IMAGINING A BETTER WORLD:

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.

Download Full-text

Behind Beats and Rhymes: Working Class from a Hampton Roads Hip Hop Homeplace

Policy Futures in Education ◽

10.2304/pfie.2009.7.2.217 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 217-229 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Aisha S. Durham

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

African American Women ◽

Public Housing ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Bell Hooks ◽

Race Riots ◽

Hip Hop Culture ◽

Hampton Roads ◽

Virginia Beach

The film documentary titled Hip Hop: beyond beats and rhymes captures ongoing conversations among scholars, cultural critics, and hip hop insiders about the state of African Americans by interrogating distinct expressive forms associated with hip hop culture. Durham draws from two scenes to describe her memories as the researched underclass and as the graduate researcher returning to her childhood public housing community to explore the shifting discursive terrain of hip hop as a struggle over meaning waged through class performances. Class is articulated through taste values and notions of respectability. Durham connects the hip hop mantra emphasizing lived, embodied culture with bell hooks' description of a homeplace to recount her researcher/ed self during the Virginia Beach Greekfest race riots and her visit home where she talks about hip hop feminism with a group of African American women from the Norfolk public housing community. By recalling autoethnographic encounters of hip hop at home, Durham calls attention to the politics of class that echoes behind beats and rhymes.

Download Full-text

Book Review. The Rhizome of Blackness: A critical ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming.

Comparative and International Education ◽

10.5206/cie-eci.v44i1.9271 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 44 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Leigh-Anne Ingram

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

North American ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Black Identity ◽

Black Youth ◽

Critical Ethnography ◽

Hip Hop Culture ◽

Language Identity ◽

Black Popular Culture

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.

Download Full-text

Race Rebels

10.5406/illinois/9780252036620.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Miles White

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Black Male ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Black Body ◽

Black Music ◽

Hip Hop Culture ◽

Elvis Presley ◽

Male Subjectivity ◽

New Millennium

This chapter discusses whiteness, masculine desire, and the animating absent black presence now inverted since its inception in minstrelsy. It shows how the triumph of hardcore rap makes it clear that the transgressive black body, primitivism, and cross-racial desire continue to find value in the marketplace of global popular culture well into the new millennium. The chapter also looks at a number of successful white performers of black music styles, including Elvis Presley, Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and Brother Ali; and addresses whether there are more or less ethical ways in which white and other youth may engage hip-hop culture and appropriations of black male subjectivity.

Download Full-text

“Be Current, or You Become the Old Man”: Crossing the Generational Divide in Hip-Hop Education

Urban Education ◽

10.1177/0042085920914358 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 004208592091435 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jason D. Rawls ◽

Emery Petchauer

Keyword(s):

Hip Hop ◽

Youth Culture ◽

Classroom Community ◽

Personal Identification ◽

Building Relationships ◽

Hip Hop Culture ◽

Large Segment ◽

Hip Hop Education ◽

Generational Divide

Hip-hop culture has been an influential force on a large segment of this generation’s teachers and a tool for building relationships with students. The contemporary hip-hop of today’s generation differs from that of many hip-hop educators/pedagogues. This case study explored how one hip-hop generation teacher attempted to cross this generational divide rather than discount youth culture in the classroom. The findings of this study focus on how the teacher’s personal identification with hip-hop culture informed his relationships with students and how he drew from key narratives and ideas in hip-hop to communicate his views of his classroom community.

Download Full-text

The Hip-Hop Nation: Black Youth Culture Today

New Black Renaissance ◽

10.4324/9781315633268-13 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 199-218

Keyword(s):

Hip Hop ◽

Youth Culture ◽

Black Youth

Download Full-text

Contesting Meanings in the Postmodern Age

Matatu ◽

10.1163/18757421-04802007 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 48 (2) ◽

pp. 335-362 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Michael Tosin Gbogi

Keyword(s):

Hip Hop ◽

Youth Culture ◽

Hip Hop Culture ◽

Under Five ◽

Production And Consumption ◽

Hip Hop Music

Recent years have seen an explosion in the production and consumption of hip hop music in Nigeria. From the MTV Africa Music Awards to the BET Awards, Nigerian hip hop heads have continued to push the boundaries of their music on the international front, linking it, in the process, to a sort of global Hip Wide Web. Yet, despite these breakthroughs, the general perception of the discursive landscape of this music is not altogether positive in Nigeria itself. In particular, the message(s) of the music’s lyrics has been severally described as a venture that has no meaning beyond its noisy character. This is especially the case when the music is being evaluated by older generations of Nigerian critics who do not share in, and are almost averse to, the hip hop culture that has newly ascended as the dominant youth culture. Problematizing these evaluations under five paradigms—crossing, multilingualism, and styling, repetition, inversion of order, meaninglessness, and pornography—this essay contends that what appears as meaninglessness in Nigerian hip hop music inscribes a masked matrix of meanings in the postmodern age. It argues that the elements of the lyrical gamut that are often perceived as meaningless are in fact meaningful and valuable resources that the artists, and by extension their audience members, harness to perform their generational ingroupness and multiplex postmodern identities.

Download Full-text

Beats from the East: Transcultural Adaptation of Hip-Hop from North America to Eastern Asia

MacEwan University Student eJournal ◽

10.31542/j.muse.157 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Donald Melnyk

Keyword(s):

African Americans ◽

North America ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Asian Countries ◽

Eastern Asia ◽

South Bronx ◽

Hip Hop Culture ◽

Transcultural Adaptation ◽

The Creation ◽

The Relationship

Hip-hop culture has spread from its origins in the South Bronx in the late 1970’s to many countries across the globe, leading to the creation of a Global Hip-hop Nation in which artist from every nation have the ability to share, collaborate, and critique the works of others. With the expansion of a culture that was created – predominately – by marginalized African-Americans, an issue that has arisen is the authenticity of what constitutes ‘real’ Hip-hop for those outside of North America. In this paper the author will explore the relationship between Hip-hop cultures in North America and Eastern Asia in an attempt to show how both cultures have influenced each other rather than the commonly held view that Eastern Asian countries (Japan, China, and South Korea) have copied and imitated the styles of North America. Through secondary research and exploring the scholarship surrounding the creation and expansion of Hip-hop culture the author will examine the circumstances that have lead to the popularity Hip-hop has gained in North America and Eastern Asia, and examine the aspects of Eastern Asian culture that have influenced Hip-hop artists in North America to show that the imitation and adaptation of cultures works both ways.

Download Full-text

Hip-Hop Citizens: Arts-Based, Culturally Sustaining Civic Engagement Pedagogy

Harvard Educational Review ◽

10.17763/1943-5045-86.4.527 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 86 (4) ◽

pp. 527-555 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Paul J. Kuttner

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Civic Engagement ◽

Civic Education ◽

Low Income ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Civic Life ◽

Cultural Resources ◽

Hip Hop Culture ◽

The Arts ◽

The Many

Amid concerns about the decreasing political engagement of young people, scholars and policy makers have begun discussing the “civic achievement gap,” disparities in civic capacity between low-income students and Students of Color and their White, wealthier counterparts. While this scholarship raises important issues, it often relies on a narrow view of civic engagement, downplaying alternative forms of civic activity and the variability of civic life across contexts. This can lead to deficit-based models of civic education that bypass the opportunity to tap into the many less-visible ways youth, particularly those from low-income Communities of Color, are already engaged in civic life. In this article, Paul J. Kuttner offers as an alternative approach, youth cultural organizing, which engages young people in catalyzing change in their communities through the arts and other forms of cultural expression, drawing on shared cultural resources. He presents a theoretical framework for this culturally sustaining civic engagement pedagogy based on a case study of the organization Project HIP-HOP, and he explores the potential of the arts and hip-hop culture as asset-based spaces within which to engage young people in civic life.

Download Full-text