According to recent reports, Yale University will begin offering a course next semester that will educate students at the prestigious Ivy League institution about pop star Beyonce’s music career. The class titled “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music” will be instructed by Daphne Brooks, professor of African American Studies and music, and focus on Beyonce’s career over the last decade.
Describing the class, Brooks said, “seemed good to teach because [Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time. The number of breakthroughs and innovations she’s executed and the way she’s interwoven history and politics and really granular engagements with Black cultural life into her performance aesthetics and her utilization of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics — there’s just no one like her.”
Brooks added that the Beyonce course stems from a previously taught course about black women in music and culture at Princeton. “Those classes were always overenrolled,” the Ivy League professor said. “And there was so much energy around the focus on Beyoncé, even though it was a class that starts in the late 19th century and moves through the present day. I always thought I should come back to focusing on her and centering her work pedagogically at some point.”
According to a description of the course from Yale, “This class centers the 2010s and 2020s’ sonic and visual repertoire of Beyonce Knowles-Carter (from 2013’s self-titled album through 2024’s Cowboy Carter) as the portal through which to rigorously examine key interdisciplinary works of Black intellectual thought and grassroots activist practices across the centuries.”
It added, “Its aim is two-fold: 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 (in history, Black feminist theory, philosophy, anthropology, art history, performance studies, musicology, political science, sociology, dance, American Studies, religious studies, archival studies etc.) that directly resonate with Beyonce’s sonic, visual and live performance endeavors. In short, this is a class that traces the relationship between Beyonce’s artistic genius and Black intellectual practice.”
Highlighting what the course will discuss, Brooks said, “2013 was really such a watershed moment in which she articulated her beliefs in Black feminism. She added, “It was the first time a pop artist had used sound bites from a Black feminist like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It became more about ‘We are going to produce club bangers that are also galvanizing our ability to think radically about the state of liberation.’”
She further noted, “Other artists have not [embraced] intersectional political and historical work like Beyoncé has. And that’s not to pit them against each other; it’s just to make a point about what institutions choose to value and what they often disregard, and it’s often people of color and especially women of color’s artistic achievements. So that’s why this class needed to happen right now.”
Watch Megyn Kelly critique the content of Beyonce’s music:
