{"id":45547,"date":"2017-06-29T15:01:32","date_gmt":"2017-06-29T19:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=45547"},"modified":"2017-07-25T15:17:29","modified_gmt":"2017-07-25T19:17:29","slug":"new-course-examines-the-urban-working-class-through-hip-hop-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2017\/06\/new-course-examines-the-urban-working-class-through-hip-hop-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"New course examines the urban working class through hip-hop culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/b>This September, Brock students have the chance to study Hip-Hop and the Urban Working Class, a new course, unique in Canada, being offered by the Centre for Labour Studies.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Professor Simon Black explains, the course isn\u2019t entirely new, but a \u201cremix\u201d of a course he offered before he came to Brock \u2014 one that was named by <\/span>Spacing<\/span><\/i> magazine as one of \u201c10 Amazing Urbanism Classes to Take at University.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Simon

Professor Simon Black.<\/p><\/div>\n

The course explores the lives of urban, working-class youth in global cities through hip-hop\u2019s four primary elements: rapping, DJing, graffiti art, and b-girling\/b-boying or breakdancing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Students will learn about and listen to the music of a range of artists, including indigenous rappers such as Drezus and Eekwol, and African-American emcees such as Kendrick Lamar and Nicki Minaj.<\/span><\/p>\n

Topics will include the criminalization of racialized youth and the re-emergence of rap music \u2014 and its sonic cousins, like grime in the U.K. \u2014 as protest music since the global economic crisis in 2008 and the rise of the social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs a voice of working class black and Latinx (a gender-neutral alternative to Latino) youth in late 1970s New York City, hip-hop spoke \u2014 and continues to speak \u2014 to the forces that shape their lives, such as white supremacy and institutionalized racism, neoliberal globalization and deindustrialization, labour market precarity, police violence, and criminalization and mass incarceration,\u201d Black said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYet as primarily an artistic movement and expressive culture, hip-hop can both make clear <\/span>and <\/span><\/i>distort urban social and economic realities faced by working class youth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Black\u2019s relationship with hip hop stretches back to his own youth, though it wasn\u2019t until he was a graduate student that he encountered it in the classroom.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI <\/span>audited a course at Columbia University (in New York) taught by Robin Kelley, a preeminent scholar of African-American history and black popular culture,\u201d Black recalled. He was soon reading as much of the scholarly literature on hip-hop as he could find, from hip-hop feminists such as Joan Morgan and Tricia Rose, and Canadian scholars such as Rinaldo Walcott and Mark V. Campbell.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, Black will engage with his own students in LABR 2P91 on what he describes as \u201ca black <\/span>cultural form that has emerged as a universal language of urban working class youth<\/span> from <\/span>the ghettos and \u2019hoods of North America to the <\/span>favelas <\/span><\/i>of Brazil, from the Occupied Palestinian Territories to the council estates of the U.K<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe course springs from both my love of hip-hop culture and my intellectual engagement with hip-hop as a social scientist.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This September, Brock students have the chance to study Hip-Hop and the Urban Working Class, a new course, unique in Canada, being offered by the Centre for Labour Studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":45548,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,1,4,38],"tags":[110,5510,3856,5509],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}