Religion and Hip-Hop

Catalog description

Hip-hop culture, originally a product of America's black and brown underclass, is a global phenomenon that deserves critical study. In addition to emceeing (rap music), hip-hop culture includes fashion/style, dancing and DJ'ing, and subversive forms of visual art. It can be simultaneously commercial and underground, chauvinist and liberationist, widely co-opted and struggling to remain beyond adoption. This course is rooted in new historiographies and ethnomusicologies of hip-hop culture and interrogates the culture's relationship to religion in three ways: (1) the religious streams within hip-hop culture, (2) hip-hop culture as a meaning-making system that parallels the work of religions, and (3) hip-hop culture as giving voice to global religious concerns beyond its original American urban contexts. (Open to University Honors Program students; lead professor may approve enrollment of other students if 3.5+ cumulative GPA and/or Junior or Senior standing in major of professor.)