Afro-American Studies 390S - Black Youth Culture/Neoliberal

Using hip hop as a lens to explore the development of Black youth culture in the neoliberal age, this course considers the African American experience during the close of the 20th century and dawning of the 21st. Our investigation will be concerned with at least two things that we will examine in parallel throughout the semester. On one hand, we will dig deeply into the origins and evolution of hip hop artistry??including visual art, dance, music, lyrics, and performance??and the impact of commercial forces on those forms. On the other hand, we will pay serious attention to the ascendence of a political ideology in the United States and globally during the 1970s and after that emphasized deregulation and privatization as a means of reshaping the global economy according to the tenets of neoliberalism, in order to understand the impact of those global economic and political realignments on the generation of black people who gave birth to or, later, inherited hip hop. Of central importance here will be the Nixon administration?s adoption of a policy of ?benign neglect? toward low-income black communities living in the nation?s crumbling cities; the replacement of the War on Poverty with the War on Drugs; the enactment of ?free trade? policies that accelerated the deindustrialization of the American economy and deepened the structural unemployment of black people in the United States; the militarization of municipal police forces; and the explosive growth of the carceral state.