Karen Lin, Senior Photographer

Next semester, Daphne Brooks, professor of African American Studies and music, will teach a new class titled “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music.” In the class, students will examine Beyoncé’s artistic work from 2013 to 2024 as a lens to study Black history, intellectual thought and performance.

The course is a byproduct of Brooks’ previous class at Princeton University titled “Black Women in Popular Music Culture.” While at Princeton, Brooks served as a faculty member in the English and African American Studies Departments. Much of the content in her Yale course draws from the section in her Princeton course which focused on Beyoncé’s cultural impact. 

“Those classes were always overenrolled,” Brooks said. “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.” 

Brooks believes that following the 2024 election and the events preceding it, it’s important to recognize Beyoncé’s unprecedented contributions to American culture, popular culture and global culture for the past two decades.

The course primarily centers around Beyoncé’s sonic, fashion and visual media following her 2013 self-titled album all the way through 2024’s “Cowboy Carter.” It also delves into the multifarious Black female experience in media and politics. 

Students will participate in discussions surrounding readings from scholars such as Hortense Spillers, the Combahee River Collective, Cedric Robinson and Karl Hagstrom Miller. 

In terms of projects, students will participate in screenings of her visual albums, work with archives in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and engage with public humanities projects designed to study Beyoncé’s physical impact on the Black community. Students will also be encouraged to create playlists connecting Beyoncé’s music to those of her influences.

“[This class] seemed good to teach because [Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time,” Brooks said. “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 utilization of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics — there’s just no one like her.”

When asked why the class centers around Beyoncé’s latter works such as “Lemonade,” “Renaissance” and “Cowboy Carter” as opposed to earlier bodies of work such as Dangerously in Love and B’Day, Brooks said it’s because she wanted to highlight Beyoncé’s break from certain dimensions of a “typical pop repertoire.”

“2013 was really such a watershed moment in which she articulated her beliefs in Black feminism,” Brooks said. “[In Flawless], it was the first time a pop artist had used sound bites from a Black feminist like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It became more about ‘We are going to produce club bangers that are also galvanizing our ability to think radically about the state of liberation.”

Brooks said that the study of Beyoncé will work as scaffolding for engaging contributions of other performers such as Harlem Renaissance entertainer Josephine Baker, acclaimed singer Diana Ross, Black sexual revolutionary Betty Davis and queer icon Grace Jones.

The course is cross-listed between the Department of African American Studies, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies and Music. Brooks says that such interdisciplinary engagement will help students at Yale think about American history and the way culture acts as a site of refuge for marginalized and minoritized groups.

“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.”

Brooks hopes that this course invites a “broad community building” mirroring that of Vice President Kamala Harris’ previous presidential campaign. She said that the feedback regarding the course’s syllabus and content has garnered positive feedback from both her previous students and Yale deans alike.

Gemard Guery ’28 said that he is intrigued by the course and is contemplating taking it next semester. He cited the course’s niche topic as the reason for his interest. Guery said that he feels many Yale courses talk about artists more broadly so he thinks it’s a cool opportunity to have a class on Beyoncé’s legacy.

Jaylen Moment ’27 shared similar sentiments regarding the course. Moment said that by studying works such as “Cowboy Carter” in particular, she is intrigued by the way Brooks might discuss the genre boundaries Beyoncé has deconstructed.

“Country music has typically been observed as a white music genre,” Moment said. “In ‘Cowboy Carter,’ for a Black woman to push the bounds of what music typically is or what people think it should sound like is very impactful.”

Brooks said that, from a fan’s standpoint, seeing Beyoncé be slighted for album of the year at the Grammy’s provides her more incentive to teach Beyoncé’s impact in the classroom.

“Black women are sometimes completely marginalized from some of the highest accolades and are so rarely taken seriously as musicians who are capable of and worthy of recognition for serious monumental work,” Brooks said. “We haven’t had a moment to think about what it means to disregard Black women’s artistic work.”

She says that other artists, especially a particular artist who has most recently won Album of the Year four times at the Grammys, have hardly taken the risks Beyoncé has. 

Brooks believes that Beyoncé has “lean[ed] into the album form” as a place where true artistry can take shape. Additionally, she holds close to the idea that Beyoncé has moved Black culture forward and made it possible for Black Americans to hold onto their histories.

“Other artists have not [embraced] intersectional political and historical work like Beyoncé has,” Brooks said. “And that’s not to pit them against each other; it’s just to make a point about what institutions choose to value and what they often disregard, and it’s often people of color and especially women of color’s artistic achievements. So that’s why this class needed to happen right now.”

Currently, Brooks’ favorite Beyoncé song is “Church Girl” from the 2022 LP “Renaissance.”