Global hip-hop identities: Black youth, psychoanalytic action research, and the Moving to the Beat project

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Haaken ◽  
Jennifer Wallin-Ruschman ◽  
Simona Patange
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 353-385
Author(s):  
Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey ◽  
Ray Block ◽  
Harwood K. McClerking

AbstractDespite a recent increase in research on its sociopolitical implications, many questions regarding rap music’s influence on mass-level participation remain unanswered. We consider the possibility that “imagining a better world” (measured here as the degree to which young African Americans are critical of the music’s negative messages) can correlate with a desire to “build a better world” (operationalized as an individual’s level of political participation). Evidence from the Black Youth Project (BYP)’s Youth Culture Survey (Cohen 2005) demonstrates that rap critique exerts a conditional impact on non-voting forms of activism. Rap critique enhances heavy consumers’ civic engagement, but this relationship does not occur among Blacks who consume the music infrequently. By demonstrating rap’s politicizing power and contradicting certain criticisms of Hip Hop culture, our research celebrates the possibilities of Black youth and Black music.


2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin L. Clay

Through sustained ethnographic field work that inquired into youth participatory action researchers’ political identity development, I identified a politicized discourse engaged by youth during their early stages of action research that I have termed Black resilience neoliberalism (BRN). This study explicates BRN theory, tracing its connection to policy discourses related to Black youth and schools and exploring the ways its tenets are revealed in Black youth action researchers’ reflections on race/racism, inequality, and social change. I argue that BRN is both a conspicuous and an inconspicuous thread of neoliberal discourse and logic, which hides in plain sight as empowerment; however, it is entangled with the project of hegemony. To that end, destabilizing the legitimization of BRN is crucial to reconstituting empowerment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Martignetti ◽  
Joshua M. Brewster

Aspiring popular musicians, particularly rappers, often feel unwelcome in tertiary music study. While hip hop has entered the academy through other fields, it is still mostly absent from music departments. In 2014, a rapper began studies in a small, open Bachelor of Music programme that had no coursework or specialists in this area. His course of study ultimately looked somewhat similar to other students’ but also included a blend of coursework in music technology, poetry, literature, communications and business. This action research study examines the student’s experience and perspectives as he prepared to graduate in May 2018, as well as the researcher’s experience and perspectives as his advisor and teacher. It is hoped that this study will enable institutions to better serve future such students.


2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Edgar Pieterse

Neste artigo assume-se que a condição urbana contemporânea está fortemente marcada por uma crescente pluralidade. Associada a esta mudança na natureza do contexto urbano, pode-se também observar a proliferação de lugares (sites) de engajamento político e de ação, sendo alguns deles formalmente ligados a fóruns institucionais do Estado, mas muitos outros podem ser caracterizados pela sua insistência em permanecer fora do Estado, uma forma de afirmar autonomia e clamar por termos próprios de reconhecimento e formas de agir. O artigo chama a atenção para o significado de uma categoria de atores urbanos – hip-hoppers – que ocupa uma posição “marginal” na relação com o Estado, mas que é muito relevante para a existência marginalizada da maior parte da juventude negra nas cidades do sul global, particularmente no Rio de Janeiro e na Cidade do Cabo. O artigo demonstra que as culturas hip hop oferecem uma poderosa estrutura de interpretação e resposta para a juventude pobre que sofre sistematicamente o impacto de forças urbanas extremamente violentas e exploradoras. A base do poder do hip hop (e congêneres) é sua complexa sensibilidade estética, que funde valores afetivos – como o desejo, a paixão e o prazer, mas também a ira e a crítica –, que por sua vez se traduzem em identidades políticas e às vezes em ação (ou seja, posicionamento) para seus participantes. Em última instância, o artigo procura associar o potencial da cultura política do hip hop a temas acadêmicos mais amplos, tais como participação, espaço público, cidadania e segurança.Palavras-chave: hip hop; política cultural; violência urbana; exclusão/ inclusão urbana; registros afetivos. Abstract: It is assumed in the paper that the contemporary urban condition is marked by an increased pluralistic intensity in cities. Coupled to this shift in the nature of the urban context, one can also observe a proliferation of sites of political engagement and agency, some of which are formally tied to the various institutional forums of the state, and many that are defined by their insistence to stand apart from the state, asserting autonomy and clamoring for a self-defined terms of recognition and agency. This paper draws attention to the significance of one category of urban actors – hip-hoppers – that can be said to occupy a “marginal” location in relation to the state but uniquely relevant to the marginalized existence of most poor black youth in cities of the global South, particularly Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. The paper demonstrates that hip hop cultures offer a powerful framework of interpretation and response for poor youth who are systemically caught at the receiving end of extremely violent and exploitative urban forces. The basis of hip hop’s power is its complex aesthetical sensibility that fuses affective registers such as rage, passion, lust, critique, pleasure, desire, which in turn translates into political identities, and sometimes agency (i.e. positionality), for its participants. In the final instance, the paper tries to link conclusions about the potential of hip hop cultural politics to larger academic themes such as participation, public space, citizenship and security.Keywords: hip hop; cultural politics; urban violence; urban exclusion/inclusion; affective registers.


2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh-Anne Ingram

This book review analyzes Awad Ibrahim's 2014 book, entitled: The Rhizome of Blackness: A critical ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity and the Politics of Becoming, published by Peter Lang. This review introduces the rhizomatic analysis used in the book to theorize the complex and multifaceted nature of Black identity within the North American context. It gives an overview of the critical ethnographic projects Ibrahim uses to illustrate the ways that Black youth are forced to deny their complex identities to fit into dominant White society, while also finding a heteroglossia of expressions in a third space through Black popular culture. The book review supports Ibrahim's proposal of using Hip-Hop and Black popular culture for a project of diversification to validate Black youth, while asking if using Hip-Hop might foreclose other opportunities to learn about expressions of Black culture beyond the confines of North American Corporate media. The book review argues that the Rhizome of Blackness provides important messages for educators about Black identity and the social construction of identity and nationhood.


Author(s):  
Kevin C. Holt

This chapter offers a historical contextualization of crunk, an Atlanta-based subgenre of hip hop, in order to access its political underpinnings. By situating the development of crunk within the context of nonparticipant panic surrounding the 1990s Black spring break event Freaknik, this chapter argues that crunk represents an aestheticization of resistance to concurrent heightened policing of Black youth leisure. While discussions of politics in hip hop music generally centralize lyrical content, crunk, with its emphasis on loud interjectional vocalizations, and extended sections of repetitious chant, necessitates an alternate analytical approach in addressing its political subtext. Accordingly, this chapter offers J. L. Austin’s concept of performative utterances and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of Signifyin’ as frames for addressing how crunk uses vocality, and by extension language, to manifest political subversion, not through lyrical content or poetic virtuosity but by facilitating the reproduction of a stylized performance that actively resists the silencing/repression of Black youth pleasure.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 2156759X1880028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian P. Levy ◽  
Amy L. Cook ◽  
Christopher Emdin

This article explores a model for school counselors to capitalize on the therapeutic, empowerment-oriented nature of hip-hop practices to engage in youth participatory action research (YPAR). Drawing from research that supports the use of hip-hop therapy and YPAR in schools, we propose a culturally sensitive group counseling process wherein students use hip-hop lyric writing, recording, and performing to critically analyze, research, and report on issues of personal importance to them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jabari Evans

This article is an ethnographic study of a hip hop-based music education programme for students within elementary school classrooms. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in two urban schools, this case study describes how hip hop song composition encouraged participants to make essential and critical reflections about media’s place in their personal lives, peer groups, families and communities. The findings of this study suggest that the social and cultural capital of making hip hop music can contribute to bolstering academic learning for Black youth. Implications from this study also suggest informal interests and social identities rooted in hip hop music can connect youth to pathways for professions in creative labour, high-capacity technological skills, civic-mindedness and critical media literacy that could also transcend the classroom.


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