Race and Popular Culture

Catalog description

This course is a seminar on race and American popular culture. It explores forms and aspects of “popular culture” and their historical development: popular/folk cultural expression, popular entertainment/amusements, mass-produced and consumed cultural products, and media representation. At the same time, it also examines the centrality of racial ideas, explicit and implicit, to popular culture’s development within the United States and its relationship to American social order and in/equality. While the course focuses on the history of the United States, it also situates that history within trans/national contexts that demonstrate the broader reach and relevance of its cultural dynamics. Restriction: no freshmen. Offered every other year.