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Abstract
In this article, I track the emergence of Hip‐hop imaginaries in the enunciatory present, focusing on three disparate scenes: democratic change in Bolivia, cultural resistance in Hawaii, and the foundations of Hip‐hop that emerged from New York City. I position Hip‐hop as a mode of cultural expression that gives resistant form to marginalized existences abjected from dominant society through political and economic exclusion. I trace the origins of Hip‐hop in New York in order to show how the idea of existential resistance provides a useful interpretive framework in which to theorize the relationships between cultural resistance and political change. I utilize this framework by looking at Hip‐hop in two disparate locations, first analyzing the music of Hawaiian Hip‐hop group Sudden Rush and contextualizing it within the contemporary Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement. Second, Bolivia’s newly emergent Hip‐hop scene amidst a turbulent culture of political protest provides a useful contrast to that of Hawaii’s. In the end, I argue that Hip‐hop imaginaries in Hawaii and Bolivia demonstrate inter‐related strategies of national and cultural decolonization which carry distinct political implications.
Notes
1. For detailed accounts of these demonstrations and protests, as well as their their causes and effects, see Webber (Citation2005); Barr (Citation2005); Madrid (Citation2005).
2. There has been much literature written on the history of Hip‐hop. For detailed historical backgrounds or analyses of the socio‐political contexts of Hip‐hop, see Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Citation1994); Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Citation2005); Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal’s That’s the Joint: The Hip‐Hop Studies Reader (Citation2004).
3. For more about the colonization of Hawaii and resistance against colonization, see Sally Merry’s Colonizing Hawaii (Citation1999), or Noenoe Silva’s Aloha Betrayed (Citation2004).
4. For a discussion of Hip‐hop’s globality in places such as diverse as Sierra Leone and South Korea, see Franklin, Resounding International Relations (Citation2005).
5. Alliances between the likes of Morales, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban President Fidel Castro have been observed by Americans with much trepidation, see for example the Washington Post article found at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052600216.html