ASRC 3020

Representing Brooklyn: Race, Place and Popular Culture

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

Hip Hop Brooklyn. Hipster Brooklyn. Immigrant Brooklyn. Brownstone Brooklyn. This course borrows from hip hop's notion of "representing" to explore popular and cultural understandings of race and place in Brooklyn as depicted in print, music, film, and online. How is Brooklyn represented? Who represents Brooklyn? What do these representations reveal about Black cultural production, inequality, and identity formation more broadly speaking? While today Brooklyn is New York City's hippest borough and the site of swift gentrification, booming real estate, and the ever-escalating displacement of immigrant and Black communities, in the 1980s and 1990s it was a hotbed of hip hop music, making the borough synonymous with Black cultural production. Now a "global brand," New York's most populous borough is still the home of the nation's most concentrated Black population. The course examines Black cultural production as it relates to representations of Brooklyn. It also deconstructs images and discourses that marginalize the borough's Black residents. Spanning the period from 1945 to the present day, emphases will include the grassroots movements of the 1960s-1970s, the commodification of hip hop in the 1980s-1990s, and close readings of films including Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," to reflect on how Black popular culture engages with Brooklyn's diverse communities. While materials are interdisciplinary in approach, our investigation is informed by anthropological, historical, and literary texts covering topics including immigration, youth culture, transnationalism, gentrification, authenticity, and classed, gendered and racialized inequality.

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (CA-AS)

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