Teachers at various universities and colleges have also included Beyoncé in their curricula or taught courses on the celebrity.
Using her position to “spectacularly elevate awareness of and engagement with grassroots, social, political ideologies and movements”
In her songs, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and Black feminist criticism, Brooks believes Beyoncé is in a class by herself.
“Can you think of any other pop musician who’s invited an array of grassroots activists to participate in these longform multimedia.
Album projects that she’s given us since 2013,” said Brooks. She pointed out that Beyoncé has also attempted to use her music to convey a tale about.
“Race and gender and sexuality in the context of the 400-year-plus history of African-American subjugation.” “She’s a fascinating artist because historical memory, as.
I often refer to it, and also the kind of impulse to be an archive of that historical memory, it’s just all over her work,” Brooks said. “And you just don’t see that with any other artist.”
