ASRC 3020 - Representing Brooklyn: Race, Place and Popular Culture

(crosslisted) AMST 3020, ANTHR 3020
(CA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

O. LaBennett.

Hip Hop/Hipster/Immigrant/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. 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. The course examines Black cultural production as it relates to representations of Brooklyn and deconstructs images and discourses that marginalize the borough’s Black residents. Spanning the period from 1945 to the present day, 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.