CSP 51 Race and Popular Culture

This course uses popular culture as a lens to explore the shifting connotations and political significance of American racial ideologies. Grounding what we call “culture” in political, economic, and social contexts, we will ask: what can an examination of such popular forms as fashion, music, sports, and film reveal about the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States? Focusing on moments when certain popular fads, cultural practices, political performances or media spectacles became lightning rods for the expression of national anxieties about race and ethnicity, we will examine the ways these episodes reflected and, at times, challenged the prevailing social order. The course will be organized around case studies from the early nineteenth century to the present, including the rise and fall of the African Theater Company in New York, the public responses to heavyweight champions Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali, the significance of the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots, and the hysteria surrounding hip hop in the 1980s.