Yale University is offering a new course on Beyoncé’s cultural impact next spring. Students will study the superstar’s music, fashion and visual albums.
According to the a Yale news article, “students in Professor Daphne Brooks’ course will dive into archives and visual albums to understand Beyoncé’s influence on Black feminist thought and American culture.”
The course, “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music”, will analyze Beyoncé’s artistic work from 2013 to 2024 as a lens to study Black history, intellectual thought and performance.
In the interview with Yale Daily News, Professor Brooks shared, “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 utilisation of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics — there’s just no one like her.”
Brooks” decision to focus on the Lemonade singer is a byproduct of a previous course she taught at Princeton University. The focus of that curriculum: “Black Women in Popular Music Culture.”
“Those classes were always overenrolled,” Brooks told the Yale Daily News. “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.”
“I would hope that no matter what discipline you are pursuing in liberal arts at Yale,” Brooks said, “by looking at culture through Beyoncé, it can invite us to think about the extent to which art can articulate the world we live in and nourish our spirits and give us the space to imagine better worlds and the ethics of freedom.
The course is only being offered to Yale students. But that hasn’t stopped the Beyhive from trying to find a loophole to enroll.