ENGL 221
Hip Hop Culture Spring 2025
Division I D Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed MUS 217 / AFR 222 / AMST 222

Class Details

The course examines how young people of color created hip hop culture in the postindustrial ruins of New York City, a movement that would eventually grow into a global cultural industry. Hip hop music producers have long practiced “diggin’ in the crates”–a phrase that denotes searching through record collections to find material to sample. In this course, we will examine the material and technological history of hip hop culture, with particular attention to hip hop’s tendency to sample, remix, mash-up, and repurpose existing media artifacts to create new works or art. We will use a media archaeological approach to examine the precise material conditions that first gave rise to graffiti art, deejaying, rapping, and breakdancing, and to analyze hip hop songs, videos, and films. Media archaeology is a critical and artistic practice that seeks to interpret the layers of significance embedded in cultural artifacts. How does hip hop archaeology remix the past, the present, and the future? How do the historical, political, and cultural coding of hip hop artifacts change as they increasingly become part of institutional collections, from newly established hip hop archives at Cornell and Harvard to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture?
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3374
Grading: no pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: Four papers, quiz, project with presentation.
Prerequisites: None
Enrollment Preferences: AMST majors or prospective majors
Distributions: Divison I Difference, Power, and Equity
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
MUS 217 Division I AFR 222 Division II AMST 222 Division II ENGL 221 Division I
DPE Notes: This course requires students to use an effective descriptive and critical vocabulary to discuss and analyze artifacts of hip hop culture, with attention to race, gender, class, sexuality, and other categories of social difference. They must understand the material, technological, historical, and cultural contexts that gave rise to hip hop culture, and proficiently synthesize scholarly perspectives related to the formation and transformations of hip hop from the early 70s to the early 21st cent.
Attributes: AFR Culture, Performance, and Popular Technologies
AMST Arts in Context Electives
AMST Comp Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora

Class Grid

Updated 2:59 am

Course Catalog Search


(searches Title and Course Description only)
TERM




SUBJECT
DIVISION



DISTRIBUTION



ENROLLMENT LIMIT
COURSE TYPE
Start Time
End Time
Day(s)