The Street Is My Pulpit

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mwenda Ntarangwi
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Global Impact ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Born Again ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Subjective Identity

To some, Christianity and hip hop seem antithetical. Not so in Kenya. There, the music of Julius Owino, AKA Juliani, blends faith and beats into a potent hip hop gospel aimed at a youth culture hungry for answers spiritual, material, and otherwise. This book explores the Kenyan hip hop scene through the lens of Juliani's life and career. A born-again Christian, Juliani produces work highlighting the tensions between hip hop's forceful self-expression and a pious approach to public life, even while contesting the basic presumptions of both. This book forges an uncommon collaboration with its subject that offers insights into Juliani's art and goals even as the book explores the author's own religious experience and subjective identity as an ethnographer. What emerges is an original contribution to the scholarship on hip hop's global impact and a passionate study of the music's role in shaping new ways of being Christian in Africa.

Comedy, Class, and Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Tew
Keyword(s):  
Youth Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Cultural Commodification ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
Post War ◽  
Recurrent Motifs

This chapter studies the comic novel. If British and Irish culture in the post-war decades underwent some radical social and political upheavals, the novel registered and critiqued these transformations in part through the development of a particular comic mode. Comedy in British and Irish novels published from 1940 to 1973 often turned around the difficult intersection of class and nation. Alongside this overarching attention to class and nation, a number of other recurrent motifs can be traced in the comic novel of the period, such as the representation of cultural commodification, the decline of traditional values, and the emergence of new forms of youth culture. In the context of such widespread changes to the narratives that shaped public life, the comic novel expressed an ironic scepticism concerning the capacity of any cultural narrative to offer an adequate account of contemporary identities.

IMAGINING A BETTER WORLD:

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 353-385
Author(s):  
Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey ◽  
Ray Block ◽  
Harwood K. McClerking
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Negative Messages ◽  
Mass Level

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.

Belief in Science? On the Neuroscience of Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-242
Author(s):  
Katja Guenther
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Physiological Study ◽  
Important Lesson ◽  
Divine Nature ◽  
Brain Scans ◽  
Normal Product ◽  
Human Spirituality ◽  
Religious Differences

This afterword demonstrates how the return of religion to public life has had an impact on science. Faith itself has become an object of physiological study, with researchers deploying brain scans to identify a “God spot,” the supposed seat of a wired-in human spirituality. The afterword then considers the growing field of “neurotheology.” Rather than asking whether God exists and contemplating His divine nature, neurotheology seeks to ascertain whether religious experience is a normal product of brain function or the result of neural pathology. The reality has, however, not lived up to the hype. Far from overcoming theological stalemate, neurotheology has merely refought old battles on new terrain. Both believers and skeptics have been able to draw on neuroscientific results to shore up their positions, and debates have returned as vigorous and apparently intractable as before. In fact, rather than being a refuge from polemic, neurotheology provides evidence that debate over theological questions might not admit final resolution. Whatever its claims, neurotheology's most important lesson might be that people are better advised to respect religious differences than to try to overcome them.

Posthuman Rap

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Adams Burton
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Discrete Argument ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

Posthuman Rap listens for the ways contemporary rap maps an existence outside the traditional boundaries of what it means to be human. Contemporary humanity is shaped in neoliberal terms, where being human means being viable in a capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. But musicians from Nicki Minaj to Future to Rae Sremmurd deploy queerness and sonic blackness as they imagine different ways of being human. Building on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, Lester Spence, L.H. Stallings, and a broad swath of queer and critical race theory, Posthuman Rap turns an ear especially toward hip hop that is often read as apolitical in order to hear its posthuman possibilities, its construction of a humanity that is blacker, queerer, more feminine than the norm. While each chapter is written so that it can be sectioned off from the rest and read with a focus on the discrete argument contained in it, the chapters are not meant to be individual case studies. Rather, each builds on the previous one so that the book should best function if it is read in sequence, as a journey that lands us in a posthuman vestibule where we can party more freely and hear the music more clearly if we’ve traveled through the rest of the book to get there.

Music and Religion in American Public Life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason C. Bivins
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Formal Arrangement ◽  
Music And Religion

Music in American public life is best understood not simply as the formal arrangement of religious texts in sound but as a fluid arena of exchange between performers, participants, and audiences. In these exchanges we note the transformation of religious traditions themselves, as they navigate contact with their others and the challenges of public life or secularism; we also see the emergence of American religious musics as alternate publics themselves, in which new understandings of authority, tradition, and identity are negotiated. What is more, in recent decades American genre music—from jazz to hip-hop—has become a steady arena in which new forms of religiosity are proposed and debated.

Intersections, Overlaps, and Collaborations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mwenda Ntarangwi
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Close Collaboration ◽  
The Subject

This chapter summarizes in brief an ethnography which demonstrates a close collaboration between the subject and researcher; the role one hip hop artist plays in a counterdiscourse to Christianity's conservative posture in Kenya; a methodological approach that blurs any assumed distance between object and subject; and the intersections, overlaps, and collaborations that have taken place in the life and work of Julius Owino—more famously known as Juliani—as an artist and the author's own as the ethnographer. This chapter provides the groundwork for later discussion by briefly examining the life and career of Juliani as well as his own relationship with the author, and by providing overviews of the major themes underpinning this volume as a whole—hip hop, youth culture, and Christianity.

Post-Socialist Sufi Revival in Albania

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-334
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Bria
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Virtual Spaces ◽  
Charismatic Authority

Abstract This work analyses the case of Sufi revival in post-socialist Albania, where the religious field has been fragmented by the competing actions of different actors (local, regional and foreign) and by the critical and individualised religiosity of the faithful. Sufi public life is substantially marginalised by the monopoly of the esoteric Baktashis and Sunni political strategies. Thus, many Sufi faithful prefer to live their religious experience and express their practice in inner, private and virtual spaces. This dynamics has transformed the Sufi path and the charismatic authority of the Shaykhs.

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