Entertainment
Yale University introduces course on Beyonce’s political and cultural impact
A course dedicated to studying Beyonce is coming to Yale University, allowing students to dig deeper into the “artistic genius” of the global superstar.
Titled Beyonce Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music, it will kick off next spring.
According to a description of the module, which is offered through the humanities and arts department, it will focus on her work from her self-titled album in 2013 to her current album, Cowboy Carter.
The country album received 11 Grammy nominations on Friday, after being roundly snubbed at this year’s Country Music Association Awards. Its recognition has made Beyonce the most Grammy-nominated artist in history, with 99 nods in total.
Yale’s pop culture-inspired course will also analyse Beyonce’s performance politics and concert films, using it as a lens through which to examine black intellectual thought and activism.
By looking at the 43-year-old singer’s midcareer repertoire, the course will explore scholarly works and cultural texts across black feminist theory, philosophy and anthropology, as well as art history, performance studies and musicology, the course description says.
The class will be taught by writer and black studies scholar Daphne Brooks, who co-founded Yale’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group, a community of faculty and students working to “explore the untapped variety of black sound archives.”
Brooks told Sky News’ US partner network NBC News that the course has been in the works for years, following on from a previous class she taught at Princeton University titled Black Women And Popular Music Culture.
Ms Brooks said this will be her first opportunity to devote an entire lecture course to Beyonce’s work.
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‘Unprecedented experimentations with the album form’
She told NBC via email: “I’m looking forward to exploring her body of work and considering how, among other things, historical memory, black feminist politics, black liberation politics and philosophies course through the last decade of her performance repertoire as well as the ways that her unprecedented experimentations with the album form, itself, have provided her with the platform to mobilize these themes.”
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The course adds Yale to a string of universities that have created courses inspired by the singer over the past decade.
In the early 2010s, Rutgers University introduced Politicising Beyonce, and the University of Illinois at Chicago added Beyonce: Critical Feminist Perspectives and US Black Womanhood.
Cornell University has also offered versions of its Beyonce Nation course, which studies her career trajectory as well as her impact on political activism and feminism.
Other universities to have offered similar Beyonce-themed courses include the University of Texas at San Antonio, California Polytechnic State University, and Arizona State University.
The cultural impact of fellow celebrities including Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga has also been embraced by university courses.
Taylor Swift. Pic: AP
In 2010, the University Of South Carolina introduced a module, Lady Gaga And The Sociology Of The Fame, as part of their sociology course.
In the wake of Swift’s re-recording of earlier albums, and her record-breaking Eras Tour, multiple colleges – including the University of Ghent in Belgium, Harvard University, UC Berkeley and the University of Florida – also began introducing courses tailored to the study of her lyricism and pop superstardom.