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ABSTRACT
Straddling between the purely political and the poetically artistic, I am arguing, is a Global Hip-Hop Nation (GHHN), which is yet to be charted and its cartography is yet to be demarcated. Taking two examples, the first a Hip-Hop song from within the Arab Spring and the second from the favelas in Brazil, my intent is to show what Hip-Hop can do socially, racially, and politically, on the one hand, and how, despite the fact that this GHHN is clearly global, it grounds itself deeply in the local, on the other. Through these examples, I call for an ill-literacy, one where creativity is taken as serious as grammar and where literacy becomes ill: intimate, lived and liberatory.
KEYWORDS:
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Notes
3. Warning: this is a graphic video of the self-immolation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHw_auqod6Y.
5. See this as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeGlJ7OouR0.
6. This is a hybrid English lyric translation drawn from different sources including Youtube, Time Magazine, Newanthem blog (Jones, Citation2011), and Kimball (Citation2014) in Hiphopdiplomacy blog (see reference section; see also Ibrahim, Citation2016).
9. With Racionais MC's, we see similar patterns to the ones we see in El Général: one mic, one message, one turntable/DJ, raw issues and one MC. If one is to conduct a semiotic exercise, I highly recommend you turn off the volume in both videos and focus on visual representations and just watch. One will see exceptional similarities between how people dress, walk and move their heads, fingers and the rest of their bodies. This is how the GHHN “speaks.” Similar to El Général, the message that Racionais MC's talk about include: police brutality, systemic and institutional racism and social class issues. They certainly “roc the mic right” (Alim, Citation2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Cie49l0WE;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVvoeWak-WMCitation2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Cie49l0WE;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVvoeWak-WM.
11. Listen to, respectively, Obasi Davis (a 16-year old from Oakland, California) giving his political diagnosis and curriculum and cultural theorizing of the ills of the US political system and Hiwot Adilow (a 15-year old from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) talking about and theorizing what it means to be young, Black, immigrant and talented: Obasi Davis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhuAaVwzZ8; Hiwot Adilow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc6CJ_kUNYc.
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Notes on contributors
Awad Ibrahim
Awad Ibrahim is a professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa. He is a cultural and curriculum theorist with special interest in cultural studies, Hip-Hop, youth and Black popular culture, social justice, diasporic and continental African identities, ethnography and applied linguistics. Among his books, Critically Researching Youth (with S. Steinberg, 2016), Provoking Curriculum Studies: Strong Poetry and the Arts of the Possible in Education (with N. Ng-A-Fook and G. Reis, 2016); Critical Youth Studies Reader (with S. Steinberg, 2014); The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming (2014); and Global Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Cultures, Youth Identities and the Politics of Language (with S. Alim and A. Pennycook, 2009).