Hip Hop Generation Research Articles

Zoo York: race, gender, enclosures, and the policing of the West Indian Carnival

In tracing the controversy-ridden social history of the West Indian Labor Day Carnival in Central Brooklyn, the phrase ‘Zoo York’ emerged as a powerful descriptor of city life as a staged and enclosed spectacle, an ethos that is enunciated by Carnival. The term ‘Zoo York’ was coined by the hip-hop generation of the 1970s. Zoo York is said to have been inspired by the physical, literal zoo in Central Park, but might have been influenced by the major construction projects that enclosed the inner city of New York City decades prior. In this analysis, Carnival is shown to be a method and praxis for examining the racial and gender aspects of the city. This method places the West Indian Carnival within a larger narrative of enclosure that has been critical in the policing of Black cultural aesthetics in the United States and beyond.

Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation

Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 18 October 2020–25 July 2021

Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation

Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation

Unmasking the Strongblackwoman in Mentoring

Abstract The strongBlackwoman (SBW; Morgan, 1999) is a hip hop generation cultural script strategically performed by Black women to project authority, competency, and togetherness. It acts as psychic armor to shield against the deadly daily dagger of White heteropatriarchy in the academy. The author recites two indelible moments when she engages as mentor to narratively stage unmasking. Each moment provides a pedagogical opportunity to reimagine so-called failed performances as reclamations of her humanness. In doing so, the author demonstrates how unmasking engages a Black feminist ethic of empathy and exemplifies a Black feminist praxis to engender relatable, compassionate, and life-affirming mentoring.

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

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.

“Whose World is This?”: A Composite Counterstory of Black Male Elementary School Teachers as Hip-Hop Otherfathers

From a critical race theory lens, the author shares data from a yearlong study on Black male elementary school teachers from the Hip-Hop generation. In this article, the author represents the data from said study as a composite counterstory which highlights how Black males are alienated, adultified, and criminalized in American public schools. Furthermore, in this article, the concept of otherfathering is comprehensively defined as it relates to how Black male teachers mentor and support their students.

The Black Organic Intellectual Tradition and the Challenges of Educating and Developing Organic Intellectuals in the 21st Century

By summarizing the legacy of the first and second wave Black working class organic intellectuals in North America in the 20th century, I will use this as a backdrop to discuss my efforts in the first decade of the 21st century to develop a third wave of organic intellectuals in the hip hop generation. I will offer a case study of the Freedom Cipher Program at the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC), and discuss the implications of this experience for organizing oppressed Black working class and underclass youth into organic intellectuals today in this age of neo-liberal capitalism and globalization. I hope this paper will contribute to the work of the revolutionary party-building Left, and youth movements concerned with organizing the hip hop generations of the 20th century (born 1965-1984) and 21st century (born 1985-2004) into a new socialist hegemonic project.

#StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

This paper examines the language, literacies, communicative, and rhetorical practices of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The work pays attention to the communication practices of the BLM and Hip Hop generation in its extension of Black and African American language traditions and prior liberation movements in their unapologetic performance of Black chants, Black grammar, phonology, vocabulary, Black fashion and music, to die-ins, hands-up, and the technologization of the movement through social media, Black Twitter, hashtags, and memes. The language and literacies of the Black Lives Matter movement represent diverse identities within Black community, vernacular associated with various economic and educational classes, diaspora, culturally rooted, Hip Hop generations, cis-gendered women, men, as well as LGBTQ and gender non-conforming. In this way, the language and literacies of BLM promote the value of ALL Black lives.

From Boys to Men: Hip-Hop, Hood Films, and the Performance of Contemporary Black Masculinity

In this essay, the author considers the ways black masculinity is created, negotiated, and sustained in hip-hop cinema. She traces a twenty-five-year trajectory of filmic representations of black boys becoming men where hip-hop offers a context and aesthetic for understanding black manhood. Chronicling three films, which were released in the early 1990s, early 2000s, and early 2010s, she argues that the fragility of black masculine identity in film is implicated, though not invented, by hip-hop. In particular, she compares Boyz N the Hood (dir. John Singleton, 1991), Baby Boy (dir. John Singleton, 2001), and Fruitvale Station (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2013) to demonstrate how the masculinity performance of black men is (de)constructed and (re)imagined in/by the hiphop generation from rigid to more progressive representations.

On innervisions and becoming in urban education: Pentecostal hip-hop pedagogies in the key of life

In the foreword to my book Urban Science Education for the Hip-hop Generation, Maxine Greene concisely and powerfully describes her stance on teaching and learning. She defines education as “an exp...

Young, Shifting, and Black

This is the story of a Black woman Baby Boomer who, inspired by the 1969 song Young, Gifted and Black, experienced cultural border crossings early in life. It includes reflections from Black women of the Hip Hop Generation who, decades later, also pursued the “world waiting” for them promised in that song. In our lived experiences across generations, we found strategic language use is part of the “gift” and critical to crossings. We also discovered identity implications as we “shift” across borders into predominantly White environments and back into our Black communities where language is perceived as a marker of racial solidarity. Black feminist thought is used to examine the implications of a communicative practice that has been done for so long and so well it appears effortless. But we know it is not—for both generations, there are benefits, yes, but also detriments, frustration, and fatigue.

Why Dancers Should Care About Colonialism--Because It's the Gift That Keeps on Giving. Find out how by looking at "Save the Last Dance"

Why Dancers Should Care about Colonialism—because it’s “The Gift that Keeps on Giving Do you absolutely love those Hollywood movies where a ballet dancer encounters hip hop and ends up dazzling everyone? Read on…. by Julianna Cressman After a long day of dancing at UC Irvine, I told my roommate over tea that I could absolutely ruin the 2001 dance film Save the Last Dance for her. You know, the movie starring Julia Stiles in which a young, fragile, white ballet student named Sarah is suddenly forced to transfer to a primarily black, inner-city high school. There, she faces both racial tension and the loss of her suburban childhood comforts, yet still triumphs in her audition for Juilliard with the fresh hip-hop skills she acquires from her new peers at school. We dancers tend to love this film in general. We get excited when we see modern or ballet, our high-art practice, represented in popular film. The narrative of a dancer getting into a performing arts conservatory resonates with all of us, because we all audition and we all want to succeed. As my roommate expressed her zest for the film, I was reminded of my own dancer nostalgia, remembering the first time I saw Center Stage or the first Step Up movie. I felt galvanized by these films; they made me feel confident and proud of my dance world. These movies were also a major adhesive for my social life at my home studio, because we all agreed how absolutely awesome they were, and repeatedly indulged in these popular romance, high- stakes competitive dance narrative spectaculars. But, this light-hearted perspective did not last long when I left my ballet studio behind and enrolled at UCI. In my Screening Race class my freshman year, a research course devoted to Race and Media studies, I finally decided to take a critical look at the Stiles movie, and subsequently “ruined” it for myself. But it was an important step in making me a more informed dancer—and person. Through my research, I found that Save the Last Dance tries to put forth a progressive, anti-racist message by portraying a triumphant interracial relationship featuring hip hop dance, and showcasing a primarily black cast, but ultimately, it fails at this mission. The film prioritizes the personal losses suffered by Stiles’ character, Sarah (her mother has just died), as she appropriates hip-hop and blackness to help her heal and serve her Eurocentric dance goals of joining the Juilliard elite. It struck me that the melodramatic portrayal of individual triumph and romance appeals to the hip-hop generation, but the movie ignores the larger issues of structural racism embedded within the story. Save the Last Dance assumes a post-racial sentiment that allows for and embraces appropriation, and it also recapitulates stereotypes of the black community. When examined with a critical lens, the film is a Eurocentric pop piece that ends up highlighting the supremacy of whiteness and high-art. The film accomplishes this in its narrative and in its subtle camera techniques and music choices. Using the theme of hip-hop versus ballet, the film makes the statement: Ballet, equated with whiteness, always wins. To be clear, when I say I can “ruin the movie for you, I really mean “deconstruct. This is not a negative thing; it’s a powerful tool for navigating our modern world. Deconstruction is a

The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil Rights Politics

The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil Rights Politics

Understanding Colson Whitehead by Derek C. Maus (review)

Reviewed by: Understanding Colson Whitehead by Derek C. Maus Howard Rambsy II Derek C. Maus. Understanding Colson Whitehead. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014. 144pp. $39.95. Few African American novelists have commanded as much attention among reviewers as Colson Whitehead over the course of the last fifteen years. Since his debut in 1999, he has published five novels and two books of creative nonfiction. In the process, he became one of the most prominent “new” black literary artists of the contemporary era. Derek C. Maus’s book Understanding Colson Whitehead constitutes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Whitehead. Hundreds of reviewers have commented on Whitehead’s individual books, and several literary scholars have published articles highlighting aspects of his writing. However, Understanding Colson Whitehead is the first book-length examination, and thus a notable cornerstone in what might someday become known as Whitehead studies. Indeed, such studies exist, even if informally, as evidenced by the large number of journalists, creative writers, scholars, and conference presenters who have converged on the subjects of Whitehead’s books. Among other attributes, Understanding Colson Whitehead draws on the extensive collective wisdom that has emerged from writings on Whitehead. Further, Maus’s book represents a surprisingly rare extended treatment on an African American writer born after 1960. The scholarly discourse on African American literature has, by and large, concentrated on historically significant and long established authors. Whitehead, born in 1969, is part of a generation of writers that has not yet received substantial scholarly attention, especially in comparison to older generations of black writers. In this regard, Understanding Colson Whitehead constitutes a slight generational shift, joining works such as Daniel Grassian’s Writing the Future of Black America: Literature of the Hip-Hop Generation (2009). Maus devotes chapters to Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (2001), and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006). Maus also analyzes what he refers to as Whitehead’s “New York Trilogy”: The Colossus of New York (2003), Sag Harbor (2009), and Zone One (2011). Understanding Colson Whitehead rewards those who are new to the novelist’s works as well as his longtime readers. Maus summarizes and then provides in-depth analyses of Whitehead’s books, highlighting the workings of the individual selections. The overall examination paints a broad and detailed picture of what Whitehead has produced over the years. Given the structural complexity of Whitehead’s John Henry Days, Maus’s chapter on that novel is particularly notable. By assembling multiple narratives to produce John Henry Days, notes Maus, “Whitehead unleashes a torrent of artifacts related to John Henry—song lyrics, folktales, sociological narratives, snippets of archival research, antique statues, postage stamps, T-shirts, and so on—to examine the far-reaching implications of the ways in which the John Henry legend has been ‘repackaged’ for different audiences over time” (37). To his credit, Maus aptly disentangles many aspects of the novel and uncovers the “trail of verbal breadcrumbs [End Page 482] scattered throughout the various parts of his wide-ranging story that enable them to cohere in a way that is not evident simply from a broad overview of the plot” (42). Maus’s chapter confirms the praise reviewers placed on Whitehead after the publication of the novel and goes further by explaining the details of Whitehead’s artistic capabilities in producing such an intricate, multithreaded novel. Understanding Colson Whitehead offers many important insights concerning the novelist’s compositions. Yet some scholars of African American literature might find fault with the fact that the book does not draw many connections between Whitehead’s works and writings by a broad range of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and many others. After all, a major objective of African American literary studies over the last two decades has involved highlighting the intertextuality of black literary texts and authors, or, in short, the existence of African American expressive traditions. Scholars are obviously not required to delve deeply into those traditions when analyzing the works of black writers (or writers who happen to be black). However, in the context of the current publication—African American...

Review of Tricia Rose. 2008. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters . New York: Basic/Civitas Books

As hip hop slowly settles into middle age, the pitched battles of its younger years have frozen in a stalemate. Critics of hip hop repeat the same attacks they leveled at NWA, decrying violence, misogyny, and homophobia in hip­ hop lyrics, and in the most extreme cases branding its creators as Typhoid Marys for a particularly virulent social pathology. Defenders respond with rebuttals codified in the early 1990s, lauding the aesthetic value and social relevance of their favorite corners of the hip-hop world, eliding any problems inherent in the rest, and questioning the true motives of hip hop's critics. As Tricia Rose tells it, these arguments have remained essentially static, even as hip hop experienced two remarkable-though opposing-developments. First, hip hop expanded. The dress, music, dance, and visual style that grew up in the South Bronx not only took hold throughout American culture, but throughout cultures of the world. Within the US media landscape, hip hop music, fashion, and visual aesthetics became ubiquitous. Outside of the US, local hip-hop movements emerged around the world, whether in the form of a few MCs in a bedroom reciting Tupac lyrics in English, or a full-fledged scene in a local language and style. Remaining closely identified with urban, black youth (in ways that Rose describes as sometimes quite unhealthy), hip hop has become an aspect of self-definition for a widespread and diverse group of people, many of whom identify as part of the "Hip-Hop Generation" united less by a period of birth than by a set of shared cultural practices (Kitwana 2002). Thanks in no small part to Rose herself, hip hop has also found a home in the academy. The "Hip-Hop University" that began with scholars like Rose (1994), Todd Boyd (1997), and Michael Eric Dyson (2001) has been populated with an ever growing list of names that includes Mark Anthony Neal (2004), Robin Kelley (1997), Bakari Kitwana (2002), Murray Forman (2004), Jeff Chang (2005), Imani Perry (2004), and dozens of others working across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. The number of courses on hip hop offered in the American universities reaches into the hundreds, and institutional forums for hip-hop scholarship like the Hiphop Archive at Harvard's W.E.B DuBois Institute and a variety of formal study groups for graduate students and more senior scholars have sprung up across the country.l

Hip-hop Culture

IntroductionIN THE 1990S, NUMEROUS AMERICAN SCHOLARS started to write seriously about hiphop.1 is a complex culture, even though it is depicted in a one-dimensional way through the mass media. is widely accepted that hip-hop culture first manifested itself in the early 1970s throughout the five boroughs of New York City, but first in the urban wasteland known as the South Bronx. emerged from the African-American, Latino and Caribbean-American communities. According to Tricia Rose, It is to be perceived as the reaction of marginalised youths in postindustrial urban America. music and culture rely on a variety of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American musical, oral, visual and dance forms and practices.2 includes four main branches of expression: deejaying (the art of combining sounds and songs using two or three turntables); b-boying (dancing); aerosol art or graffiti writing; and the emerging part of the iceberg, emceeing (rapping).Hip-hop is a way of life that conditions the way its participants are looking at the world, or at society, and the way they interact with other individuals. also participates in the making of their social identity. According to pioneer Kris Lawrence Parker, also known as KRS-One, Hip-hop is something you live and rap is something you do.3 The music industry and the media have helped to make the words hip-hop and rap synonymous, leaving out the other elements of the culture. In this article, when I use the word hip-hop, I will be referring to the culture along with all its elements and not only rap music. Anthropology envisions culture as the abilities individuals acquire in order to think and act according to their environments When one talks about culture, it implies a set of habits, values, an ideal that conditions the way participants look at society, their aspirations and their life choices.* As a consequence, it concerns much more than clothing, songs and videos.Ever since the 1980s, hip-hop has become a cultural product that is being sold and bought all over the world. is a product that garners millions of dollars, produces waged activities and boosts the American and the world economy. culture, mostly through rap music, became a legal way to escape from social exclusion and poverty for a category of young people in America and in Europe. In May 2014, Forbes magazine estimated the personal fortune of certain African-American hip-hop entrepreneurs: the most well known are the producer, rapper, record producer, actor and entrepreneur Sean Combs (born 1969), also known by his stage names Diddy and P. Diddy, whose fortune is valued at US$700 million, and the rapper, entrepreneur and music producer Sean Carter (born 1969), aka Jay-Z, with an estimated fortune of US$520 million. Andre Young, aka Dr Dre, a rapper and music mogul, has an estimated fortune of US$550 million. In 2008, he cofounded the Beats brand of audio equipment with Interscope chief, Jimmy Lovine.6 These artists/ business executives as well as their partners have become dynamic commercial assets.Since hip-hop entered popular culture, it became also a product willing to sell out, to please. Popular culture is commercial, in other words, it is marketed in order to make profits. repeats itself hoping that the products that had commercial appeal will be successful again. At the same time, its producers not only reflect the beliefs and the values of its consumers, they shape them. The culture has had a strong impact on the clothing and food industries, on the media, education, language, sexuality, gender relations, social and economic policies in the United States and other parts of the world.The hip-hop generation is between thirteen and fifty years old. This culture gives them a specific language, a common notion of authenticity, common values and common landmarks that transcend their own ethnic and cultural heritage. Even if the process might be questionable, hip-hop is a cultural unifier. …

Intergenerational Engagement with Hip Hop: Parents as Mediators of African American Adolescent Consumption of Popular Culture

Now imagine there's a shorty, maybe five maybe four. Ridin' 'round with his mama listening to the radio. And a song comes on and a not far off from being born, doesn't know the difference between right and wrong. Now ain't trying to make it too complex, but let's just say shorty has an undeveloped context about the perception of women these days. His mama sings along and this what she says, Niggas, I'm a bad bitch, and I'm bad bitch. Something that's far above average and maybe other rhyming words like cabbage and savage and baby carriage and other things that match it. Couple of things are happenin' here, first he's relatin' the word bitch with his mama-comma, and because she's relatin' to herself, his most important source of help and mental health, he may skew respect for dishonor.-Lupe Fiasco Bitch Bad (Waco, Jordan, Giannos, & Boyd, 2012)The study reported in this article addressed the socialization messages African American female adolescents receive, the hip hop cultural movement as an educative site, and the role of parents and educators in countering the dominant scripts and facilitating media literacy among these young women. first hip hop generation, born between 1965 and 1984, have entered adulthood and middle age and now have children impacted by musical content and imagery that influenced them (Kitwana, 2003). Today, young people all over the world are identifying with and using popular culture to define themselves, for many of them, the adults in their lives are as well.Based on the (mis) representations of Black women and girls in the media, the author co-created a media literacy group and designed a pedagogical intervention to deconstruct media messages of Black women and their meanings. work with this group was intentional in historicizing stereotypes about Black women and encouraging Black adolescent females to (re)define Black girlhood for themselves. In addition to fostering a reaffirming space for Black girls to create or maintain, a positive self-identity, the author also sought to explore the intergenerational engagement with hip hop occurring in the household of the girls, based on dialogue conducted in the media literacy group. By exploring relationship dynamics and level of dialogue with these girls and their parents, the findings contribute to the literature on Black family socialization. This research also adds to the literature that examines students' out-of-school time, and the environmental and social determinants of academic success.THE HIP HOP CULTURAL MOVEMENTA revolution in youth culture was launched through the evolution of hip hop and effects youth's multiple identities. Television, another form of popular culture, has nudged its way into this space as well. Aisha Durham (2010) referred to the music in hip hop and its imagery as hip-hop media. There are several television shows, on a variety of networks, in which hip hop is the basis. VH1's & Hip Hop-New York, with spin-off, Chrissy & Mr. Jones, as well as & Hip Hop-Atlanta, with a spin-off in the making based on a controversial couple, Stevie J and Joseline Hernandez. Additionally, several hip-hop artists have created television shows: rap mogul Sean Diddy Combs' Making the Band and Who Wants to Work for Diddy, William Flavor Flav Drayton's Flavor of and subsequent spin-off shows I Love New York and Chance of Love, RunDMC artist Reverend Joseph Run Simmons' Run's House, rapper Clifford T.I. Harris' Family Hustle, rapper Jayceon The Game Taylor's Marrying the Game and Bravo channel's The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Hip hop continues its reach into film with three films, 8 Mile, Hustle and Flow, and Get Rich or Die Tryin', all receiving Academy Award nominations. 8 Mile, starring White rapper Eminem, received the Academy Award for Best Original Song for Lose Yourself from the movie soundtrack. song was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. …

Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing JustinGifford. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.

Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing Justin Gifford. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.In Pimping Fictions, Justin Gifford examines the African-American crime fiction genre, which has existed since at least the 1920s. His focus is particularly on the period after the World War II, especially the 1960s and onward. Although much has been written on African American writers of the mid to late twentieth century, scholarship on popular street literature authored by African is limited. He introduces the crime fiction genre to the existing scholarship on slave narratives, Harlem Renaissance, protest novels of the mid-twentieth century, and a more recent focus on hip hop generation writers. As the title of the book suggests, Gifford is particularly interested in characters such pimps, sex workers, drug dealers, hustlers, and criminals representations of African American resistance to American establishment well the harsh living reality of street corners, prisons, and the urban environment.Gifford is equally interested in the role of the publishing industry. He argues that Holloway House Publishing Company, a white-operated firm, even faced racism by white book sellers who argued that Blacks don't read (49). But Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock, founders of the press and Hollywood publicists, successfully expanded their market penetration from Los Angeles and Hollywood to a national scale. Although an increasing number of books by African-American authors was good news, AfricanAmerican writers had to balance their commercial success with the generation of independent AfricanAmerican art. The author explains that the publisher secured its reputation as the world's leading publisher of black crime novels by selling an image of ghetto authenticity to working-class African Americans (73). The popularity of the genre, on the one hand, indicated increased publishing opportunities for Black writers. On the other hand, these writers were well aware that profits were being made by commodifying African American criminal experiences. This racial dynamic is one of the reasons why Gifford characterizes the Black pulp fiction a cultural and social movement, in addition to its being a literary one. The book locates Black crime literature within the social context of the post-World War II US. From urban renewal policies to continuing segregation and mass incarceration of Blacks, African faced social injustices. …

Activism and the Hip-Hop Generation

Our freedom of speech is freedom or death, we got to fight the powers that be. —Public Enemy's Fear the Black Planet (1990) Hip-hop music and culture have transformed the global landscape of modern...

Tupac's Law: Incarceration, T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E., and the Crisis of Black Masculinity

This article discusses Tupac Shakur’s relationship with policy debates in the 1990s using an interdisciplinary approach to examine historical, musical, archival, and policy sources. Key episodes in his life, especially his incarceration at the Clinton Correctional Facility in New York from 1995 to 1996, illustrate numerous challenges Black men of the hip-hop generation encountered, such as incarceration, targeted enforcement, and police corruption. Shakur’s contributions to the study of Black masculinity should not be relegated only to his music, but also include his contributions to policy discourse by engaging his T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. code in its proper historical and cultural context. This research demonstrates how unsettled policy questions and cultural debates have continuing significance in the present, as well as the limitations of public policy approaches that exclude diverse perspectives on race, gender, and culture.