Professor of Africana Studies Tricia Rose MA'87 PhD'93 is called the "hip-hop theorist" by many media outlets for her work on music, politics, racism and sexism in popular American culture. She is well-regarded for her widely read book, "Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America."
Rose is currently working on a new book about particular visions of social justice that have emerged from poets and musicians, focusing on the ethics and politics of interpersonal behavior.
She will teach a seminar next semester on the issues she is pursuing in this book, focusing on music and poetry. "How we treat each other has implications on social systems," she told The Herald. Instead of the hard-line political approach of the 1960s - "Are you willing to die for the revolution?" she said, describing 1960s rhetoric - she is approaching social change from a black feminist revisionist perspective, she said.
Or, as she puts it, "Politics you can live with and live by - not politics about destruction and rage and impossibility."
Citing the American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of "A Raisin in the Sun," as an influence on her work, Rose is interested in the "internalization and interpersonalization" of racism.
Like Hansberry, Rose values "strategies for social justice that emanate from centering interpersonal relationships" to combat segregation, she said.
This semester, Rose is offering for the first time at Brown her signature lecture course, AFRI 0880: "Hip Hop Music and Cultures," which she previously taught at New York University and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"It's been really lively and dramatic," Rose said of the course this semester. She recently guided the class through a discussion of music sampling and intellectual property and said she was surprised at the students' acceptance of sampling as an art form, calling it "status quo talk."
"How can you transform what's going on if you don't even have a language that suggests change?" she said she asked them.
Rose said she likes teaching students at Brown, who she thinks tend to have a good sense of agency and intellectual drive. She said students here are "hungry for some things, but don't want to be fed others."
Students are eating up Rose's course. "It's a great class, I'll tell you that," Paul Graham '09 said. "I think that one of the keys to her popularity is the success of her lectures. Not for a second would you be in her class and think that she doesn't know what she's talking about. And she has a great sense of humor."
