“Beat It like a Cop”

opening chronicle of Nelson George's Buppies, B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (1992) includes a small but notable stream of literary and academic figures such as Ishmael Reed, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Cornel West. Yet poetry--as written on page or as practiced by writers who identify themselves primarily as poets--is significantly absent (9-40). (1) Likewise, Mark Anthony Neal's Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and Post-Soul (2002), despite Neal's insistence on including and academics under post-soul umbrella (104) and an extended analysis of spoken word artist Paul Beatty's first novel (about a poet), provides no close reading of poetry as an important genre in post-soul era (131-74). absences of poetry and poetic analysis seem important because of crucial and prominent role of poetry during black arts movement, literary period preceding what Trey Ellis and Greg Tate have termed (in 1989 and 1992, respectively) the new black aesthetic (Ellis, The New Black Aesthetic 234-42) and a postnationalist black arts (206). Ellis's and Tate's versions of emerging period also fail to include or poetry. (2) If we agree with Cheryl Clarke on two points--that the African-American literary tradition begins with poetry and poets (12) and that poetry was a principal instrument of political education about new blackness during black arts movement (2)--then it matters a great deal that poetry studies, including a critical examination of poems, has gone missing from contemporary cultural landscape of post-soul era. One possible explanation for this supposed absence is that contemporary black poetry is often represented through spoken word and, by extension, hip hop, in which oral and performative elements of African American poetic tradition have come to fore. But such an explanation overlooks fact that there have been a number of black producing written, on page, poetry in 1980s, 1990s, and today. Additionally, in literary-academic circles, this period has witnessed establishment of George Moses Horton Society for Study of African American Poetry by Trudier Harris at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, founding of Cave Canem Poetry Workshop for African American Poets by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, and two Furious Flower conferences organized by Joanne Gabbin. omission of poetry from George's chronicle, Neal's chapter on post-soul intelligentsia, and Ellis's and Tate's manifestos brings into question written poetry's and poets' relevance to post-soul black culture. If post-black arts movement poetry is flourishing, why are black not represented in early articulations of this period? Can their poetry be seen, like that of preceding black arts movement--as an instrument of political education about new blackness? And if we include them in post-soul aesthetic, how does that shift our understanding of defining themes of period? While I cannot provide in this space a full survey of many important and fine contemporary African American and wide range of their aesthetics, I will focus on Cyrus Cassells and Elizabeth Alexander as a pair of working in different ways with one dimension of post-soul aesthetics: cosmopolitanism. (3) Including them under umbrella of post-soul refuses, as post-soul culture itself does, a high versus low culture binary. Keeping black such as Cassells and Alexander within fold of post-soul aesthetics is an inclusive stance that considers cultural hybridity, as evidenced by university degrees, international travel, and professorial positions, an aspect of contemporary black life that is, as Trey Ellis would argue, just as black as any other. As George expresses it, one feature of contemporary period is tales told not from belly of beast, but from barely integrated mountain tops of academia, law, and mainstream journalism (108); therein is chronicled tight space where cultural mulattoes reside (107). …

This chapter discusses the aesthetic and political dimensions of the Muslim International through hip-hop culture during a period when the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist” were viewed as fundamental threats to U.S. national identity. Through the resurgence of Malcolm X and the embrace of Black Islam, hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s tapped into Black internationalism to challenge racial domination, militarism, and mass incarceration, imagining Black freedom beyond the United States and into Africa and the Muslim Third World. The hip-hop culture—like jazz and the Black Arts Movement—became a space where Black radicalism, Islam, and Muslim Third World politics would have a strong influence, interpreted through lyrics that have been expressed by various artists such as Rakim, Public Enemy, Mos Def, Ice Cube, and many others.

Critical inquiry at the intersections of hip-hop music, African American literature, and Black visual culture inform a generative discourse for Black underground imagery within and across an array of interrelated texts. Through certain textual pairings—Jonathan Green’s “Seeking” and the Gravediggaz’s “The Night the Earth Cried”; or Mos Def’s “hip-hop” and Jeff Wall’s “After Invisible Man,” (among others)—this chapter seeks to excavate a ritualistic intertextuality imbedded in certain works that feature elements of what can tentatively be referred to as Black visual underground culture, a constellation of lyrics, images, and textual allusions that articulate an underground ethos present (if not readily audible/visible) in hip-hop culture. In Practices of Looking …, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright argue that “visual culture encompasses many media forms ranging from fine art to popular film and television to advertising to visual data in fields such as the sciences, law and medicine.”1 The Black visual underground functions in much the same way except that the subject matter embraces blackness and the cultural, spiritual, and political markers of Black identity—especially here in contemporary popular culture.KeywordsMusic VideoAfrican American CultureNative TongueBlack LifeMiddle PassageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In his new book Build, Mark Katz provides a rich account of the people, histories, problems, and successes around the U.S. State Department's use of hip hop as a diplomatic tool. Katz served as director of the government's hip hop diplomacy initiative, Next Level, from 2013 to 2018 and traveled around the world meeting artists and participating in events. These experiences and his sharp observations and thoughtful reflections about them provide for an engaging exploration of what hip hop means to so many people, from so many backgrounds, and in so many places. While the book attempts to make the case for both hip hop and diplomacy, and to make a clear bridge between the two, it is most successful when it focuses on the art form and the artists, for whom Katz clearly has deep admiration. As he sees time and time again, for countless young people across the globe, the music matters because "hip hop saved my life" (6).

Hip Hop culture arrived in Britain in the late 1970s from New York. However, by the middle of the 1980s it had established itself as a hugely popular youth cultural form in Britain in the shape of graffiti, break dancing and music. Although largely seen as an African American form, a number of artists began to produce music that drew specifically upon established black British styles, within a Hip Hop framework of beats and rhymes, in order to develop a highly unique version of Hip Hop, one that communicated both the differences and similarities within the US and the UK. This dialogue placed black British music and culture as an equal partner in the black Atlantic triangle, as artists and cultural practitioners drew upon the Caribbean and America while specifically being influenced by and reflecting upon their very unique position in Britain. London Posse, as one of the first groups to specifically draw upon the traditions of black British music and Sound System culture, and combine it with Hip Hop culture, sought to utilize Hip Hop as a form for expressing a particular position as young black Londoners with cultural resources of their own. In so doing, they were drawing upon the music's origins as a hybrid and malleable form rather than as an essentially black American one. This period of intense creativity and innovation has rarely been documented, yet is significant in the continuing ability of black British cultures to position themselves at the centre of black Atlantic debates and creativity, as opposed to simply mimicking or drawing upon American and Caribbean influences. My essay explores this period through a close reading of London Posse's music and lyrics and an examination of their position as a Hip Hop act drawing upon a black British tradition with roots in the Caribbean and US, but which spoke from, and for, a British perspective.

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) has become an increasingly popular subject of critique in recent years. Despite participation of some of most prolific women writers, artists, and activists of this period, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Mari Evans, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan (some of whom did not define themselves as artists), male artists and intellectuals are given credit for shaping and codifying aesthetic and political ideologies of BAM. Cherise Pollard reminds us that: As they articulated black manhood through pen, gun, penis, and microphone, male poets in Black Arts Movement defined and reified revolutionary black male identity.... [M]any [black women poets] worked both within and against men's assumptions about relationships between race and gender and art and politics. (Pollard 173) The work produced by women writers and artists characterized ideological and propagandistic relationships between race, sex, and art in ways that deserve careful examination. In his extensive project, Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African-American Poetry and Culture, Tony Bolden provides an overview of this subject as it relates to women poets, stating that much of black vernacular culture, like American generally, is male-centered, and [i]s a product of that culture. An acknowledgement of ways in which male writers and intellectuals of BAM, such as Haki Madhubuti, Maulana Karenga, Amiri Baraka, and Larry Neal not yet learned to question narrow framework in which gender is theorized in black culture is integral to an exploration of ideals of this period (25). Indeed, scholars are now beginning to recognize complexities of aesthetics of this historical period in ways that move beyond popular critiques of its masculinist ideological foundations. Such interests privilege other aspects of BAM that recognize its artists' varied approaches to executing its ideals. Black American writers of preceding generations had debated, discarded, and negotiated questions of cultural representation, nationhood, and role of black writer in articulation of such concepts, and BAM writers of 1960s and '70s would continue to do same. Looking at goals of BAM through context of local initiatives, in such cities as Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, and Chicago, is useful for engaging ways in which BAM principles were experimented with and sustained by black artists in particular communities. Although New York is often understood to be at center of most of artistic productivity of BAM, due in part to a migration of innovative black writers there during 1950s and '60s (Nielsen 79), Movement would be shaped in other regions of U. S. as well. In Chicago, for instance, black artists were affiliated with Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC), a multi-media initiative that would continue to thrive well into decade of eighties. As James Smethurst suggests in a valuable historical survey of BAM, the numerous direct exchanges and interconnections between African American cultural and political activists in Chicago and Detroit made Black Arts movement in those cities exceptionally vital (180). For members of OBAC, both writing and production of other media of expression was germane to communication of organization's specific objectives. For example, under direction of such members as artist Jeff Donaldson, one of captains of AFRICOBRA, visual arts branch of OBAC, efforts of local artists to translate its ideals into visual media would be realized in construction of in/famous Wall of Respect on Chicago's South Side. As Margo Natalie Crawford writes, The OBAC visual arts workshop decided to shape mural around following categories: rhythm and blues, jazz, theater, statesmen, religion, literature, sports, and dance. …

At the most fundamental level, bling—the display of prestige through luxury goods—is the latest iteration of “conspicuous consumption,” coming from hip hop culture. However, hip hop artists have not consistently focused on luxury consumption for the sole purpose of celebrating—and thereby reinforcing—elite signs of the wider (and whiter) dominant culture that has historically sought (and currently seeks) to circumscribe the influence of black American culture. This chapter focuses on three tracks, from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, that highlight ways that hip hop has questioned, satirized, and hollowed out the meanings ascribed to dominant cultural capital. Luxury hip hop and hip hop luxury also subversively reconfigure the meanings of elite symbols and highlight hip hop’s power to redefine dominant cultural signs of power.

This article theorizes Hip Hop as Black liberatory practice by explicating the links between Hip Hop knowledges, pedagogies, and futures. I draw on multiple research and classroom experiences, including co-teaching a course with pioneering Hip Hop artist Chuck D of Public Enemy. The course examined Hip Hop culture as an extension of Black freedom culture and delved into the politics and the poetics, as well as the activism and the aesthetics, of the Hip Hop arts movement. Presented in interview format, this article highlights Hip Hop as an organic form of culturally sustaining pedagogy that aims to advance the Black liberatory practices that we refer to as “freedom moves” (Alim et al., 2023).

This chapter argues that the performances of hybrid, transcultural identities mark a cornerstone of hip hop and inform the debates within and about hip hop as a movement, practice, lifestyle, or culture.As hip hop is in essence about belonging and practice, about "doing something somewhere," it is also crucially about "doing identity," about creating a self in a world that is as much for you as it is against you.In the case of Berlin rap, hip-hop music videos enter a complex relationship with US hip hop and its repository of cultural gestures in their aspiration to put Berlin rap music on the map (roughly in the first decade of the 21st century).Ultimately, of course, this generational conflict hinges on a notion of performing and remixing authenticity that hip-hop culture had itself transported into the world and on the tension that arises when transcultural engagement meets 'keepin' it real.'This contribution looks at the transcultural and transatlantic relationships and connections hip-hop culture has facilitated since it became a powerful (and global) pop cultural and youth cultural force in the early-to-mid 1990s.Hip hop allows us to conceive of it as decisively 1Early scholarship on hip hop emerged in the early 1990s and the study of hip hop constituted itself as a field right around the heyday of the boom bap era, see Gilroy 1993;

This chapter traces how the stories people tell through and about hip hop produce diasporic connections. It introduces two fundamental and interlinked origin myths that are central to how music means in Senegalese hip hop (Rap Galsen). One connects hip hop to griots and indigenous oralities; the other centers on the South Bronx and urban marginalization. It argues that analyzing hip hop within specific local musical histories complicates frameworks of resistance in global hip hop studies. Rather than objectifying the sounds of hip hop or reducing them to a medium of resistance, it approaches hip hop meaning through an ethnographic analysis of musical genre that examines the social significances of sound and musical gesture. It shows how hip hop’s aural palimpsests relate to strategic practices of memory.

African Americans' historical roots are encapsulated in the lyrics, melodies, and rhythms of their music. In the 18th and 19th centuries, African slaves, longing for emancipation, expressed their hopes and dreams through spirituals. Inspired by African civilization and culture, as well as religion, art, literature, and social issues, this influential, joyous, tragic, uplifting, challenging, and enduring music evolved into many diverse genres, including jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul, swing, and hip hop. Providing a lyrical history of our nation, this groundbreaking encyclopedia, the first of its kind, showcases all facets of African American music including folk, religious, concert and popular styles. Over 500 in-depth entries by more than 100 scholars on a vast range of topics such as genres, styles, individuals, groups, and collectives as well as historical topics such as music of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and numerous others. Offering balanced representation of key individuals, groups, and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and other perspectives not usually approached, this indispensable reference illuminates the profound role that African American music has played in American cultural history. Editors Price, Kernodle, and Maxile provide balanced representation of various individuals, groups and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and perspectives. Also highlighted are the major record labels, institutions of higher learning, and various cultural venues that have had a tremendous impact on the development and preservation of African American music. Among the featured: Motown Records, Black Swan Records, Fisk University, Gospel Music Workshop of America, The Cotton Club, Center for Black Music Research, and more. With a broad scope, substantial entries, current coverage, and special attention to historical, political, and social contexts, this encyclopedia is designed specifically for high school and undergraduate students. Academic and public libraries will treasure this resource as an incomparable guide to our nation's African American heritage.

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, hip hop of the 1980s and early 1990s, and spoken word poetry have each attempted to initiate the dialogical process outlined by Paulo Freire as necessary in overturning oppression. Each art form has done this by critically engaging with the world and questioning dominant systems of power. However, unlike the Black Arts Movement and early hip hop, spoken word—with its growing foothold in urban classrooms and contemporary culture—may be in a unique position to facilitate unprecedented social change by providing students with a platform from which to question and negotiate the conditions of their lives.

Beginning in the early to mid 1980s, Hip Hop culture appeared on Canadian stages and in homes, even as it was limited in supply on commercial radio and television. Unlike their American counterparts, mainstream Canadian emcees (many of whom were racialized as Black and identified with the city of Toronto) were notably dependent upon personal finances, under-resourced independent record labels, distribution deals, and state and not-for-profit grant monies to subsidize the conceptualization, production, and promotion of their art. Labelled “urban music” in an attempt to spatialize and covertly reference Blackness, Hip Hop in Canada, from the outset, was mapped against, in conflict with, and outside of the national imaginary. While building local scenes, an independent label system, and a cross-Canada college radio, television, and live music infrastructure and audience, Hip Hop artists developed spaces of resistance, circumvented industry-generated obstacles, and defined success on their own terms — all of which suggested that they were not solely at the will of the dominant white music industry. And yet artists simultaneously encountered anti-Black practices that constrained the creation and sustenance of a nationwide Hip Hop infrastructure and denoted an inequitable structuring of support for the arts in Canada. By examining the interface of Blackness, art, and the racial economy of Canada’s creative industries, this article will outline instances of Canada’s anti-Black racism as well as the challenges Hip Hop artists and industry professionals have faced in the areas of recording and label relations, music sales, broadcasting regulations, and the accolade system. These social relations — many of which are rooted in longer histories of race relations and anti-Blackness in Canada — resulted in industry-wide policies, practices, norms, and ideologies that unfairly disadvantaged Black artists and undermined the realization and marketplace potential of a Hip Hop infrastructure within and beyond Canada.

This essay considers the political efficacy of hip-hop, as genre and as lifestyle, three decades after it emerged from the South Bronx and as its artists and cultural critics variously mourn, endure, and embrace its institutionalization. I look at three recent critical works on hip-hop: Paul Gilroy's 2011 Darker than Blue, which sees in the genre empty posturing and codes of conspicuous consumption; the 2012 edition of Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal's anthology That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, which with a wide array of essays and interviews seeks to establish the contours of a discipline that's lost its novelty but continues to evolve; and Nitasha Tamar Sharma's 2010 ethnography Hip Hop Desis, which explores hip-hop culture among South Asian American youths who found in connoisseurship, collaboration, and performance a language for negotiating race and asserting identity. In particular, this essay takes up a charge issued by Gilroy in several works, that reductive racial politics are promoted by black Atlantic popular culture and by members of the academy. I argue on the contrary that the proliferation of hip-hop's technologies, language, and ethic of collaboration remains a viable political tool and meaningful artistic gesture—one that in overlooked contexts endorses Gilroy's views and engages in a rigorous critique of race.

This compelling, interdisciplinary compilation of essays documents the extensive, intersubjective relationships between gender, war, and militarism in 21st-century global politics. Feminist scholars have long contended that war and militarism are fundamentally gendered. Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives provides empirical evidence, theoretical innovation, and interdisciplinary conversation on the topic, while explicitly—and uniquely—considering the links between gender, war, and militarism. Essentially an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars studying gender in political science, anthropology, and sociology, the essays here all turn their attention to the same questions. How are war and militarism gendered? Seventeen innovative explanations of different intersections of the gendering of global politics and global conflict examine the theoretical relationship between gender, militarization, and security; the deployment of gender and sexuality in times of conflict; sexual violence in war and conflict; post-conflict reconstruction; and gender and militarism in media and literary accounts of war. Together, these essays make a coherent argument that reveals that, although it takes different forms, gendering is a constant feature of 21st-century militarism.