AFR 239
Music Migration, Blues People, and Wayward Women: Case Studies in DJ Scholarship Fall 2021
Division II
Cross-listed MUS 215 / AFR 239
This is not the current course catalog

Music Migration explores migration patterns vis-à-vis the movement of music, people, and ideas. Students will explore DJ culture as an interdisciplinary practice, both performative and subversive in its ability to shape and define social experiences. Students will employ creative research skills to examine the social context of DJ culture related to the music of the Black diaspora and its makers’ interior lives and genius, enacting what the instructor calls “DJ Scholarship.” The course will follow flows of music migrations between various regions within the United States. Instead of providing a linear history, this course connects and tunes into fundamental political-cultural movements and musical interventions across geographies. Specific attention will be paid to how sound travels within the context of the blues and what this tells us about the relationship between the sonic, race, gender, and sexuality. Using Black feminist thought as a guide to understand Blues, funk and soul women, we will draw from Saidiya Hartman’s conceptual framework “wayward women” to understand a working-class feminist practice. In turn, we will examine what kind of worlds are produced by sound cultures during significant political and social change.