The Culture of the (Long) Civil Rights Movement: From Jean Toomer’s Cane to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter
Martin Lüthe
Kommentar
In this seminar we attempt to analyze the cultural practices, performances, discourses, and affects that emerge in the context of the “long” Civil Rights Movement. The long here designates that the master narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, which center-stages the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-to-late 1960s, is flawed and limited and serves a specific (political) purpose itself, as Jacqueline Dowd Hall argued in her essay of the same title. We will utilize an array of different source materials and some theoretical texts to inspire discussions and analyses of the cultural history of African American life in the face of anti-black violence, a racist carceral state, of persisting economic and political disenfranchisement, and of the biopolitics of racial capitalism. As these levels of an anti-black racist formation serve as driving forces of U.S. life realities since the end of slavery and to this day, they have and continue to become visible, articulated, scrutinized, and criticized in African American cultural performances from the Harlem Renaissance to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter (or the Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef and, for example, the song “You’re Not Like Us”).
Schließen16 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung