Educating black youth through Hip-Hop studies

This essay explores educational performance between blacks and whites in the United States and the various reasons research has given for the education gap in America. It explores both the class and race based arguments for the gap, but interjects a cultural explanation and underlying “orienting concepts” as more salient reasons for the education gap. It debunk the “cultural deprivation model” for low by blacks, and argues for actually utilizing the prolific cultural contributions of black culture in teaching methodology, particularly in higher education. It explores Critical Race Theory, as well as Social Justice Hip-Hop Pedagogy theory to examine alternative explanations for the problem and methods to ameliorate it. Through the use of one case study, examples of how Hip-Hop Studies is shown to achieve success in making education relevant to university students of color, and black students in particular, which has implications for elementary and secondary education as well

Dancing the Black Atlantic: Katherine Dunham’s Research-to-Performance Method

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was one of the great dancer/choreographers of the 20th century. As a trained anthropologist and author, her unique contributions formed a marriage between dance and ethnology that developed the archetype of the scholar-artist. I explore her research-to-performance methodology that trail-blazed what has been analyzed by Caribbeanist VèVè Clark as "performance ethnography." Dunham explored Afro-Caribbean culture and dance, as well as her own African American culture. The essay demonstrates how she did this specially in her writings on the Jamaican Moroons and the Vodou of Haiti, recontextualizing the latter in her famous 1945 "Shango" dance work. In the process, Dunham danced the Black Atlantic well before that trope was even conceptualized, and dignified black dance forms of the Americas

All the way from … authenticity and distance in world music production

World music and the narratives it produces are at the very centre of a formerly transnational production and consumption process. However, the shortened distance between the sites of production and consumption of this good, brought on by migration and greater participation, has created a dilemma for the UK-based artists who perform it: how to maintain authenticity without the added value of ‘distance’. Therefore, the aim of this article is to examine the ways in which musicians and other participants attempt to overcome this problem and in doing so (re)-construct particular aspects of their identity. Rather than being just another critique on authenticity, this article uses distance as an organizing concept in understanding the challenges facing world music production in the UK

The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop Power Moves

'The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip Hop' explores how a vital, expressive culture, which began in a New York Black and Latino impoverished community, has become a global delineating sign of the new millennium

The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop Power Moves

'The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip Hop' explores how a vital, expressive culture, which began in a New York Black and Latino impoverished community, has become a global delineating sign of the new millennium

Hip-hop Border Crossings: From the Bronx Hood to the Global Hood

Flyer for Fall 2003 ICS Faculty Fellow Lecture by Halifu Osumare

Getting “a message through to the red, white, and blue”: Ice-T in the age of Obama

The title of this chapter is taken from a verse in Ice-T’s 1992 track “Body Count” on the infamous debut album by his all-black rock band of the same name. The verse reads, “Goddamn what a brother gotta do to get a message through to the red, white and blue? / What I gotta die before you realize I was a brother with open eyes? / The world’s insane while you drink champagne and I’m livin’ in black rain.”1 These lyrics quintessentially represent what Robin D.G. Kelley calls “the first-person autobiographical accounts” of gangsta rap street journalism that positions the political within the personal lived experience of the urban inner city black male.2 This verse not only signals Ice-T’s street roots in the Crips territory of South Central Los Angeles (LA), but also his innate political awareness of his plight as a black male in urban America. As evidenced by lines such as “You try to ban the A.K., I got ten of ‘em stashed / With a case of hand grenades,” it also dramatizes his flair for hyperbolic “revenge fantasies” that initiated the then fledgling genre of gangsta rap, allowing urban black males to rhetorically inflict their retribution on the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for its infamous police brutality.3 Within just a few months, the LAPD’s disrepute was about to become world news with the 1992 Rodney King beating and the subsequent urban rebellion that followed the acquittal of the police officers involved

The 'Fierce Freedom of Their Souls': Activism of African Dance in the Oakland Bay Area

The Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area is a center of African dance in the United States, which has evolved out of the black political and cultural activism of the 1960s. African nationals from Ghana, Congo, and Senegal established a strong community of dancers and drummers that built upon the Dunham dance legacy through Ruth Beckford, the late Katherine Dunham company member