ENGL 5946 The Black Atlantic Goes Pop

This course explores the way that different strands of the African diaspora come to influence each other, especially in the realm of popular culture. By tracing the ways that Black cultures in Africa, Britain, and the Americas influence each other, this course both explodes a monolithic reading of African diasporic identity and considers how these intercultural connections nevertheless signal a form of global Black solidarity. Jumping off from Paul Gilroy’s foundational work, this course asks how we might read these representations of African diasporic interpenetration as working within a complex web of ideas about authenticity, identity, affiliation, hybridity, and originality.