S Poddar
This spring, Yale University will offer a course on something that every American household should take: the profound cultural and political impact of Beyoncé. The course, Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition, History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music, will open to students next year, diving into the musical giant’s cultural significance and “artistic genius.”.
This module, co-taught by the department of humanities and arts at Yale, tracks the unfolding of Beyoncé from her 2013 self-titled album to her latest effort, Cowboy Carter, the multi-Grammy-nominated country album. The course engages with how the artistry in Beyoncé’s music and performances takes on intersections of black intellectual thought, activism, and social issues.
Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s latest work, has received 11 Grammy nominations and was recently stated to become the most grammy-nominated artist of all time with a total of 99 such nominations. The album has been significantly well-received critically, and it is testimony to Beyoncé’s versatility and influencer in a genre that has been challenging to penetrate for black artists in history.
Students in this landmark pop culture course will have a richly academic engagement with Beyoncé’s art, drawing on theories from black feminist thought, philosophy, anthropology, and musicology. They’ll also look at the works of art history and performance studies to work towards a broader perspective on her impact. Yale describes the course as an opportunity to study “performance politics” by looking at her concert films and live shows, often heavy with social justice and activist sentiment.
The class will be taught by Daphne Brooks, a prominent writer, professor, and black studies scholar. Brooks also founded Yale’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group-an inclusive community of scholars in which faculty and students gather together to explore and celebrate the wide-ranging black sound archives. The course that she had spent countless years envisioning while teaching earlier classes at Princeton University came together to form Black Women And Popular Music Culture.
This will be the first chance for Brooks to teach a lecture course focused solely on the work of Beyoncé at Yale. Brooks hears Beyoncé’s mid-career works like Lemonade, Renaissance, and Cowboy Carter as potently meaningful cultural texts into which personal and collective narratives are inscribed. Through it, Beyoncé frequently touches issues of race, gender, and social justice, making her work especially important for students looking to understand contemporary black feminist discourse and its impacts on the arts.
It is promised to both be an adventure of exploring Beyoncé’s art and to be an academically rigorous journey into black radical thought. The act of unraveling the themes and symbolism in her work will offer a cultural and intellectual legacy as a black woman artist in mainstream success.
