A new course called “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music” will be taught by Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American Studies and music, the following semester. Students will explore Black history, intellectual thought, and performance through the prism of Beyoncé’s artistic creations from 2013 until 2024.
The course is an offshoot of Brooks’s “Black Women in Popular Music Culture” course from Princeton University. Brooks was a professor in the English and African American Studies departments at Princeton.
Yale University’s logic for using Beyonce as a course
Her Princeton course’s part on Beyoncé’s cultural influence served as the basis for a large portion of the material in her Yale course. Brooks said : “Those classes were always overenrolled,” . “And there was so much energy around the focus on Beyoncé, even though it was a class that starts in the late 19th century and moves through the present day. I always thought I should come back to focusing on her and centering her work pedagogically at some point.”
“[This class] seemed good to teach because [Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time,”. “The number of breakthroughs and innovations she’s executed and the way she’s interwoven history and politics and really granular engagements with Black cultural life into her performance aesthetics and her utilization of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics — there’s just no one like her.”
Brooks responded that she wanted to draw attention to Beyoncé’s departure from some aspects of a “typical pop repertoire” when asked why the class focuses on her more recent works, like “Lemonade,” “Renaissance,” and “Cowboy Carter,” rather than her earlier bodies of work, like Dangerously in Love and B’Day. Here are some pictures of queen B!
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