AML 4604 - Spring 2026 - Wilson

This course, which meets the Human Experience requirement, begins in the apocryphal 1960s, when the fight for civil rights inspired young African Americans Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Nikki Giovanni, and others to redefine their generation with mantras like “I’m so pretty!,” “Say it loud! I’m Black and I’m proud,” “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and “Even my errors are correct.” They shed their “New Negro”/Harlem Renaissance forebears’ respectability politics and culled an unapologetically Black aesthetic, defying European beauty standards that had haunted them since the chattel era. We will study the debates between Nation of Islam and Southern Baptist leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and the outpouring of multigenre art from the Black Arts Movement’s independent theater, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and spoken word albums; industry-saving Blaxploitation films; dance and fashion troupes’ embrace of Afros, daishikis, bold prints, and African diasporic techniques; visual artists’ evolution from surrealist abstraction/graffiti to “post-Black”; and musical innovations from the Motown sound to Philadelphia soul, from acid jazz and psychedelic rock to funk, disco, and integrated pop, culminating with the (d)evolution of hip-hop, which has dominated American life for the past 50 years. We will investigate three central questions: How do African Americans invoke and/or revoke stereotypical characterizations of Blackness (Mammy, Uncle Tom, Buck, Jezebel, Sambo, Pickaninny) that persist? To what end are contemporary representations of beauty shaped by America’s painful chattel past? Finally, we will be able to answer, with greater confidence and complexity, what makes Blackness beautiful—“way back then” and now?