With August 11, 1973 marking the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop, this course celebrates Hip Hop as a resistance history and culture. Last fall marked the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop, so even though we are a year late, we can still show out for the after-party. We center the origins of Hip Hop in the Brown and Black youth protest cultures of the Bronx, New York in this course. We trace the traditional five pillars of Hip Hop--- rap/emceeing, dance/breakin, (graffiti) graf writing, deejaying, and knowledge--- and add to that: fashion, film, journalism, urban street literature, and scholarship. By looking at these aesthetics and politics historically, we critically examine Black and Brown experiences from the late twentieth century into the twenty-first century in relation to race, neighborhoods, racial capitalism, gender, sexuality, activism, and technology. All along the way, we will curate together a wide genre of Hip Hop performances and build an understanding of Hip Hop Nation Language, Hip Hop Feminisms, Black Language, Hip Hop rhetorics, and sonic rhetorics.
The course does pedagogy as a deeply intellectual and theoretical project (as opposed to a set of standards, learning outcomes, common syllabi, or classroom lesson plans) where we can intervene in college classroom spaces--- which we will treat as geographies that do the day-to-day/minute-to-minute work of maintaining institutional oppressions. Though this class is taught from and inspired by the pedagogical methodologies and disciplinary ideologies of composition-rhetoric studies, we will not confine ourselves therein or any discipline that western culture has designed. We will therefore engage urban education, literacy studies, communication studies, and BIPOC critical theory. The course does not assume that there are any ready-made answers to social injustice (and does not mobilize ideas of liberalist reform) or that composition-rhetoric studies should be the locus of such polemics. However, the historical entry of composition studies in the academy and its nesting with literacy in higher education mean that it can never hide from racial-pedagogical truths in ways that other disciplinary categories have seemingly mastered. It is important that you know this is a rhetoric-writing class. Rhetoric-writing professors are always about the texts we ourselves produce. If students aren’t producing and creating their own original content in creative/ multimedia ways that can leave the confines of the classroom, then it ain’t a real rhetoric-writing class. The works that you create as students are as important as the stuff that you are assigned to read and view. We are not here to just regurgitate, review, and/or summarize the content outlined in a syllabus and lesson plans. We are here to build and create our own world. This is fundamental and this is the best part of being a rhetoric-writing teacher and scholar. |
Weekly Topics(click below for each week) |
Come to the course ready and willing to shake down the white European chokehold on rhetoric scholarship that suggests rhetoric is used to write linear-driven essays, make true arguments, understand grammar better, or merely persuade. We will examine the intersections between Black rhetoric and Hip Hop rhetoric and talk about why/how so many of us in literacies and rhetorical study pay such close attention to Hip Hop instead. We will also challenge the western pre-occupation with alphabetic text that often promotes rap as the most salient character of Hip Hop. Hip Hop, however, was never just rap music and lyrics and didn’t even start that way. The outfit, the chain, the doorknockers, the sound, the attitude, the spin, the block, the tag, the cadence, and more have always been just as important. Hip Hop as culture will thus shape how we define cultural rhetorics, community literacies, and multimodal/multimedia pedagogies towards new understandings of race, freedom, and creativity.
For all these reasons, this course is intended EXPLICITLY for aspiring researchers, teachers, scholars, and writers who fundamentally believe that structural racism is endemic to the institutions in which we think and live, especially the academy. It will not focus on persuading you or comforting you about race’s materiality. It will not pursue the liberalist project of helping you to become a better person or better teacher. It will not deploy classroom communication guidelines that silence BIPOC students to elevate white students’ comfort. There are plenty of courses like that here that you would be better off pursuing. I am also not a monkey at the zoo here to give you a caged show or a new, exotic experience into a Black woman’s teaching style and mind. Please ignore the advisers and stray thoughts who are telling you this. This course is for folx interested in consciousness, activism, and culture as central to a race-radical intellectual praxis. Let Hip Hop’s defiant rage be more than a metaphor and understand that I mean alla dis! Like Big Daddy Kane told everybody way back in 1988: “…they can't get with me/ so pick a B.C. date 'cause you're history… at the table I sit, makin' it legit/ and when my pen hits the paper, awwww shit...”
NOTE: Before class begins, please read Check it While I Wreck it: Black Womanhood, Hip-hop Culture, and the Public Sphere by Gwendolyn Pough.
For all these reasons, this course is intended EXPLICITLY for aspiring researchers, teachers, scholars, and writers who fundamentally believe that structural racism is endemic to the institutions in which we think and live, especially the academy. It will not focus on persuading you or comforting you about race’s materiality. It will not pursue the liberalist project of helping you to become a better person or better teacher. It will not deploy classroom communication guidelines that silence BIPOC students to elevate white students’ comfort. There are plenty of courses like that here that you would be better off pursuing. I am also not a monkey at the zoo here to give you a caged show or a new, exotic experience into a Black woman’s teaching style and mind. Please ignore the advisers and stray thoughts who are telling you this. This course is for folx interested in consciousness, activism, and culture as central to a race-radical intellectual praxis. Let Hip Hop’s defiant rage be more than a metaphor and understand that I mean alla dis! Like Big Daddy Kane told everybody way back in 1988: “…they can't get with me/ so pick a B.C. date 'cause you're history… at the table I sit, makin' it legit/ and when my pen hits the paper, awwww shit...”
NOTE: Before class begins, please read Check it While I Wreck it: Black Womanhood, Hip-hop Culture, and the Public Sphere by Gwendolyn Pough.
