
Title | The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming |
Publication Type | Book |
Year of Publication | 2014 |
Author | Ibrahim, Awad |
Number of Pages | 239 |
Publisher | Peter Lang Publishing |
City | New York, NY |
ISSN Number | 1947-5985 |
Keywords | Blackness, Culture, Identity, Youth |
URL | http://www.amazon.com/The-Rhizome-Blackness-Critical-Ethnography/dp/1433126028 |
Copies at the Archive | 1 |
The Rhizome of Blackness is a critical ethnographic documentation of the process of how continental African youth are becoming Black in North America. They enter a "social imaginary" where they find themselves already falling under the umbrella of Blackness. For young Africans, Hip-Hop culture, language, and identity emerge as significant sites of identification; cultural, linguistic, and identity investment. The result of this dialectic space between language learning and identity investment is a complex, multilayered, and "rhizomatic third space," where Canada meets and rubs shoulders with Africa in downtown Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal in such a way that it produces its own "ticklish subject" and pedagogy of imaginary and integrative anti-racism.