“Yo Nací Caminando”
Community-Engaged Scholarship, Hip Hop as Postcolonial Studies, and Rico Pabón’s Knowledge of Self
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.37841Keywords:
activism, applied ethnomusicology, community-engaged scholarship, decolonization, hip hop, knowledge of self, postcolonial studies, Rico PabónAbstract
This article outlines an open, decentred and unfinished vision for community-engaged scholarship in hip hop studies. Employing examples from the Hip Hop as Postcolonial Studies initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, it elaborates in theory and method how (and why) hip hop's community knowledges might (and should) be better valued and leveraged in university contexts. The article argues that hip hop is itself a form of open (and vulnerable) scholarship; that hip hop's core praxis of "knowledge of self" (KoS) is an intellectually and artistically rigorous form of (counter)history; that hip hop is postcolonial studies. By examining artist-facilitator Rico Pabón's pivotal role in the initiative, the article elaborates how hip hop's performed KoS calls into question our reliance on the professorial structure of the university knowledge trade. Centring on a "questing" track that gives this article its title, it shows how the seamless and unfinished unity of Pabón's knowledge/performance, content/form and theory/method can model ways in which to decentre our scholarly praxis and bring our decolonial theory into a pedagogical form more befitting of postcolonial studies.
References
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Wimsatt, W. K., and M. C. Beardsley. 1946. “The Intentional Fallacy”. The Sewanee Review 54/3 (July–September): 468–88.
Writers for the 99%. 2011. Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America. New York: Independent.
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Adorno, Theodor. 1941. “On Popular Music: I. The Musical Material”. In Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 17–48. New York: Institute of Social Research.
Alim, H. Samy. 2006. Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture. New York: Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203006733
Baker, Houston A. 1984. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
BBC News. 2018. “Facebook Scandal ‘Hit 87 Million Users’” (4 April 2018). https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43649018 (accessed 19 August 2018).
Bernard-Carreño, Regina. 2010. “Organic Intellectualism: Varying Theories”. Counterpoints 366 (Nuyorganics: Organic Intellectualism, the Search for Racial Identity, and Nuyorican Thought): 19–37.
Campbell, Emahunn Raheem Ali. 2011. “A Critique of the Occupy Movement from a Black Occupier”. The Black Scholar 41/4: 42–51. https://doi.org/10.5816/blackscholar.41.4.0042
Carlson, Nicholas. 2014. “The Inside Story of How Rap Genius Fired a Cofounder—and Just Raised $40 Million (Annotated!)”. http://assets.businessinsider.com/the-inside-story-of-how-rap-genius-fired-a-cofounder--and-just-raised-40-million-annotated-2014-7 (accessed 21 November 2018).
Chetty, Darren, and Patrick Turner. 2018. “Towards a Hip Hop Pedagogy of Discomfort”. Journal of World Popular Music (Special Issue on Hip Hop Activism and Representational Politics) 5/1: 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.36674
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1: 139–67.
Dirksen, Rebecca. 2012. “Reconsidering Theory and Practice in Ethnomusicology: Applying, Advocating, and Engaging beyond Academia”. Ethnomusicology Review 17. https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/piece/602
Freire, Paolo. 2005 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.
Gilroy, Paul. 1991. “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at…: The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification”. Third Text 5/13: 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829108576284
Gilvin, Amanda, Georgia M. Roberts and Craig Martin. 2012. Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Hale, Charles. 2008. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hall, Stuart. 2000. “Encoding/Decoding”. In Media Studies: A Reader, edited by Paul Marris and Sue Thornham, 51–61. New York: NYU Press.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions.
hooks, bell. 2015. Black Looks: Race and Representation, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.
Huddleston, Tom. 2014. “Rap Genius gets name change, $40 million funding”. Fortune.com (11 July 2014). http://fortune.com/2014/07/11/rap-genius-name-funding-embeddable/ (accessed 10 July 2018).
Joyce, James. 1916. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: W. Huebsch.
Kelley, Robin D. G. 1997. Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston: Beacon Press.
Keyes, Cheryl. 2002. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Marshall, Wayne. 2009. “From Música Negra to Reggaeton Latino: The Cultural Politics of Nation, Migration, and Commercialization”. In Reggaeton, edited by Wayne Marshall, Raquel Z. Rivera and Deborah Pacini Hernandez, 19–76. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Moreno, Jairo. 2004. “Bauza-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean”. South Atlantic Quarterly 103/1: 81–99. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-1-81
Morgan, Marcyliena. 2009. The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392125
Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Oparah, Julia Chinyere, and Margo Okazawa-Rey, eds. 2009. Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism, and Social Change. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
Pabón, Rico. 2018a. “Bio”. www.RicoPabon.com (accessed 10 June 2018).
—2018b. Personal communication, 24 July 2018.
Readings, Bill. 1997. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rollefson, J. Griffith. 2017. Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226496351.001.0001
—2018. Planet Rap: Global Hip Hop and Postcolonial Perspectives syllabus. Publicly available at https://europeanhiphop.org/planet-rap-syllabus/ (accessed 12 July 2018).
Rose, Tricia. 2008. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop—and Why It Matters. New York: Basic Books.
RYSE Center. 2018. RYSE Center YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzyRbQ2SdS0U2PaJMN40qRQ (accessed 14 July 2018).
RYSE Youth. 2013. Annotation to ‘One Life, One Love’ (Hieroglyphics) on Genius.com. https://genius.com/7468540 (accessed 14 July 2018).
Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.
Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Shane, Scott. 2017. “These are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2018”. New York Times (1 November). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-election-facebook.html (accessed 19 August 2018).
Solis, Gabriel. 2018. “The Future of Academic Freedom”. Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities website. https://iprh.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/the-future-of-academic-freedom/ (accessed 14 July 2018).
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2017. Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Wimsatt, W. K., and M. C. Beardsley. 1946. “The Intentional Fallacy”. The Sewanee Review 54/3 (July–September): 468–88.
Writers for the 99%. 2011. Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America. New York: Independent.
YPAR (Youth-led Participatory Action Research) Hub Website. “Setting Ground Rules”. http://yparhub.berkeley.edu/get-started-lessons/setting-ground-rules/ (accessed 11 July 2018).
Published
2018-12-28
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Rollefson, J. G. (2018). “Yo Nací Caminando”: Community-Engaged Scholarship, Hip Hop as Postcolonial Studies, and Rico Pabón’s Knowledge of Self. Journal of World Popular Music, 5(2), 169-192. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.37841
