Faculty-Graduate Seminar "Race & Popular Culture"
Tuesday afternoons, 4:30-6:00pm. Stanhope Hall
Coordinators
Faculty: Daphne A. Brooks
brooksd@princeton.edu
Popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic… It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time.
--Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?”
This is the second year of the Center for African American Studies Faculty-Graduate Seminar at Princeton University. The seminar meets bi-monthly throughout the course of the academic year and provides a forum for faculty and graduate students who are committed to critically examining race and pursuing intellectual discourse in African American studies. The seminar combines presentations by Princeton faculty and visitors and hosts both established and emerging scholars from institutions throughout the country. The seminar is decidedly interdisciplinary and engages scholarship from multiple fields, perspectives and methodological approaches. We encourage graduate student and faculty participation from the humanities, social sciences, physical and natural sciences, arts and professional schools.Theme: This year’s theme for 2008-2009, Race and Popular Culture draws inspiration from the groundbreaking 1992 critical anthology Black Popular Culture (Seattle, WA: Bay Press) in its aim to explore “the popular” in relation to race and across multiple sites of inquiry and fields of cultural production: literature and print media, film, video, the visual arts, dance, digital-web media, television, popular music and sound media, theater and performance art. Following the Center’s commitment to interdisciplinarity, the seminar will stress multiple methodologies, as well as its three thematic subfields (life and culture; race and public policy; and comparative race and ethnicity) in order to explore how constructions of race in popular culture intersect with historical, social, political, religious, economic and material issues. The research presented in the workshop will assist participants in theorizing the politics of racial representation in popular culture, the impact of globalization on the production and dissemination of black popular culture within an historical framework, and the potential for sites of popular culture to engage with contemporary policy issues. How do marginalized subjects negotiate power and “play with their own identifications” in relation to the “collective unconscious” that is popular culture? What are the grounds for collective action in contemporary popular culture and what are the responsibilities of critics, artists/activists, and policy makers in creating and sustaining collective action? To quote Black Popular Culture contributor Cornel West, how might we imagine the potential for a radical “joy” to emerge out of our conversations with popular cultural texts that re-galvanizes “love, care, kindness, service, solidarity, the struggle for justice—values that provide the possibility for bringing people together”?
Seminar Meeting Dates
Tuesday, March 10 - Robin D.G. Kelley (American Studies and Ethnicity), University of Southern California (African diaspora, urban studies, working class radicalism, social movements, and cultural history with an emphasis on music)
Tuesday, September 16 - Fall Orientation Meeting for Graduate Student Seminar Participants ONLY
Tuesday, September 23 - First regular seminar meeting: Mark Anthony Neal (English), Duke University, (Mark Anthony Neal) – currently at U. of Penn.
Tuesday, October 7 - Tommy DeFrantz (Dance/African American Studies), MIT (dance), Paper: Hip Hop Habitus, v.2.
Tuesday, November 18 - Jason King (School of Recording Arts), New York University
Tuesday, December 2 - Richard Iton (Politics), Northwestern University (black popular culture)
Tuesday, December 9 - Kara Keeling (School of Film), University of Southern California (film, queer theory, cultural studies)
Tuesday, February 3 - Ralina Joseph (Communications), University of Washington, Seattle (television culture, media studies, mixed-race studies)
Tuesday, February 10 - Jacqueline Stewart (Film, Radio & Television/Northwestern University)
Tuesday, February 24 - Kobena Mercer (Art History), CAAS Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow (visual culture, trans-Atlantic studies)
Tuesday, March 3 - Judith Casselberry (Anthropology), CAAS Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow (religion, popular music culture, performance studies)
Tuesday, March 24 - Oliver Wang (Sociology), California State Long Beach (Asian American Studies, hip hop, Latin boogaloo, popular music culture)
Tuesday, April 14 - Joshua B. Guild (History/CAAS)
Tuesday, April 28 - Fred Moten (Literature), Duke University (performance Studies/jazz Studies/critical theory/popular music studies)
Contact information: If you are interested in applying to participate in the seminar, please contact Daphne A. Brooks, the seminar’s faculty coordinator for 2008-2009 at brooksd@princeton.edu. A graduate student coordinator will be announced this summer. The staff contact at the Center for African American Studies is Jennifer Loessy, jloessy@princeton.edu, 609.258.3216.
Sponsored by the Center for African American Studies and Graduate School's Office of Academic Affairs and Diversity