AMST 3020

Representing Brooklyn: Race, Place and Popular Culture

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

Hip Hop Brooklyn. Hipster Brooklyn. Immigrant Brooklyn. Brownstone Brooklyn. 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. New York's most populous borough is still the home of the nation's most concentrated Black population. 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, and film. How is Brooklyn represented? What do these representations reveal about Black cultural production, inequality and transnational identity formation more broadly speaking? 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 iconic Brooklyn films such as Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," to reflect on how Black popular culture engages with Brooklyn's many ethnic groups. While materials are interdisciplinary in approach, our investigation is informed by anthropological, historical, and literary texts covering topics including immigration, transnationalism, gentrification, and gendered and racialized inequality. Texts include Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones; Mose Brown's Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans in Creating Community; Bailey's Jay-Z: Essays on Hip Hop's Philosopher King; Osman's The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York; and LaBennett's She's Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn.

When Offered Fall.

Distribution Category (CA-AS)

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