J. Griffith Rollefson | University College Cork (original) (raw)

Papers by J. Griffith Rollefson

Journal of Popular Music Studies, Mar 1, 2023

$Research paper thumbnail of Le cauchemar de la France: Blackara\u27s postcolonial hip hop critique in the City of Light$

$Research paper thumbnail of Tom Zé\u27s Fabrication Defect and the “Esthetics of Plagiarism”: a postmodern/postcolonial “Cannibalist Manifesto”$

On his 1998 album Fabrication Defect the Brazilian composer-performer Tom Zé articulates the disc... more On his 1998 album Fabrication Defect the Brazilian composer-performer Tom Zé articulates the discourses of postmodernity and postcoloniality. More than simply touching on various aspects of ‘‘post-ness,’’ Zé forges from them an updated manifesto premised on Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 ‘‘Cannibalist Manifesto.’’ The former Tropica´lia musician proposes an ‘‘Esthetics of Plagiarism’’ as a way to appropriate and then reformulate the products of Western techno-capitalism. In this discussion, I will argue that the composer reconfigures the modernist and colonial tropes of primitivism and cannibalism in a subversively technophilic postmodern and postcolonial fashion - an oppositionality embodied in the album’s ‘‘defective android’’ figure

Aims and Scope Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) is a peer-reviewed, rigorous and community-responsiv... more Aims and Scope Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) is a peer-reviewed, rigorous and community-responsive academic journal that publishes research on contemporary as well as historical issues and debates surrounding hip hop music and culture around the world, twice annually. The journal provides a platform for the investigation and critical analysis of hip hop politics, activism, education, media practices and industry analyses as well as manifestations of hip hop culture in all four of the classic elements (DJing/turntablism, MCing/rapping, graffiti/street art and b-boying/b-girling/breaking and other hip hop dances), the under-examined realms of beatboxing, fashion, identity formation, hip hop nation language (HHNL) and beyond. Centred around the truly global collection of established scholars on its advisory board, GHHS privileges the insights of people of colour and supports and encourages those of all marginalized, subordinated and disenfranchised global citizens who are engaged in manifesting progressive political and social change and expanded intellectual vistas.

Le cauchemar de la France: Blackara's postcolonial hip hop critique in the City of Light Auth... more Le cauchemar de la France: Blackara's postcolonial hip hop critique in the City of Light Author(s) Rollefson, J. Griffith Editor(s) Saucier, Paul Khalil Publication date 2011-08 Original citation Rollefson, J. G. (2011) 'Le cauchemar de la France: Blackara's postcolonial hip hop critique in the City of Light', in Saucier, P. K. (ed.) Native Tongues: an African Hip-Hop Reader. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. pp. 179-216. Type of publication Book chapter Link to publisher's version http://africaworldpressbooks.com/native-tongues-an-african-hip-hopreader-edited-by-p-khalil-saucier/ Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Rights © 2011, Paul Khalil Saucier. All rights reserved. Item downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10468/4213

Global Hip Hop Studies, 2020

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS). By no means the first scholarly ... more Welcome to the inaugural issue of Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS). By no means the first scholarly journal of its kind (think of Journal of Hip Hop Studies and Words, Beats & Life, for example), GHHS reaches out to hip hop heads, artists, activists and scholars both in and beyond the United States in order to embrace that fact that hip hop is a manifestly global and intercultural phenomenon that takes many creative and critical forms. 1 Herein print and online-you will see a mix of scholarly articles, reviews, dialogues, interviews, op eds and reflections by a posse of scholars, artists and activists (them heads from different locales). As we write in our mission statement, viewable online and in the front of the print edition of each issue: 'GHHS is a peer-reviewed, rigorous and community-responsive academic journal that publishes research on contemporary as well as historical issues and debates surrounding hip hop music and culture around the world, twice annually'. In the design of the journal's sections, we have attempted to reflect hip hop's own multidisciplinary and glocal ethos. For starters, each issue will feature an artefact from an element of hip hop's visual culture on the cover

Journal of World Popular Music, 2018

This article outlines an open, decentred and unfinished vision for community-engaged scholarship ... more This article outlines an open, decentred and unfinished vision for community-engaged scholarship in hip hop studies. Employing examples from the Hip Hop as Postcolonial Studies initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, it elaborates in theory and method how (and why) hip hop's community knowledges might (and should) be better valued and leveraged in university contexts. The article argues that hip hop is itself a form of open (and vulnerable) scholarship; that hip hop's core praxis of "knowledge of self" (KoS) is an intellectually and artistically rigorous form of (counter)history; that hip hop is postcolonial studies. By examining artist-facilitator Rico Pabón's pivotal role in the initiative, the article elaborates how hip hop's performed KoS calls into question our reliance on the professorial structure of the university knowledge trade. Centring on a "questing" track that gives this article its title, it shows how the seamless and ...

The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music, 2018

This chapter examines how hip hop exemplifies the instrumentalization of verbal arsenals, lyrical... more This chapter examines how hip hop exemplifies the instrumentalization of verbal arsenals, lyrical kung fu, and other rhetorical gestures to “words as weapons.” Indeed, this weaponization of knowledge may be thought of as the very premise of hip hop—of rap music as martial art. While this theorization will help explain hip hop’s enduring polycultural commitment to martial arts, the aim here is a more foundational one—to account for the ways that the trope of physical violence functions in hip hop discourses and performative practices. The chapter employs a political economy framework to argue that this translation from the discursive to the material is a counterhegemonic response to the conflation of the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution: “the freedom of speech” and “the right to bear arms.” The chapter concludes by explaining why hip hop has proven an unlikely force for nonviolence in the Black Lives Matter moment.

American Music, 2015

When Buddy Bolden tuned up you could hear him clean across the river! Clean across the river! He ... more When Buddy Bolden tuned up you could hear him clean across the river! Clean across the river! He woke up the working people and kept the easy living. Call on Buddy Bolden. Call him Buddy Bolden. Watch him, he's calling his flock now. He's calling his flock now. Here they come. . .-"Hey, Buddy Bolden," Nina Simone on Nina Simone Sings Ellington (1962) Nostalgia for Black and White On the 2006 track "En noir et blanc" the Senegalese-French rapper Sefyu begins with the sound of a West African shekere moving back and forth through the stereo field. Right left, right left, right left, right. .. its dotted rhythm emulating a heartbeat. As we wait for the completion of the next rhythmic dyad a needle is suddenly dropped on an old record. The vinyl

Black Music Research Journal, 2008

In 1999 Alondra Nelson, then a graduate student in American studies at New York University, launc... more In 1999 Alondra Nelson, then a graduate student in American studies at New York University, launched an online community dedicated to the study of what might be best described to the uninitiated as black science fiction. Nelson named the forum the "AfroFuturism" listserv after a term coined by Mark Dery in his set of interviews about black artists whose works displayed a uniquely African-American take on futuristic narratives of scientific and technological progress (Dery 1993). As Nelson explains, Dery and his interviewees-scholars Tricia Rose and Greg Tate and novelist Samuel Delany: claimed that these works simultaneously referenced a past of abduction, displacement and alien-nation, and inspired technical and creative innovations in the work of such artists as Lee "Scratch" Perry, George Clinton and Sun Ra. Science fiction was a recurring motif in the music of these artists, they argued, because it was an apt metaphor for black life and history" (Nelson 2007). Since the beginnings of the listserv, its contributors have commented on countless aspects of Afrofuturist culture and art, debated its aims and methods, and otherwise shaped the definition of Afrofuturism to the extent that it has become a recognizable field of scholarly inquiry and artistic production. 1 Later in J. Griffith Rollefson is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a recent Berlin Program Fellow at the Berlin Freie Universität. He has published articles on popular music and postcoloniality in Music Research Forum and Popular Music and Society and has contributed entries on Afrofuturism and Experimental Music to Greenwood Press's forthcoming Encyclopedia of African American Music. His dissertation, entitled "Musical (African) Americanization in the New Europe," examines European hip hop in relation to African-American cultural politics. BMRJ 28_1 txt.indd 83 4/14/08 11:07:43 AM bmr journal 1999 Nelson organized a conference on the subject, " AfroFuturism | Forum: a critical dialogue on the future of black cultural production," at NYU and in 2002 a special issue of Social Text highlighted the subject featuring recent Afrofuturist poetry, prose, visual arts, and scholarship. While the moniker "Afrofuturism" and the study thereof are relatively new phenomena, we can trace a long legacy of Afrofuturist cultural production. Scholars of Afrofuturism have recognized elements of the project in the work of novelist Ralph Ellison and bandleader Sun Ra as early as the 1950s (Eshun 1998; Weheliye 2003; Yaszek 2005; Zuberi 2004). This vein of artistic production continued through the 1970s with the prose and stage works of Ishmael Reed and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and the disco-funk of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic up through the 1980s with the street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the raps of the Ultramagnetic MCs. Today, the most notable examples of Afrofuturist activity continue to be found in the world of hip hop, where artists like Cee-Lo, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, and Kool Keith-formerly of the Ultramagnetic MCs-have laid claim to the supersonic identities, interplanetary alter egos, and robotic surrealities of the Afrofuturist legacy. Much more than straightforward science fiction, however, the epistemes that accompany these identities reflect an oppositionality and an historical critique that seeks to undermine the logic of linear progress that buttresses Western universalism, rationalism, empiricism, logocentrism, and their standard-bearer: white supremacy. Lisa Yaszek offers a concise yet comprehensive summary of this critique in the introduction to her article "An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man": "As an intellectual aesthetic movement concerned with the relations of science, technology, and race, Afrofuturism appropriates the narrative techniques of science fiction to put a black face on the future. In doing so, it combats those whitewashed visions of tomorrow generated by a global 'futures industry' that equates blackness with the failure of progress and technological catastrophe" (2005, 297). In short, as the Afrofuturist scholar Alexander Weheliye puts it, this black science fiction ideology reflects "a posthumanism not mired in the residual effects of white liberal subjectivity" (2002, 30). On the 1970 live album It's After the End of the World, composer and keyboardist Sun Ra gives us a taste of this posthumanism, taking his audience on a musical voyage through his trademark black sci-fi world-view. On Ra's piece "Myth Versus Reality (The Myth-Science Approach)," vocalist June Tyson and alto saxophonist Danny Davis ask: "If you are not a reality, whose myth are you? If you are not a myth, whose reality are you?" before 1. Although the online forum is titled "AfroFuturism," the common usage is now "Afrofuturism."