Hip-Hop As Public Culture

Particularly since the early 1990s, we have seen a proliferation of fine art, literature, and scholarship that has furthered the establishment of hip_hop studies in what might be called unlikely venues. In the past few years especially, we have witnessed the development of university courses, academic conferences, museum exhibits, and collaborative research initiatives devoted to an investigation of the culture and its practice. Embedded in the discourse around hip_hop as an intellectual project is an ongoing argument about exactly how we should be arguing about hip_hop and about how we should interpret its prominence as a topic in critical circles. The current discussion engages hip_hop at the line of transition, in a moment of crisis in public culture and cultural studies. The turn of the millennium witnesses hip_hop being mediated by big industry and marketed globally to an unprecedented extreme. A new core group of entities and individuals is deciding for us what hip_hop is and what hip_hop means. To the extent that hip_hop is referenced synonymously with black culture, we also see particular conceptions of blackness being mediated and marketed as well. And we are challenged to remark upon the ways in which what have been until now relatively privately constructed subjectivities are being regulated in nontraditional spaces. There is a new level of public access to the agency of identity. It is impossible to have a comprehensive discussion about race or Americanness, about class or gender or sexuality, without incorporating a principled discussion of the state of and ramifications of hip_hop culture today. And the character and content of its appropriation and commodification make the current condition of the text a veritable human rights concern. Hip_hop and conversations around hip_hop almost necessarily compromise the boundaries of private and public expressive spheres, challenging us as critical thinkers to account for the consistent evidence of alternative intellectualisms and revised epistemologies. The work facilitates a dialogue through which parameters of nationalist community and cultural authenticity are defined and readjusted constantly. In this seminar we will spend a good deal of time unpacking some of the most recent scholarship and popular work concerning hip_hop and its practice. And we will produce our own potentially publishable contributions to the contemporary discourse.