A new course at Washington
University in St. Louis, U.S. will see students examine the world and life of
superstar rapper, Kanye West.
According to
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 75 third-year students have registered for
“Politics of Kanye West: Black Genius and Sonic Aesthetics”.
Jeffrey
McCune, professor, says the course which began this week will focus on the
rapper, producer and fashion designer.
He noted
that it will offer a way for students to connect issues of politics, race,
gender, sexuality and culture.
It’s not the
first college course about West. Georgia State University offered one in 2015,
and a 2014 course at the University of Missouri focused on West and Jay Z.
“Kanye West
As a hip-hop artist Kanye West has had unprecedented impact on the sonic force
of music, fashion, politics, and videography. Coupling his controversial
moments, with his corpus of musical texts with special focus on sonic
production, this course illuminates Mr. West as a case study for interrogating
the interplay between fame, gender, sexuality, and race.
“Mostly, we
explore how racialized ways of doing iconography, complex ways of seeing,
creates a distorted or reductive frame through which we see the black and
famous. Nonetheless, the course oscillates with entertaining these nuances,
while being entertained by the decade-long catalogue of music and visual
imagery.
“Together,
we extract the ‘Politics of Mr. West’ in his music and life, while also
illuminating the importance of a politics of genius-making in the larger arc of
black pop culture tradition,” said the course description.
Although 75
undergraduates have already registered, there’s still a waiting list of
students, aching to get in.
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