نبذة مختصرة : According to its practitioners, hip hop is a holistic culture that encompasses numerous artistic elements and even knowledge and teaching. Rap, one of element of hip-hop culture, became the most profitable and popular musical genre in the United States in 2017. Despite its global origins, diverse manifestations, and myriad social engagements, commercial rap is often metonymic with hip-hop culture as a whole, despite its espousal of problematic messages, reinforcement of racist stereotypes, and enrichment of exploitative corporations. Using multi-sited ethnography and bibliographic research conducted between 2010 and 2019, this dissertation documents, analyzes, and amplifies selected initiatives in education and social engagement in hip-hop culture in a global context. These ethnographies describe: how engaged hip hop artists use breakdance and Hip-Hop Based Education to critique political corruption and empower handicapped youth in Malta; the history of political graffiti in Haiti, and how artists use it to resist the predatory neoliberal interventions that continue to dominate reconstruction following the earthquake of 2010; and confront and resist the legacy of Settler Colonialism in the United States, and how Indigenous artists are using hip hop to combat cultural appropriation, structural racism, and white supremacist border politics in the US state of Arizona. Finally, a critical reflection chapter uses Freire’s concept of engaged pedagogy to make connections among the preceding ethnographies, discuss related projects beyond the geographic boundaries of the three main ethnographic chapters, interrogate the researcher’s positionality and experiences, and investigate the interplay of commercialization and engagement to propose a new aesthetic theory for hip-hop culture. This research demonstrates that hip hop is indeed much more than a business, an art, or even a culture. It is a transformative and intersectional framework for human rights and empowerment that transcends not only languages and cultures, but ...
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