The Politics of Making Home: Opening Up the Work of Richard Iton in Canadian Hip Hop Context

Abstract

Toronto hip hop music from approximately 1986–2000 featured several successful singles that demonstrated a focus on representational patterns, where the city was refashioned aligned with the aesthetics of AfroCaribbean diasporic communities. These tracks can be read as aggressive sonic attempts at fashioning a counterdiscourse to exclusionary local politics with the biopolitics of hip hop music and aesthetics that made “home,” forging nodes of belonging in the diaspora. Popular renderings of Afrodiasporic life reproduced an exclusionary logic that continued to render Aboriginal life not only invisible but also relationally irrelevant to notions of “home” and articulations of “belonging.” Moving through a colonial sublime that grounded an aesthetics of belonging on the exclusion of Aboriginal populations, hip hop's superpublic have worked through and begun to recognize the contingent nature of belonging and the necessary inclusion and consideration of Aboriginal presence.

Keywords:

• Black Canada
• Black diaspora
• Canadian hip hop
• diaspora
• home
• Toronto

Notes

Shing Shing Regime, “We Strive,” Invincible Swordplay E.P., 2010.

Freedom Writers, “Music,” Now, 2013.

See “Represent” by Nas, “Unbelievable” by Biggie Smalls, and “Hoods n Tims Check” by Smif N Wesson.

The Stephen Lewis report was commissioned by the City of Toronto to help them understand the 1992 Yonge Street “Riots”. The event, a smashing of store windows on Yonge street, one of the city's most tourist traffic areas, included several young people for whom the frustration with the Rodney King trials spilled over into Toronto's streets.

Africville was a settlement of African Canadians in Nova Scotia. Black Settlers purchased this land in 1848 and were removed by the Halifax Planning Board starting in 1962.

See Liner notes from Now.

See Avtar Brah's useful definition of diaspora space (1996).