Topics in African-American Studies (380-0-23)

Topic

Feeling in Black Music

Instructors

Barnor Hesse
8474913775
1860 Campus Dr Crowe 5-131

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-435: Tues, Thurs 2:00PM - 3:20PM

Overview of class

This is a course about Black Feeling as much as it is about Black Popular Music during the early to late 20th century. While not a course in musicology or even ethnomusicology, it is more broadly a course in Black cultural studies and Black cultural politics. Against that background ‘feeling' refers to the realm of emotional and bodily intensities that emerge as recognizable and unrecognizable, prolonged sensations and orientations in personal, social, political and cultural intimacies and relationships. The course places particular emphasis on Black loving feeling and Black political feeling in different genres of Black music. The importance of studying feelings lies in drawing attention to modes in which Black individuals and collectives, are motivated and mobilized in registers of their social being that do not rely solely or particularly on cognitive processing and rational argument, in conveying meaning, ideas, dispositions and attitudes. Black feelings are activated in passions, emotions, and affects constantly enacted and foregrounded through bodies racialized and gendered as Black. Black feelings arise and are experienced in the body affecting and being affected by different genres of Black music.

In this course we will explore the idea of the Blues as a dominant, orchestrating structure of Black feeling. In referring to Black Music we will be concerned with music produced by populations of African descent, played by, consumed by and circulated within the locales and communities in which populations of African descent have become identified and identify as Black. Black music populations have undergone the racialized formations of slavery, colonialism, segregation and white supremacy. Black music emerges as a distinctive phenomenon in the 20th century and can be generally located in different repertories across the Americas, Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, or what is known as the Black diaspora. Although this course will focus largely on Black music from the US, it will also discuss Black Music from Jamaica, Nigeria and the UK. The course will also discuss the meaning of Blackness as political feeling in abjection and emancipation; and as loving feeling in intimacy and community; in the formation of identity, culture, and affect in Black music. In short, the course develops an introduction to the culture and politics of Black Feeling, explores the orientations of feeling and emotional sociality in Black Music, with examples taken from a variety of Black musical forms from the early 20th century to the late 20th century.

Class Materials (Required)

Mary Caton Lingold, 2023, African Musicians in the Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press)
Gutherie P. Ramsey, 2004, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press)
Shana Redmond (2014) ‘Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora', New York University Press

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: PRE-REG: Reserved for Black Studies majors & minors.