Hip hop’s third space: Imagined community and the global hip hop nation (original) (raw)

Hip-Hop Culture in a Global Context: Interdisciplinary and Cross-Categorical Investigation

American Behavioral Scientist, 2011

Hip-hop permeates modern global society, and yet, there remains remain various divisions within it. Following up on an interdisciplinary academic conference, the Lehman Conference on Hip-Hop, this special issue highlights a number of aspects in hip-hop's development, and looks toward an ever increasing globalization of what was, initially, a neighborhood based cultural practice. The authors assembled here examine hip-hop within such contexts as social protest, entertainment, and identity formation, and also as a response to dominant structures, such as race, gender inequality, and capitalism. Their investigations consider hip-hop's roots and branches, and its connections to politics, culture and consumption. This special issue also focuses, in detail, at some of hip-hop's many practices, raising questions about its use for expressing the thorny topics of race, class, national identity, gender and sexuality. But the overall theme is one, which was expressed in the conference's initial theme: from local to global practice. It is this process, in particular, which we are attempting to better understand. We are also particularly concerned to explore ways marginal groups within hip-hop and the larger society, like LGBTQ communities (especially of color) and women of color also use hip-hop as a form of protest to critique social ills.

(Re)Building the Cypher: Fulfilling the Promise of Hip-Hop for Liberation

In this chapter we describe a pedagogy for building hip hop communities that can fulfill hip hop's liberatory potential. This pedagogy is based on the work of Project HIP-HOP (Highways Into the Past, History, Organizing, and Power), a Boston-based youth organization that trains young black and Latino/a hip hop artists as cultural organizers who can use their art to catalyze social change in their communities. Using the metaphor of the hip hop cypher, we show how Project HIP-HOP works to link young people to deep reservoirs of cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) by connecting them to their peers, their past, and their purpose. To envision the kind of hip hop communities we need in order to realize hip hop’s liberatory potential, we offer the metaphor of the cypher. The hip hop cypher, in which individual artists take turns performing and supporting one another in friendly competition, embodies hip hop’s roots as a form of individual and communal expression. Hip hop today, at least in its most widely disseminated forms, is out of balance. Building—and in some ways, rebuilding—the cypher means balancing hip hop’s tendencies toward individuality, competition, and boastfulness with the increasingly marginalized values of community, collaboration, and representing. It means supporting individual artists, while rebuilding the circle around him or her.

Hip Hop World News: reporting back

Race & Class, 2017

Responding to the BBC 4 documentary, The Hip Hop World News, the author examines a number of debates that the programme, narrated by Rodney P, a pioneer of British rap music, and a believer in the revolutionary potential of hip hop culture, throws up. For hip hop also has many reactionary elements and has become big business for the corporations and rap ‘stars’ involved in its production. Beyond just pointing to individual rappers who have been ‘conscious’ political voices, such as Public Enemy’s Chuck D, we are shown structures embedded in the origins and ‘elements’ of hip hop that continue to make it a ‘voice of the voiceless’. Some people, like Lord Jamar, who is interviewed on the documentary, have argued that hip hop as a black art form can only be performed by black artists, yet, as Rodney P points out, hip hop has been adopted everywhere to express and transmit the situations and struggles of marginalised and oppressed groups all over the globe.

Can It Be Bigger Than Hip Hop?: From Global Hip Hop Studies to Hip Hop

2019

Global Hip Hop Studies has grown tremendously since it started in 1984. Scholars from a number of disciplines have published numerous journal articles, books, dissertations and theses. They have also presented at multiple academic conferences and taught classes on global Hip Hop. "Can It Be Bigger Than Hip Hop?: From Global Hip Hop Studies to Hip Hop Studies" traces this history and examines the key authors, intellectual interventions, methods, and theories of this field. I used an interdisciplinary methodology entailing participant observations of local Hip Hoppas and the examination of more than five hundred scholarly texts that I assembled into a Global Hip Hop Studies bibliography. I conducted this study from the perspective of an Africana scholar who also identifies as Hip Hop. While analyzing Global Hip Hop Studies, I made two discoveries: scholars created artificial boundaries between Hip Hop Studies and Global Hip Hop Studies and they too narrowly focused on their specific region without accounting for Hip Hop's global connections. As such, "Can It Be Bigger Than Hip Hop?" sets the tone for the special issue and lays out "If I Ruled the World's" central argument: Global Hip Hop Studies is Hip Hop Studies. If we are to understand Hip Hop, we need to go beyond the United States. Moreover, Hip Hop is an African diasporic phenomenon that consists of multiple flows that create Hip Hop ciphas around the world.

If I Ruled the World: Putting Hip Hop on the Atlas (full issue)

2019

The compilation of "If I Ruled the World" consists of flows and a cipha in and of itself. The late and great Nigerian poet, Ikeogu Oke, blessed us with poems on Tupac Shakur. Oke's poems bring a new perspective to Tupac and positions Tupac as an African diasporic rapper. This perspective means that Tupac was (and still is) African. The shift in thinking from American to African living in a diaspora changes how we comprehend Tupac's identity and his reach around the world. My article "Can It Be Bigger Than Hip Hop," thoroughly examines Global Hip Hop Studies and lays out the overall argument for "If I Ruled the World: Putting Hip Hop on the Atlas." I contend for a third wave of Global Hip Hop Studies that builds on the work of the first two waves, identifies Hip Hop as an African diasporic phenomenon, and aligns with Hip Hop where there are no boundaries between Hip Hop inside and outside of the United States. Joanna Daguirane Da Sylva adds to the cipha with her examination of Didier Awadi. Da Sylva's excellent work reveals the ways in which Hip Hoppa Didier Awadi elevates Pan-Africanism and uses Hip Hop as a tool to decolonize the minds of African peoples. The interview by Tasha Iglesias and myself of members of Generation Hip Hop and the Universal Hip Hop Museum provides a primary source and highlights two Hip Hop organizations with chapters around the world. Mich Yonah Nyawalo's "Negotiating French Muslim Identities through Hip Hop" details Hip Hop artists Médine and Diam's, who are both French and Muslim, and whose self-identification can be understood as political strategies in response to the French Republic's marginalization of Muslims. In "Configurations of Space and Identity in Hip Hop: Performing 'Global South'," Igor Johannsen adds to this special issue an examination of the spatiality of the Global South and how Hip Hoppas in the Global South oppose global hegemony. The final essay, "'I Got the Mics On, My People Speak': On the Rise of Aboriginal Australian Hip Hop," by Benjamin Kelly and Rhyan Clapham, provides a thorough analysis of Aboriginal Hip Hop and situates it within postcolonialism. Overall, the collection of these essays points to the multiple identities, political economies, cultures, and scholarly fields and disciplines that Hip Hop interacts with around the world. A special issue of this caliber requires a large contribution from a number of scholars. Inevitably, we will not be able to name everyone, but here is our best effort. We would like to thank the team of reviewers, they copyedited, reviewed essays, and provided excellent feedback:

“Our Lives are Lived in Freestyle”: Social and Dynamic Productions of Breaking and Hip Hop Culture

2018

Based on fieldwork with breakers living in New York, Osaka, and Perth, as well from prior experiences within my field of study, this thesis builds on a growing body of scholarship which examines the productions, expressions and consumptions of hip hop culture. This study looks at how breakers-hip hop dance practitioners-work to produce, sustain and transform hip hop culture in ways that are local and unique. It is not, however, my intention to set out a definitive list of good or bad, authentic or unauthentic, notions of hip hop, or to suggest that there is one true or correct way in which to participate and identify as a member of. What is emphasised are the ways in which breakers, through their embodied dance practices, negotiate, express, understand and conceptualise hip hop. The title of this thesis, "Our Lives are Lived in Freestyle", is a line from a spoken word poem, by a breaker from Texas named Marlon. In breaking, to "freestyle" means to improvise in the moment; to use the tools one has at their disposal to perform and create. Hence, this term "freestyle" is an apt metaphor for this thesis as it illustrates the dynamic and improvisational modalities by which hip hop is reflexively constituted, pushed and pulled in a variety of different directions, by a diverse and ever-changing aggregate of different peoples from around the world. Throughout the chapters of this thesis I demonstrate how hip hop is a globalising and diverse social field, governed not by any institutions, offices or titles, but rather by individual hip hop persons, within and across different local settings. This study contributes to contemporary anthropological writings on culture, process, agency and social action. Additionally, this research also contributes to a growing body of hip hop scholarship, which consider hip hop and its many practices as a living, transformative, global phenomenon.