The Black Arts Renaissance & American Culture: Rethinking Urban and Ethnic History in America

The Black Arts Renaissance is an essential window into American cultural history. How did jazz become American classical music? Looking back one century, American culture was defined not in terms of our way of life but rather in terms of “refinement.” In line with that, Black America was defined not in terms of an American ethnic group but rather in terms of an inferior race. By 1903, Anglo-American authorities insisted that “no full-blooded Negro has ever been distinguished as a man of science, a poet, or an artist.” The lectures and films in this course examine the contours of US history and American studies to explore how, in one century, the value of Black America, blues, jazz, and hip-hop culture was transformed from worthless to priceless. The triumph of the Black Arts Renaissance, jazz studies, and Africana studies was produced by an epic century of extraordinary American cultural revolution; and that cultural revolution embraced social and cultural transformations that also produced golden ages of Irish, Yiddish, Chicano, and Nuyorican Renaissance. In other words, this course introduces students to the rethinking of urban and ethnic history in America.