From Lena Horne to Lemonade: Black Feminism and Media Industries

From the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom to Lifetime’s six-part investigative series Surviving R. Kelly, recent media has highlighted the particular injustices and inequities faced by black women in the popular music industry and media industries more broadly. This course introduces students to Black Feminist Thought, historicizing and unpacking key concepts such as hypervisibility, intersectionality, womanism, and hegemony and exploring how they are manifest in (and sometimes challenged by) work in the creative industries, specifically music, television, and film.

Course Goals

By the end of the semester students should expect to be able to:

• Demonstrate fluency and comfort with key concepts in Black Feminist Thought

• Analyze historical and popular figures in media through these lenses

• Explicate the layers, stakeholders, and working forces of the culture industries

• Apply these perspectives to critical analysis of the culture industries

• Hone critical thinking and writing skills

• Produce a thoroughly researched and argumentative journal-style article

Week 1: Syllabus and Introductions (August 27)

1.     Film Screening: Twenty Feet from Stardom

Week 2: The Foundations, Part I – An Introduction to Black Feminism (September 3)

1.     Patricia Hill Collins, “Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought” from Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment

2.     The Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement”

3.     Hannah Giorgis, “The Chart-Topping Artist with a Complicated Empowerment Message,” The Atlantic

Week 3: The Foundations, Part II—Standpoint Theory and Hypervisiblity (September 10)

1.     “Feminist Standpoint Theory,” from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2.     Maureen Reddy, “Invisibility/Hypervisibility: The Paradox of Normative Whiteness,” from Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy

Week 4: The Foundations, Part III—Intersectionality (September 17)

1.     Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersecting Oppressions”

2.     Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”

3.     Patricia Hill Collins, “What’s in a Name?”

Week 5: Media Industries (September 24)

1.     David Hesmondhalgh and Anamik Saha, “Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production,” from Popular Communication

2.     Carolyn Byerly and Karen Ross, “Women and Production: Gender and the Political Economy of Media Industries,” from Women and Media: A Critical Introduction

3.     Stuart Hall, “What is this "Black" in Black Popular Culture?,” from Social Justice

4.     Manoucheka Celeste, “Black Media Studies”

Week 6: Consumption, Representation, and Hypervisibility (October 1)

1.     bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” from Black Looks: Race and Representation (Also available on Genius.com)

2.     Nicole Fleetwood, “Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility,” from Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness

3.     Laura Horak, “Trans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility, Temporality”

4.     Stacy Smith et al, “Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films”

Week 7: Mediation and Controlling Images (October 8)

1.     Patricia Hill Collins, “Mammies, Matriarchs, and other Controlling Images,” from Black Feminist Thought

2.     Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Introduction,” from The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening

3.     Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Broadcasting Race: Lena Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ann Petry,” from The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening

Week 8: NO CLASS (October 15)

1.     La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “‘The People Inside My Head, Too’: Madness, Black Womanhood, and the Radical Performance of Lauryn Hill” from African American Review

2.     Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, “The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams: Meshell Ndegeocello and the ‘problem’ of Black female masculinity” from Popular Music

Week 9: Global Frames (October 22)

1.     Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring Shout Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery, Introduction and Chapter 1: “The Script: ‘Africa was but a blank canvas for Europe’s imagination’”

2.     C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife”

3.     Shana Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, “Introduction: Anthem: Toward a Sound Franchise”

Week 10: Hip-Hop Feminism (October 29)

1.     Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost

2.     Selections from The Crunk Feminist Collection

3.     Aisha Durham, Brittney C. Cooper and Susana M. Morris, “The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay”

Week 11: Global Media & Labor (November 5)

1.     Aida Opoku-Mensah, “Marching On: African Feminist Media Studies”

2.     Alessandro Jedlowski “The women behind the camera: Female entrepreneurship in the southern Nigerian video film industry,” from Cultural Entrepreneurship in Africa

3.     Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project”

Week 12: Raced Media Vocations & Tactics (November 12)

1.     Deborah Gabriel, “Blogging while Black, British and female: a critical study on discursive activism,” from Information, Communication & Society

2.     Melissa Brown, Rashawn Ray, Ed Summers & Neil Fraistat, “#SayHerName: a case study of intersectional social media activism”

3.     Allissa V. Richardson, “Bearing Witness While Black”

Week 13: Interventions (November 19)

1.     Charlotte E. Jacobs, “Developing the ‘Oppositional Gaze’: Using Critical Media Pedagogy and Black Feminist Thought to Promote Black Girls’ Identity Development”

2.     Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, Introduction

3.     Safiya Umoja Noble, “A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies”

Week 14: B’Day (November 26)

·       Readings TBA

Week 15: Final Presentations (December 3)

Dreams & Nightmares: The Music Industry, Media and Inequality

What were the racial and gendered stakes when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards? How did the R. Kelly and Kesha sexual abuse cases go so underacknowledged and under-covered? What are the structures of the music industry that have enabled inequity throughout its history? These questions and more will be addressed in this course, which explores problematic hierarchies and structures of oppression within the global popular music industry. It situates musical case studies of identity-based discrimination within social, news and entertainment media environments and pays particular attention to the role of music journalism—from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork—in setting the terms of key debates.

Course Objectives

By the end of our time together, students should expect to:

• Develop a robust understanding of the music industry, specifically as a media industry with messaging, internal politics, ideologies, and structuring logics

• Think critically about areas where identity-based oppression occurs, specifically race, class, gender, and the postcolonial

• Understand the role of media in telling stories and representing the industry

• Build argumentative and analytical skills as writers

WEEKLY SCHEDULE OF READINGS

Week 1: Industrial Thinking

Read:

1.    Simon Frith, “The Industrialization of Popular Music”

2.    Roy Shuker, “‘Every 1’s a Winner: Music as a Cultural Industry,” from Understanding Popular Music Culture (Third Edition)

3.    Matt Stahl, “Introduction,” Unfree Masters: Popular Music and the Politics of Work

4.    Liz Pelly, “The Problem with Muzak: Spotify’s bid to remodel an industry,” The Baffler

5.    David Turner, “Billie Eilish: The Exception That Proves the Rule,” Penny Fractions

6.    OPTIONAL: Jacques Attali, “Chapter 1: Listening,” from Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Week 2: Anti-Blackness

Read:

1.    Wesley Morris, “Why is everyone always stealing Black Music?” from The New York Times 1619 Project

2.    Karl Hagstrom Miller, “Introduction,” from Segregating Sound Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow,

3.    David Hesmondhalgh and Anamik Saha, “Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production,” from Popular Communication

4.    Greg Tate, “Hiphop Turns 30,” from The Village Voice

5.    John Vilanova, “’Imma Let You Finish...But…’: Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé Knowles and the Myths of Memory at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards”

Optional Supplemental Watch:

1.    20 Feet from Stardom (Netflix Documentary)

Week 3: Gender Trouble

Content Warning/Trigger Warning: This unit contains depictions of sexual assault.

1.    John Vilanova and Kyle Cassidy, “’I’m Not the Drummer’s Girlfriend’ Merch Girls, Tour’s Misogynist Mythos, and the Gendered Dynamics of Live Music’s Backline Labor,’ from Journal of Popular Music Studies

2.    Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch, “R.Kelly Accused of Sex with Teenage Girls” from the Chicago Sun-Times

3.    Jessica Hopper, “Read the ‘Stomach-Churning’ Sexual Assault Accusations Against R. Kelly in Full,” The Village Voice

4.    Constance Grady, “Jim DeRogatis broke the R. Kelly story in 2000. Now he’s compiled a damning case against Kelly,” Vox

5.    Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “Kesha, Interrupted,” The New York Times

6.    Liz Pelly, “Discover Weakly: Sexism on Spotify,” The Baffler

7.    Jenn Pelly, “Reckoning with Pinegrove,” Pitchfork

Optional Supplemental Watch (as much as you have time for):

1.    Surviving R.Kelly on Netflix

Week 4: Colonialism

1.    Lester Bangs, "Innocents In Babylon: A Search For Jamaica Featuring Bob Marley And A Cast Of Thousands" Creem

2.    Lloyd Stanbury, “Introduction,” from Reggae Roadblocks: A Music Business Development Perspective

3.    Michael Denning, “From Port to Port: How Colonialism Shaped Music As We Know It,” Foreign Affairs

4.    Abby Aguirre, “REGGAE REVIVAL Meet the Millennial Musicians Behind Jamaica’s New Movement,” Vogue

5.    Richard Letts, “The Protection and Promotion of Musical Diversity” UNESCO

Week 5: The GRAMMY Awards

1.    Selections from John Vilanova, “Not Simply the Best: The GRAMMY Awards, Blackness, and the Music Industry”