The Yale Daily News broke the story in November about a new course on R&B singer Beyoncé’s cultural impact. The course, which will be taught by Daphne Brooks, will be offered at Yale University this spring.
The announcement of the course, “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music,” has garnered global attention, with many people having mixed emotions about the necessity of the class.
Connecticut Public visuals journalist Ayannah Brown sat down with Daphne Brooks, professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Music at Yale University, to gain clarity on the focus of the course, its importance and what she wants students to absorb.
How the media got it wrong: This is not the first course on Beyoncé
What started off as a simple interview with the campus newspaper quickly turned into a global story. After it was shared online, Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, reposted the article on her Instagram account, according to Brooks. Knowles has more than 4 million followers.
“I've always kept my focus on my students and prioritize my students, which is why I gave an interview to the Yale Daily News to a fabulous undergraduate reporter to interview me about the course," Brooks said.
And then, Brooks said, the world "turned upside down."
"What was out of my control was the fact that the article itself was posted on social media," she said.
Brooks has had dozens of requests for interviews from the U.S. and all over the world.
With millions of eyes and hundreds of news outlets grabbing ahold of the news, critiques came online against Brooks and Yale University. Some were excitedly ready to know all about the course. Others wondered why it existed at all.
“The most shocking thing is the presumption that this is a course that has never been taught before, either here at Yale or elsewhere,” Brooks said.
She wants to set the record straight.
“I was a visiting faculty member at Yale in the fall of 2008, and I taught a course called Black Women in Popular Music Culture, a hundred years' worth of historical, theoretical, cultural inquiry about the impact of Black women's musical genius on American culture. Beyoncé was a part of that curriculum. She was on the syllabus in 2012 when I was at Princeton,” Brooks said.
Brooks said she has colleagues at other universities, such as Rutgers and Georgetown, who have also taught courses on Beyoncé.
"This phenomena of Beyoncé studies, which is tied to the larger field of popular music studies, which is itself half a century old, but has roots that go back much further to landmark African-American studies pioneers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who centralized the importance of music culture in relation to African-American culture,” Brooks said.
Brooks shares the importance of the course
Despite integrating teachings surrounding Beyoncé’s contributions to music and culture as a Black woman in other curriculums via various smaller forms, Brooks said the timing of a full course dedicated solely to learning about Beyoncé felt important to do now.
“Centering an entire course around Beyoncé seemed right in the wake of her ambitions,” Brooks said.
“Say for instance, her critically acclaimed 2022 album 'Renaissance.' She's not only giving us the history of Black women artists' contributions to innovations and dance culture. but also elevating the ways in which Black and brown queer communities, LGBTQIA communities are really the life force in the artistic genius that birthed modern dance music culture."
The new one-credit course will analyze Beyoncé’s work from 2013 to present day, with a specific focus on the work of her "Lemonade," "Renaissance" and "Cowboy Carter" albums. Brooks says the albums cover quite a bit of American history.
"So, between 'Renaissance' and now 'Cowboy Carter,' which arguably is the most audacious statement and interrogation of Jim Crow culture in the modern recording industry that we've ever seen, you've now got two albums that ... are using popular music genres as the scaffolding for telling much larger stories about America,” Brooks said.
“There's an enormous audio archive of Black intellectual history that Beyoncé has been amassing and interpolating into her album releases since 2013. And that's such a rich array of materials to incorporate into classroom explorations of African American intellectual history,” Brooks said. “She has distinguished herself as an artist who self-consciously thinks about performing as an archive of cultural memory of Black women's historic musicianship.”
What Brooks hopes students take away from the course
It is important to Brooks that people understand that the core of this class is to look at Beyoncé with a critical lens that provokes deeper understanding and a new way of engagement with popular music.
“It requires you to build up your scholarly engagement with immersion and research of historical texts and political theory, social theory," Brooks said. "It requires you, if you're a humanist, which I am, to think about art and literature and music and the ways in which various cultural forms create meaning for us.”
Brooks wants students to grasp how storytelling has evolved within popular music and how those stories are told about African American history.
“It's using the music in order to think about the stories that we tell each other about gender and sexuality, about of course, racial formations, about American history, about Jim Crow segregation about marginalized communities, especially marginalized queer communities," she said.
According to Brooks, Beyoncé’s "Lemonade" album alone is packed with a rich tapestry of political, societal, cultural and historic messaging.
“There's so much scholarship on that visual album, but one of the things — many things — that people don't know about the making of the work itself is that it was shot in part on several different former plantation sites," Brooks said.
"It was also shot very famously in New Orleans, and really was giving back to our cultural imaginary ways of grappling with the afterlives of Hurricane Katrina, which itself has been argued by many historians and political theorists, sociologists, an event very much entangled with the afterlives of slavery."
Brooks continued: "So there are so many different ways of thinking about and interrogating our current American moment through Beyoncé's repertoire and her work is unparalleled with regards to that.”
