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Yale introducing new Beyoncé course centered on her political and cultural impact

November 11, 2024 | | Print Article

Less Ivy League and more “Blue Ivy,” one of the nation’s oldest universities is set to introduce a new course on culture and politics centered on Beyoncé.

“Just when you thought academia couldn’t get more woke.”

Fresh off her endorsement of two-time failed presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, the 32-time Grammy Award winner is set to be the focus of a course years in the making at Yale University. Such was the contention of instructor Daphne Brooks, the co-founder of Yale’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group in an email detailing the course to NBC News.

“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,” she explained to the outlet of the class titled, “Beyonce Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music.”

According to the course description on Yale’s website, Brooks sought to cover the artist’s work from her 2013 album “Beyoncé” through 2024’s “Cowboy Carter” as “This class centers the 2010s and 2020s’ sonic and visual repertoire of Beyonce Knowles-Carter… as the portal through which to rigorously examine key interdisciplinary works of Black intellectual thought and grassroots activist practices across the centuries.”

She described a two-fold aim “to both explore and analyze the dense, robust and virtuosic aesthetics, socio-historical and political dimensions of Beyonce’s pathbreaking, mid-career body of work and to, likewise, use her aesthetics; the multi-dimensional form and content of her recordings; her boundary-transgressing performance politics; her history-making visual albums; her innovative concert films; her unprecedented pop music archival endeavors and more as the occasion to explore landmark Black Studies scholarship and Black freedom struggle scholarly and cultural texts…that directly resonate with Beyonce’s sonic, visual and live performance endeavors.”

“In short,” the description concluded after appearing to get the most out of the thesaurus, “this is a class that traces the relationship between Beyonce’s artistic genius and Black intellectual practice.”

As it happened, Yale was not the first school to make the former Destiny’s Child a focus of a course as NBC News listed other institutes of higher learning with Beyoncé-themed classes including Arizona State University, California Polytechnic State University, Rutgers University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

While fans of the artist married to rapper Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, with whom she’s had three children including daughter Blue Ivy, were excited and wished there was some way they could take the course, others remained critical of the trend in universities increasingly leaning on the “liberal” part of liberal arts degrees.

Kevin Haggerty
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