True Heads: Historicizing the Hip_Hop "Nation" in Context

Abstract

Hip_hop culture is intricately linked to any comprehensive understanding of race and national identity in the United States at the turn of the twentieth-first century. What was initially developed as a mode of marginal expression, conceived as a countermeasure to the material and social inequities of American postindustrialism, has, in the past several years, become perhaps the most prominent medium by which blackness is represented in the U.S. and by which blackness and Americanness are represented globally. And hip_hop, which might best be imagined as a way of reading and critiquing public culture, is itself troubled by the ways that it is read and recontextualized by its detractors and proponents alike. For this reason it is imperative that we explore the extent to which hip_hop discourse seems to typify American convention as much as it informs it, particularly in light of recent international events that have reignited some tough discussions about what Americanness means. This project elucidates the challenges of historiography as it concerns a cultural practice that has been racially marked as black and that has been understood as a site of militant, class-based struggle and resistance. Hip_hop and conversations around hip_hop almost necessarily compromise the boundaries of private and public expressive spheres, challenging us as critical thinkers to account for the consistent evidence of alternative intellectualisms and revised epistemologies. The work facilitates a dialogue through which parameters of nationalist community and cultural authenticity are defined and readjusted constantly. In addressing hip_hop as a functional cultural text, I am giving some fresh attention to its transition from a system of alterity to an internationally operative organizing mechanism, and I am pushing my instinct that the idea of this transition will become increasingly less compelling unless we begin to investigate more intently the details of this process and its ramifications for the ways that African Americanness is constructed and appropriated. Considering some new theoretical possibilities around a holistically situated hip_hop, this project brings together some apparently disparate cultural media and found objects toward a useful critical effort.