This presentation critically explores "African American movement music" from classic rhythm & blues through to contemporary rap and neo-soul. Each major form of African American popular music has, in many senses, served as a soundtrack for a broader African American popular movement or historical episode. Indeed, this presentation emphasizes, African American music is more than music. It is an often-overlooked repository of African American history, culture, politics, and inspiring democratic social visions which free-float throughout and appear to be even more pronounced in African American music between 1945 and Obama's presidency.
Reiland Rabaka is an Associate Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Humanities Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an Affiliate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and a Research Fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA). He also holds graduate faculty appointments in the College of Music, School of Education, Department of Sociology, Department of Religious Studies, and Critical Theory Prof. Rabaka has published ten books, including Du Bois's Dialectics: Black Radical Politics and the Reconstruction of Critical Social Theory (2008); Africana Critical Theory (2009); Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon's Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization (2010); and Hip Hop's Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (2011).
Date: November 29, 2012
Location: Weiss 235
Time: 7:00-8:00 pm