Best practices are only best when they work for nearly everyone. While ungrading advocates encourage others to ditch traditional grading, we need to consider the impact of ungrading on groups who already encounter resistance from students around grades. What is ungrading? Robert Talbert defines it as “a way of assessing and reporting on student learning…
Author: Crystal S. Anderson
Teaching Black Internationalism, Part 2, or, What Will Students Learn?
Creating student learning outcomes is one of the most difficult part of course design, but spending some time on this up front helps to guide the course and reduce the tendency to second-guess ourselves during the course. A word about course design. I think that we ascribe a romantic quality to teaching, focusing on the…
Teaching Black Internationalism, Part 1: Preliminary Considerations
That’s right! The Teaching series is back. I’ve been asked to teach a course, any course I want, for African and African American Studies. So like my Teaching K-pop series, I’m going to take you all along for the course design ride! I had to make two decisions right away: what to teach and how….
Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop
Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop is the first scholarly book to examine how contemporary Korean popular music (K-pop) references and incorporate musical and performative elements of various genres of African American popular music. Specifically, it argues that K-pop simultaneously cites instrumentation and vocals from various genres of black popular music and employs…
Project Update: Red Velvet: Queendom
The new exhibit on KPOPCULTURE, “Red Velvet: Queendom,” details the group’s musical production featuring their dual concept since debut in 2014. The exhibit provides basic information about the group and its music as well as a curated playlist derived from fan data. This exhibit is a part of the KPOPCULTURE digital humanities project, which curates…
PROJECT UPDATE: TWICE – Girls Like Us
The new exhibit on KPOPCULTURE, “Twice: Girls Like Us” shares the group’s impressive run of promotional tracks since debut in 2015. These tracks resonate with fans more so than deep cuts from releases. The exhibit provides basic information about the group and its music as well as a curated playist derived from fan data. This…
PROJECT UPDATE: ATEEZ- PIRATE KINGS
The new digital exhibit, ATEEZ : Pirate Kings, marks the return of the KPOPCULTURE project. Even though ATEEZ is a rookie group debuting just in 2018, the group has been quite prolific, and fans have been diligent in listening to their music, as evidenced by the healthy combination of promotional as well as deep cuts…
Sonic Historiography and Cover Songs: Ramsey Lewis/Minnie Riperton and Stevie Wonder/The Brand New Heavies
Cover songs are a great way to rediscover the trajectory of sound. There is a collection of music scholars who direct their attention to how regular listeners interact with music. In “the Future is Now. . . and Then: Sonic Historiography in Post 1960s Rock,” Kevin Holm-Hudson draws together several similar strands of thought regarding…
BOOK TALK: Soul in Seoul: African American Music and K-pop @ CSU-Dominguez Hills
Looking for something exciting to do during the pandemic? Check out this book talk at 1:00 – 2:30 (PST) on April 30, (sponsored by the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills). Register here.
K-pop as Popular Music
K-pop is a form of popular music whose significance goes beyond its financial success. In January 2021, Esquire published Emma Carey‘s article, “The Best Pop Bands of All Time Prove the Universal Power of Music,” which acknowledged the slippery nature of the label of “pop,” but also declared: “In simple terms, pop music is literally….
Modeling Black Womanhood in K-pop
Given the influence of black popular culture on K-pop, it is not surprising that female K-pop artists also draw on images of black womanhood, especially those associated with hip-hop. While some scholars focus on prominent, sexualized images of black women as the defining model, other scholars point to the more complicated nature of representations of…
Writing about K-pop: Choose Your Disciplinary Adventure
In my previous article, I talked about how taking a historian’s approach to K-pop considers the past in making sense of the present. In this article, I’ll discuss how this informs my approach to K-pop in my book Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop. In making sense of K-pop, I choose several…
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