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)