Course info

What?!!!: The purpose of this class is to understand narrative. We want to visit the works of Spike Lee, their relationship to creating healthy and truthful visions of the Black experience of America - with Hip-Hop as our lens. To hopefully, empathize, emphasize and understand what America has done to the cultures it “houses”.

What is a visual code? Where does your empathy sit? What do you see?

Actually, What is culture? How can we write our own stories?

This course is intended as a starting point for self- reflection and self-directed research, writing and thoughts.

Meaning: your personal choice of research, insights, observations and instincts should take precedence over memorized learning. There will be reading, writing and (hopefully) independent, critical thinking. We’ll be analyzing film, frames and artistic sovereignty . Though we will not cover a “who, what, when, where and how” in hip- hop; the focus this semester is the seminal works of the great Spike Lee.