Communiqué
This project in resistance (research) serves as my communique, a signal transmitting across networked models, a rhythm across radio waves, a digital artifact to be found by data thieves at various points in time and space. It is my embodied experience and observations reaching out hoping to grasp hands connected to humanity, and through that confluence of touch critically recognizing the oppression created by borders drawn on bodies. This is the toastmaster, the soundsystem emcee sensing space and building comm(unity) through the vibes felt from the ingenuity of the oppressed, the hacking of the system by keystrokes, the unassailable desire to reclaim humanity and dignity. This is hip hop scholarship as counter hegemonic narrative, it is the global flow of ways of being and knowing, it is sensing empire in our bodies and rejecting its hold on our minds and hearts, it is reclaiming autonomy by rejecting authority, it is subversion taking place from within.
This project is rooted in the traditions of Friere, Fanon, Galeano, Rodney, Smith, hooks, Turner, Lorde, and those whose lived experiences are seldom recorded in the institutions of 'knowledge'. I draw on old and new histories, methodologies, and pedagogies to give shape to my own production of counter hegemonic knowledge. This project hopes to convey to the reader (listener) a level of resistance research which is participator, emancipator, and collaborative. The ability of sonic and digital spaces to help histories, voices and experiences migrate in a way that decolonized notions of time, space and place are an important component to understanding the structure of this project. Hip hop mixing, remixing and cultural expressions cannot be reduced to a linear progression of time and space, and neither can this project, I address the complexities of resisting coloniality with multiple currents or flows of knowledge which hope to speak to each reader where they are at.It is a work that seeks to transgress and transform, to transcreate and translocate, to sit in the intersections and draw across borders. The goals of this project are simple, to present a work that uses the shared vocabulary of hip hop culture and decolonizing practices to create a space of critical recognition that works across borders and seeks to dissolve sites of epistemic violence (categories of exclusion), to focus on how diasporas are both spaces of potential healing and extreme violence within the coloniality of knowledge and power. This creation is a practice in dialogue, it is the understanding that the production of knowledge does not happen solely on an individual level, but as a social practice, which uses the technology of open culture in the form of the digital world to communicate and connect experiential knowledge to systemic oppression.
I came to this resistance ‘research’ with an intentional hunger, weight and speed. My hunger is my desire to cocreate, collaborate, and break down the isolation felt as a part of the systemic apparatus of coloniality (Crass, Grosfoguel, Castro-Gomez), to critically recognize our shared vulnerability (Turner) and to contribute to reclaiming our humanity. The weight which I carry is the awareness of how my form of life is complicit in the bodily violence experienced by bodies in space, this is both a knowledge of the historical legacy of violence as part of settler colonialism in the United States and the understanding that everything I come into contact with in my material world creates violence for others. My speed is the urgency felt, the need to contribute to the on-going creation of counter hegemonic knowledge, the push for prefigurative strategy that actively seeks to improve the world as it is while theorizing about how the world could be. This hunger, weight and speed can be viewed as a desire to contribute to a shared vocabulary that allows us to articulate our experiences of oppression in a way that connects to one another and actively seeks to breakdown the systemic causes.
Participation is the only way this project succeeds and if it fails due to a lack of participation, that in itself informs the strategy and the growth that follows. My framework for understanding and discussing networks and communities has shifted since the inception of this project. I was very much entrenched in the language and rhetoric of social justice which drew its narrative from that of organizations and institutions embedded in the non-profit industrial complex. Much of my professional experience was grounded in the professionalization of social justice work through non-profit institutions. These spaces are sites of violence which manage and control dissent by becoming the only legitimate avenue oppressed and marginalized folks have to challenge hegemony (INCITE).
This is a chance to produce research that does not live behind a paywall, whose value rests in the way personally subjectivities choose to access it in space. Participation is necessary for counter hegemonic cultural production to take place. In my process of growth, learning and coming into ways of knowing and being, I have realized that the contribution I make to discourses and ways of knowing are not grounded within the formal structure of institutions. The (dis)placement I have experienced is a direct result of the violence felt as I have been excluded from spaces, and where my voice was silenced. This experience of (dis)placement is not unique to me, this is the (dis)ease of empire. The coloniality of knowledge and power are a virus that has infected the very fabric of humanity. The historical pathogen that begins with colonialism, the enlightenment, mercantile capitalism, the spread of christianity, patriarchy, white supremacy, gender, heteronormativity, etc.
This virus must be countered through the production of cultural knowledge which refutes and reclaims ways of knowing and being. The transmigration of and transcreation of knowledge through hip hop has been a place of healing (Sheffield 2011). Hip hop as a social cultural movement, has become the essence of (g)local. It is a transnational cultural expression which local comm(unities) have used in innovative ways that help youth express their experiential knowledge(s) of the social conditions which oppress their comm(unities) (Chang 2007, Rose 1995, Akom 2009, Fernandes 2003, Flores 2000).
As an individual expression of experiential knowledge each verse, sample, scratch, break, shake of an aerosol can, and cipher is a space to communicate existence to your local context, and migrate that existence to spaces, places, and times which cross borders and allow for broader critical recognition to take place. Critical recognition is the ability to understand that the lived experience of another is informed by the way categories of exclusion have created violence, and these categories should not create the borders of distinction, but points where we truly see the way oppression is enacted on bodies in space. Morgan and Bennett (2011, pp 177) describe hip hop knowledge as “aesthetic, social, intellectual, and political identities, beliefs, behaviors, and values produced and embraced by its members, who generally think of hip-hop as an identity, a worldview, and a way of life.” In this project, I use hip hop as a lens to examine the socio-historical, political, economic, and gendered critiques of the experience of displacement and the condition of migrancy. I seek to contextualize and analyze the forms of popular education that are transmitted through the poetics of hip hop culture. My analysis will draw on a resistance framework that has its roots in emancipatory theories and critical pedagogies (Forman 2013, Gamso 2012, Akom 2009, Chang 2007, Freire 1970, Smith 1999). Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (2008) argues that hip hop has the ability to encapsulate a sonic archive in each track, which questions the politic of how knowledge is produced, remembered and mobilized. I drew on this notion whilst creating this project. If each individual track has the ability to create a sonic archive, albums and mixtapes become sonic life histories of displacement and diasporas, counter hegemonic critiques based on the positionality of the creator, and spaces for popular resistance education.
This project grounds conversation in the complexities of cultural and knowledge production, those challenges to the pervasiveness of hegemonic ways of being and knowing that omit and obscure information designated as ‘other’. The creation of multiple mixtapes infused with sonic archives and annotated with visual culture, poetry, academic and organic intellectual knowledge is a practice in facilitating dialogue. I include observations made in the physical, digital, imagined, sonic spaces I occupy in the attempt to use theory to come to terms with who I am and how I fit into larger systems of oppression and liberation. This work seeks to serve as a connector, connecting writer to reader, reader to writer, reader to resources and to reclaim space in community through reciprocity and accountability. I am following the legacy of writers who argue that researcher must be repositioned as listener instead of interpreter of information, it is through this understanding that audio mixtapes annotated with supplemental information seemed the appropriate medium to put forth my observations of counter hegemonic cultural production through hip hop aesthetics (Kirkness and Barnhardt 1991, Carjuzaa and Fenimore-Smith 2010).
Hip hop transmigration as a decolonizing antidote to the pathology of coloniality
Colonialism is not something that takes place in the distant past which has no bearing on the present. Colonialism is a pathology, a (dis)ease that has infiltrated our bodies and lands. It is a sickness that has created imaginary lines around our hearts and minds. It has erected fences and borders which scar the earth and divide spaces. Spaces become places of containment and exclusion, of domination and subjugation. It is a perverse (dis)ease, a (dis)ease that pretends it is 'natural', the logical course of human progression (read modernity). Like all pathologies, the (dis)ease just gets stronger as we ineffectively treat symptoms instead of confronting the colonial condition in its entirety. This newly evolved form of colonialism, this drug resistant (dis)ease, relies on mutations of tactics of the past. The antidote for this (dis)ease will not be produced in a laboratory, no pharmaceutical manufacturer will be able to patent this intellectual knowledge. This cure will be drawn from the collective intelligence of people, of the sick healing the sick, of the outcasts, the untouchables, turning exclusion into liberation.
The condition of (trans)migrancy is the most direct tool we have in the destabilization of the coloniality of knowledge and power. The experiential knowledge of displacement, diaspora and movement is encoded on bodies in space. This code is transmitted through our various networks of connection and creates a language of resistance. This resistance is manifested in the reclaiming of our collective humanity, in our ability to transcend and transgress categories of exclusion that allow violence to take place. Walia (2013) argues that this leads to a space where migrants of color exist in a constant state of exclusion, at times existing the spaces of nation-state borders, but never belonging or being of a nation-state. This systemic and ephemeral notion of non(belonging) for persons of color, is an important factor in understanding the importance of hip hop community formation in the experience of displacement and as a counter hegemonic resistance strategy. These counter hegemonic challenges to ways border imperialism and the criminalization of bodies are challenged must be able to mutate to fit the pathology of empire.
Decolonizing practices are the rhythms we move to, the relationships we cultivate and the forms of life we inhabit. Hip hop (culture) becomes the message and the medium by which this antidote is deployed, it is a global flow passing through spaces of marginality, growing connections and sense of belonging. Hip hop (culture) cultivates practices of transcreation and transmigration which breakdown the pathological walls of exclusion between and against the human experience. This pathology migrates through bodies in space (mis)shaping ways of being, it has infected ways of knowing. These conditions (symptoms) will be referred to as the coloniality of power and knowledge, they are manifestations of the illness that work in tandem to affect the body and the mind. Hip hop through its poetics creates an oral narrative of the historical collective trauma of diaspora peoples. Nafciy (1999) argues that due to the colonial/modern condition diaspora is a form of life found in all places and spaces. Hip hop has enplaced itself into spaces of displacement, the places that have been fractured by the coloniality of power and knowledge.The movement (migration) of hip hop is a decolonizing antidote to this process, it provides visual aesthetics that communicate at a base level shared values in a visual vocabulary, regardless of what the graffiti, wheatpasting, stickering, etc. looks like or asserts in its imagery or visual narrative, the act of participating in creation is an act of counter hegemonic cultural production. It is the assertion of voice (autonomy) in space, it is a desire to connect individual subjectivity to the collectivity, it is a desire to be seen, to tell some part of our story, to breakdown the isolation that this illness keeps us trapped in.
Sonic coding in the production aspect of hip hop music is able to transmit knowledge under the comprehension of the hegemonic dis(ease). Hip hop producers understand that the arrangement of sonic space has the ability to transmit knowledge at a deeply intuitive level. They transmit archives of resistance knowledge which connect back to rhythms, syncopations, progressions and ‘noise’ which resonate and attach sound to the experience (both real and imagined). Hip hop rhythm as resistance is connected to rhythmic traditions of African drumming which is experienced in the forced displacement of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade (Gilroy 1193). This rhythmic resistance was used to communicate and when white supremacy culture banned drums, displaced peoples used other methods of rhythm-making such as household objects, bodies, and even vocal cadence.
Poetically the decolonizing power of hip hop lyricism is in the code-switching that takes place, a vernacular expression of resistance through cultural reference to history, shared experience and collective strategy that operate out loud and subversively so that hegemony can never fully capture the complexity of what is being signified (Potter 2005).
End communiqué; begin transmission
This work weaves knowledge from various fields of study with the thread of critical recognition (of the legacy of oppression that is embedded into the institutionalization of knowledge and power). This thread is spun in the language of the subaltern, the prose and poetry of displacement and diasporas, the fiction that is the “other”. I use the vocabulary of weaving, because that is how I conceive of this project; I visualize the creation of a rug or mat. An elaborate or simple design that is the merging of materials into a cohesive project, the finished piece may have aesthetic qualities but is ultimately utilitarian in purpose. I will weave together theoretical and academic based knowledge with the popular knowledge found in the cultural expression of hip hop. Both weaving and hip hop can be viewed as folk arts, which is a term I mean with the highest respect, they blend aesthetics with usefulness. Hip hop is used to connect those displaced by empire to a common beat. A rhythm to keep the oral culture and history of narrative flowing, a global cipher spoken in many tongues, counter hegemonic resistance knowledge flowing from drums to dance to a visual vocabulary, the collective imagination using poetics to code the history of the oppressed.
My goal is to produce a working document that helps add to the collective intelligence and resistance strategies of peoples engaged in struggles against domination in all of its forms. In order for this to be possible, I cannot claim authority or legitimacy over the end result. If value is given it will come from people whom use/adapt/critique/engage with it. I invite you to engage with the following body of work, I consent to readers reproducing, remixing, adding to and taking away from this work what is most valuable to their understanding of practices of transmigration, transcreation and counter hegemonic cultural production.
This project is rooted in the traditions of Friere, Fanon, Galeano, Rodney, Smith, hooks, Turner, Lorde, and those whose lived experiences are seldom recorded in the institutions of 'knowledge'. I draw on old and new histories, methodologies, and pedagogies to give shape to my own production of counter hegemonic knowledge. This project hopes to convey to the reader (listener) a level of resistance research which is participator, emancipator, and collaborative. The ability of sonic and digital spaces to help histories, voices and experiences migrate in a way that decolonized notions of time, space and place are an important component to understanding the structure of this project. Hip hop mixing, remixing and cultural expressions cannot be reduced to a linear progression of time and space, and neither can this project, I address the complexities of resisting coloniality with multiple currents or flows of knowledge which hope to speak to each reader where they are at.It is a work that seeks to transgress and transform, to transcreate and translocate, to sit in the intersections and draw across borders. The goals of this project are simple, to present a work that uses the shared vocabulary of hip hop culture and decolonizing practices to create a space of critical recognition that works across borders and seeks to dissolve sites of epistemic violence (categories of exclusion), to focus on how diasporas are both spaces of potential healing and extreme violence within the coloniality of knowledge and power. This creation is a practice in dialogue, it is the understanding that the production of knowledge does not happen solely on an individual level, but as a social practice, which uses the technology of open culture in the form of the digital world to communicate and connect experiential knowledge to systemic oppression.
I came to this resistance ‘research’ with an intentional hunger, weight and speed. My hunger is my desire to cocreate, collaborate, and break down the isolation felt as a part of the systemic apparatus of coloniality (Crass, Grosfoguel, Castro-Gomez), to critically recognize our shared vulnerability (Turner) and to contribute to reclaiming our humanity. The weight which I carry is the awareness of how my form of life is complicit in the bodily violence experienced by bodies in space, this is both a knowledge of the historical legacy of violence as part of settler colonialism in the United States and the understanding that everything I come into contact with in my material world creates violence for others. My speed is the urgency felt, the need to contribute to the on-going creation of counter hegemonic knowledge, the push for prefigurative strategy that actively seeks to improve the world as it is while theorizing about how the world could be. This hunger, weight and speed can be viewed as a desire to contribute to a shared vocabulary that allows us to articulate our experiences of oppression in a way that connects to one another and actively seeks to breakdown the systemic causes.
Participation is the only way this project succeeds and if it fails due to a lack of participation, that in itself informs the strategy and the growth that follows. My framework for understanding and discussing networks and communities has shifted since the inception of this project. I was very much entrenched in the language and rhetoric of social justice which drew its narrative from that of organizations and institutions embedded in the non-profit industrial complex. Much of my professional experience was grounded in the professionalization of social justice work through non-profit institutions. These spaces are sites of violence which manage and control dissent by becoming the only legitimate avenue oppressed and marginalized folks have to challenge hegemony (INCITE).
This is a chance to produce research that does not live behind a paywall, whose value rests in the way personally subjectivities choose to access it in space. Participation is necessary for counter hegemonic cultural production to take place. In my process of growth, learning and coming into ways of knowing and being, I have realized that the contribution I make to discourses and ways of knowing are not grounded within the formal structure of institutions. The (dis)placement I have experienced is a direct result of the violence felt as I have been excluded from spaces, and where my voice was silenced. This experience of (dis)placement is not unique to me, this is the (dis)ease of empire. The coloniality of knowledge and power are a virus that has infected the very fabric of humanity. The historical pathogen that begins with colonialism, the enlightenment, mercantile capitalism, the spread of christianity, patriarchy, white supremacy, gender, heteronormativity, etc.
This virus must be countered through the production of cultural knowledge which refutes and reclaims ways of knowing and being. The transmigration of and transcreation of knowledge through hip hop has been a place of healing (Sheffield 2011). Hip hop as a social cultural movement, has become the essence of (g)local. It is a transnational cultural expression which local comm(unities) have used in innovative ways that help youth express their experiential knowledge(s) of the social conditions which oppress their comm(unities) (Chang 2007, Rose 1995, Akom 2009, Fernandes 2003, Flores 2000).
As an individual expression of experiential knowledge each verse, sample, scratch, break, shake of an aerosol can, and cipher is a space to communicate existence to your local context, and migrate that existence to spaces, places, and times which cross borders and allow for broader critical recognition to take place. Critical recognition is the ability to understand that the lived experience of another is informed by the way categories of exclusion have created violence, and these categories should not create the borders of distinction, but points where we truly see the way oppression is enacted on bodies in space. Morgan and Bennett (2011, pp 177) describe hip hop knowledge as “aesthetic, social, intellectual, and political identities, beliefs, behaviors, and values produced and embraced by its members, who generally think of hip-hop as an identity, a worldview, and a way of life.” In this project, I use hip hop as a lens to examine the socio-historical, political, economic, and gendered critiques of the experience of displacement and the condition of migrancy. I seek to contextualize and analyze the forms of popular education that are transmitted through the poetics of hip hop culture. My analysis will draw on a resistance framework that has its roots in emancipatory theories and critical pedagogies (Forman 2013, Gamso 2012, Akom 2009, Chang 2007, Freire 1970, Smith 1999). Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (2008) argues that hip hop has the ability to encapsulate a sonic archive in each track, which questions the politic of how knowledge is produced, remembered and mobilized. I drew on this notion whilst creating this project. If each individual track has the ability to create a sonic archive, albums and mixtapes become sonic life histories of displacement and diasporas, counter hegemonic critiques based on the positionality of the creator, and spaces for popular resistance education.
This project grounds conversation in the complexities of cultural and knowledge production, those challenges to the pervasiveness of hegemonic ways of being and knowing that omit and obscure information designated as ‘other’. The creation of multiple mixtapes infused with sonic archives and annotated with visual culture, poetry, academic and organic intellectual knowledge is a practice in facilitating dialogue. I include observations made in the physical, digital, imagined, sonic spaces I occupy in the attempt to use theory to come to terms with who I am and how I fit into larger systems of oppression and liberation. This work seeks to serve as a connector, connecting writer to reader, reader to writer, reader to resources and to reclaim space in community through reciprocity and accountability. I am following the legacy of writers who argue that researcher must be repositioned as listener instead of interpreter of information, it is through this understanding that audio mixtapes annotated with supplemental information seemed the appropriate medium to put forth my observations of counter hegemonic cultural production through hip hop aesthetics (Kirkness and Barnhardt 1991, Carjuzaa and Fenimore-Smith 2010).
Hip hop transmigration as a decolonizing antidote to the pathology of coloniality
Colonialism is not something that takes place in the distant past which has no bearing on the present. Colonialism is a pathology, a (dis)ease that has infiltrated our bodies and lands. It is a sickness that has created imaginary lines around our hearts and minds. It has erected fences and borders which scar the earth and divide spaces. Spaces become places of containment and exclusion, of domination and subjugation. It is a perverse (dis)ease, a (dis)ease that pretends it is 'natural', the logical course of human progression (read modernity). Like all pathologies, the (dis)ease just gets stronger as we ineffectively treat symptoms instead of confronting the colonial condition in its entirety. This newly evolved form of colonialism, this drug resistant (dis)ease, relies on mutations of tactics of the past. The antidote for this (dis)ease will not be produced in a laboratory, no pharmaceutical manufacturer will be able to patent this intellectual knowledge. This cure will be drawn from the collective intelligence of people, of the sick healing the sick, of the outcasts, the untouchables, turning exclusion into liberation.
The condition of (trans)migrancy is the most direct tool we have in the destabilization of the coloniality of knowledge and power. The experiential knowledge of displacement, diaspora and movement is encoded on bodies in space. This code is transmitted through our various networks of connection and creates a language of resistance. This resistance is manifested in the reclaiming of our collective humanity, in our ability to transcend and transgress categories of exclusion that allow violence to take place. Walia (2013) argues that this leads to a space where migrants of color exist in a constant state of exclusion, at times existing the spaces of nation-state borders, but never belonging or being of a nation-state. This systemic and ephemeral notion of non(belonging) for persons of color, is an important factor in understanding the importance of hip hop community formation in the experience of displacement and as a counter hegemonic resistance strategy. These counter hegemonic challenges to ways border imperialism and the criminalization of bodies are challenged must be able to mutate to fit the pathology of empire.
Decolonizing practices are the rhythms we move to, the relationships we cultivate and the forms of life we inhabit. Hip hop (culture) becomes the message and the medium by which this antidote is deployed, it is a global flow passing through spaces of marginality, growing connections and sense of belonging. Hip hop (culture) cultivates practices of transcreation and transmigration which breakdown the pathological walls of exclusion between and against the human experience. This pathology migrates through bodies in space (mis)shaping ways of being, it has infected ways of knowing. These conditions (symptoms) will be referred to as the coloniality of power and knowledge, they are manifestations of the illness that work in tandem to affect the body and the mind. Hip hop through its poetics creates an oral narrative of the historical collective trauma of diaspora peoples. Nafciy (1999) argues that due to the colonial/modern condition diaspora is a form of life found in all places and spaces. Hip hop has enplaced itself into spaces of displacement, the places that have been fractured by the coloniality of power and knowledge.The movement (migration) of hip hop is a decolonizing antidote to this process, it provides visual aesthetics that communicate at a base level shared values in a visual vocabulary, regardless of what the graffiti, wheatpasting, stickering, etc. looks like or asserts in its imagery or visual narrative, the act of participating in creation is an act of counter hegemonic cultural production. It is the assertion of voice (autonomy) in space, it is a desire to connect individual subjectivity to the collectivity, it is a desire to be seen, to tell some part of our story, to breakdown the isolation that this illness keeps us trapped in.
Sonic coding in the production aspect of hip hop music is able to transmit knowledge under the comprehension of the hegemonic dis(ease). Hip hop producers understand that the arrangement of sonic space has the ability to transmit knowledge at a deeply intuitive level. They transmit archives of resistance knowledge which connect back to rhythms, syncopations, progressions and ‘noise’ which resonate and attach sound to the experience (both real and imagined). Hip hop rhythm as resistance is connected to rhythmic traditions of African drumming which is experienced in the forced displacement of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade (Gilroy 1193). This rhythmic resistance was used to communicate and when white supremacy culture banned drums, displaced peoples used other methods of rhythm-making such as household objects, bodies, and even vocal cadence.
Poetically the decolonizing power of hip hop lyricism is in the code-switching that takes place, a vernacular expression of resistance through cultural reference to history, shared experience and collective strategy that operate out loud and subversively so that hegemony can never fully capture the complexity of what is being signified (Potter 2005).
End communiqué; begin transmission
This work weaves knowledge from various fields of study with the thread of critical recognition (of the legacy of oppression that is embedded into the institutionalization of knowledge and power). This thread is spun in the language of the subaltern, the prose and poetry of displacement and diasporas, the fiction that is the “other”. I use the vocabulary of weaving, because that is how I conceive of this project; I visualize the creation of a rug or mat. An elaborate or simple design that is the merging of materials into a cohesive project, the finished piece may have aesthetic qualities but is ultimately utilitarian in purpose. I will weave together theoretical and academic based knowledge with the popular knowledge found in the cultural expression of hip hop. Both weaving and hip hop can be viewed as folk arts, which is a term I mean with the highest respect, they blend aesthetics with usefulness. Hip hop is used to connect those displaced by empire to a common beat. A rhythm to keep the oral culture and history of narrative flowing, a global cipher spoken in many tongues, counter hegemonic resistance knowledge flowing from drums to dance to a visual vocabulary, the collective imagination using poetics to code the history of the oppressed.
My goal is to produce a working document that helps add to the collective intelligence and resistance strategies of peoples engaged in struggles against domination in all of its forms. In order for this to be possible, I cannot claim authority or legitimacy over the end result. If value is given it will come from people whom use/adapt/critique/engage with it. I invite you to engage with the following body of work, I consent to readers reproducing, remixing, adding to and taking away from this work what is most valuable to their understanding of practices of transmigration, transcreation and counter hegemonic cultural production.
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