Yale University is going to be offering a course devoted entirely to Beyonce, and honestly, it’s about time.
How does one spend an entire semester devoted to a pop star, you may ask? For starters, Queen Bee is more than just a musician, she’s a cultural force.
Following the wave of Universities offering classes on Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and even Harrison Ford, Yale University announced their new curriculum, titled ‘Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music’.
The class will be taught by African American studies and music professor Daphne Brooks in the coming spring semester.
As one of the most influential artists in pop music history, including a record-breaking 99 Grammy nominations and 32 wins, there’s no shortage of material to cover. However, the class will specifically cover the portion of Beyonce’s career spanning her self-titled 2013 album through to this year’s genre-bending ‘Cowboy Carter’.
In a shock to no one, Brooks shared with The Guardian that there’s been “waves and waves of excitement – from undergraduates as well as graduate students” and even from a few “fellow colleagues and staff”.
In speaking with the publication, she then added: “This is the first opportunity I’ve had to focus an entire lecture course on the truly astonishing and marked socio-political and intellectual shift in Beyoncé’s repertoire since her 2013 self-titled album.
“I’m looking forward to exploring her body of work and considering how, among other things, historical memory, Black feminist politics, Black liberation politics and philosophies course through the last decade of her performance repertoire as well as the ways that her unprecedented experimentations with the album form, itself, have provided her with the platform to mobilize these themes.”
Delving deep Beyonce her popularity, Brooks is looking to explore and examine the intersection of music with “grassroots, social, political ideologies and movements.”
“She’s a fascinating artist because historical memory, as I often refer to it, and also the kind of impulse to be an archive of that historical memory, it’s just all over her work,” Brooks said. “And you just don’t see that with any other artist.”
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