When Lida Shemun realized she would attend a Kung Fu lesson as part of her course in Ancient Political Thought, she wasn\u2019t sure what to make of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was expecting classic texts, obviously, taking a theory course \u2014 but the hip-hop albums took me by surprise,\u201d said Shemun, a fourth-year honours student in Political Science and Labour Studies.<\/p>\n
Yet the study of classic hip-hop albums in the context of touchstone texts in Ancient Political Thought is crucial to POLI 4P02\/5P02, taught by Associate Professor Stefan Dolgert in the Department of Political Science.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe course explores five classic texts from ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Islam and Ch’an Buddhism, pairing each with a classic hip-hop album by Nas, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Mon\u00e1e and Wu-Tang Clan, in order to see how these diverse pairs of texts speak to one another,\u201d said Dolgert.<\/p>\n
Previous iterations of the course have examined relationships between personal accounts of contemporary migrants and Virgil\u2019s Aeneid<\/em>, or between Greek tragedies and Season 3 of The Wire<\/em>.<\/p>\n This year, fourth-year and graduate students in Political Science will look at St. Augustine\u2019s Confessions\u00a0<\/em>alongside Kendrick Lamar\u2019s Damn<\/em>, or The Conference of the Birds\u00a0<\/em>by Farid ud-Din Attar alongside Janelle Mon\u00e1e\u2019s Dirty Computer<\/em>.<\/p>\n But how, exactly, did the class wind up at the Niagara Kung Fu Academy last Tuesday, taking an introductory lesson in the martial art from Sifu Rob Atalick?<\/p>\n Dolgert said the Wu-Tang Clan were\u00a0inspired by the philosophy and martial arts in the 1970s Kung Fu films of the Shaw Brothers, which depicted the style developed by the Shaolin Monastery in China.<\/p>\n \u201cThat monastery’s legendary founder was Bodhidharma, who essentially creates Ch’an Buddhism, which becomes known as Zen when it moves to Japan,” said Dolgert.\u00a0“Because Ch’an Buddhism invites us to experience ourselves and the world without the distorting prism of language \u2014 to engage it directly through practice \u2014 it seemed obvious that to begin to understand Ch’an and the Wu-Tang, we had to be transported physically into a space where we could\u00a0focus on bodily movement rather than staring at PowerPoint.”<\/p>\n Shemun found that her Kung Fu experience developed her understanding of the course materials presented so far this semester. She also noted how the discussion of the historical context of Kung Fu and how it was used for self-defence against those in power during a shift in dynasties related to the lyrics of the Wu-Tang Clan.<\/p>\n \u201cThe circular teachings of Bodhidharma made a little more sense in the context of Kung Fu,\u201d Shemun said. \u201cIt connected with the Bodhidharma text.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The study of classic hip-hop albums in the context of touchstone texts in Ancient Political Thought is crucial to POLI 4P02\/5P02.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":60963,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,1,4,38],"tags":[110,4104,4811,6575,8300,8299,3427],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60936"}],"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=60936"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60952,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60936\/revisions\/60952"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}