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The University of Arizona recently announced that it has created a “Hip-Hop Concentration” in the College of Humanities’ minor for Africana Studies, reportedly the first of its kind for the institution.
According to the description of the minor and its objectives, the University of Arizona seeks to ”provide students with a solid introduction and broad understanding of the origins and developing of the forms of expression that make up Hip-Hop cultures throughout the world: Hip-Hop dance, rap music, graffiti/tagging, fashion, business, and film. The Minor introduces students to the main themes represented in Hip-Hop cultures: appropriation and defense of spaces, mixing of different cultures, migrations, multilingualism, race, class, gender, religions, sexuality, nationality, politics and the economy, and, the search for identity.”
“The UA is more open to new, challenging, ambitious, creative and even controversial topics than almost any other university in the world,” Alain-Philippe Durand, director of Africana Studies at the University of Arizona explained. “Here, you are not told to stay in your corner. It is the opposite: You are constantly pushed and encouraged to break boundaries.””
Courses for the minor include Rap, Culture and God, Hip-Hop Cinema, US & Francophone Hip-Hop Cultures, Blacks in Hollywood, Pan-African Dance Aesthetics and a host of other classes geared towards African-American studies and African-American History.
Ultimately the course seeks to give students the opportunity to investigate Hip-Hop’s cultural impact, which the University of Arizona acknowledges “severely impacted many elements of mainstream American culture to the extent that corporations have embraced hip-hop music and artists as a means of marketing goods to everyone.”
For more on the minor at the University of Arizona check it out here: Minor in Africana Studies with Concentration in Hip-Hop Cultures
