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Global Flows

hip hop poetics of transmigration and transcreation as counter hegemonic cultural production

SCZ, Author

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About the Author

Who Writes: displacement, fragmentation, a desire to belong OR positionality
             The tension between academic writing and my understanding of social/human responsibility are a central theme in my writings. My worldview and perspectives are shaped by empancipitory pedagogies and critical theories of hierarchies of oppression. Audre Lorde (1984, pp 119) once said, “unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.” My experiential knowledge of what this ‘war’ looks like motivates me to hold a concept of ethics that is rooted in producing work that is both accountable to and provides a benefit for the communities who provide me refuge. Ideas of positionality of the “researcher” are often put into binaries of detachment/involvement or outsider/insider. These binaries are problematic and create ideas of inclusivity verses exclusion, which are sites of “epistemic violence” (Johnston, J and Goodman, J 2006, Castro-Gomez 2002, Grosfoguel 2011). This war, this violence, this process of dehumanization which takes place through the mechanisms of the coloniality of power and knowledge (i.e. categories of exclusion) is being waged against all of us, in every moment, so this desire to deconstruct binaries is at the very least self-preservationist. It is my hope that it goes beyond merely individualist desire and that as we move away from understanding the world in categories of “other”, that we ground our resistance (research) in critical recognition and humanistic values.
                   In order to reclaim our autonomy, our self-power and determination, we need to cultivate spaces of honesty and safety, of accountability and love, and of authentciy and trust. In this (research) project, I want to be honest about my positionality and intersectionality so people are informed, and can choose to engage with me in a safe space. I have the privilege within hegemony to have relatively no restrictions placed in my motility with the exception of capital. My positionality exists within hegemony as being a citizen of the United States, educated, English is my first language, queer femme, who passes for cisgender heterosexual (i.e hegemonic notion of marriage). These are the categories of power, privilege, exclusion and epistemic violence that have been assigned to me. My relationship to space, place and identity look very different when I speak in my own voice. I have experienced the dehumanization and bodily violence most often ascribed to female bodies considered non-white in the United States. I am part of a diasporic experience that is both North African and Jewish. I grew up in conditions of poverty in rural Kentucky, a geographic location where my olive/brown skin made me an easily identifiable ‘other’. This “otherness” made me migrate to the refuge of the hip hop community, where I became a participant in, organizer of and sometimes creator of culture. I cannot talk about coloniality without recognizing that I am also part of a settler legacy due to my father’s European origins. Within the Western conception of modernity this masticating process has left few parts of the physical world or knowledge about the socio-historical structuring of space uncolonized. Yet, spaces of hope exist within exile, spaces where comm(unity) entrenches in our marginality to love and create, to reclaim and reimagine, to challenge and resist (Lorde 1984, Lorde 2003, Smith 1999, hooks 1991, hooks 1993, Castells 2012). This sense of hope is where this writing calls home.

For whom?: Ethical responsibility to community

           Our ethics must be the ethics of the heart, not an ethics of the mind. The mind has been colonized. The “researcher” and “researched” are both part of this colonizing process. The “researcher” is both colonized and colonizer, the “researched” is the colonized and the invisible. The binaries, borders, and boundaries of power remove us from our shared humanity. My ethical imperatives are rooted in a deep respect for community, and an understanding that I must be accountable to the communities I work with and am a part of. Research has long been a dangerous and exploitative word and practice for many periphery groups. Smith (1999) describes how research is in one the most triggering words to indigenous peoples; she highlights the legacy of subjugation and dehumanization that has taken place in the name of so-called scientific research. My understanding of ethics had been shaped by critical theories of race, gender, economics, and decolonization (Smith 1999, Carjuzaa and Fenimore-Smith 2010, Kirkness and Barnhardt 1991). My research goal is to produce a resource that speaks to the experiences of communities where counter hegemonic resistance, migrancy and hip hop culture intersect.
              It is important to understand that people do not need formalized or institutionalized theories to understand the social conditions, which impact their lives. Ethically, I feel that I can only apply theory to my own experiential knowledge and group participation. If I were to theorize about “others”, I would be engaging in an oppressive system of knowledge production, which removes an individual’s ability to tell their own stories. Decolonizing framework focuses on a need for ‘researcher’ to be repositioned as ‘listener’ rather than ‘interpreter’ of knowledge (Carjuzaa and Fenimore-Smith 2010). This is particularly important when thinking about the resistance strategies of migrancy, the poetics of resistance in hip hop (culture) and the importance of networks (physical, digital, transnational) in concepts of identity and community. I will seek to hold space with persons allowing their expression to fill pages which are surrounded by my own experiences in the communities I am a part of and the theory that has helped frame my understanding of the way the coloniality of power and knowledge effect social order. Smith (1999, pp38) agues that theory is important because, ‘it gives us space to plan, to strategize, to take greater control over our resistance.”
            Relational fields are at the center of my understanding of ethics, accountability and how research should be designed and conducted (Crass 2013, Choudry, Hanley and Shragge 2012). It is imperative, as scholars working on displacement, that we understand the role of the academy in displacement, forcing people across both physical and conceptual boundaries. My relationships to the individuals, communities and spaces that I will be discussing are much deeper and stronger, the concept of a relational field is central to community organizing or ‘activism’, or what I call resistance research (Choudry, Hanley and Shragge 2012). My participation in these spaces is active and on-going, and the community will be engaged in the process of this project at every point. This collaboration will be accomplished through the use of Scalar, a digital open-source platform. Through this platform I will produce an interactive document and educational resource with participants that reflects their goals and interests. The content of this research will be available online in a format where people can freely annotate, challenge and engage with this work. In my local context, I will be facilitating workshops in which we will discuss how to critically engage with the content and how to use the content as a community education tool.

In what circumstance?: Problematizing academic writing

Kathie Irwin, cited in Smith (1999, pp 38), discusses the concept of theory, ‘we don’t need anyone else to develop the tools which will help us come to terms with who we are. We can and will do this work. Real power lies with those who design the tools-it always has. This power is ours.’ My goal is to embody this concept in my scholarly/intellectual process. In order for me to contribute to the collective consciousness in a way that moves toward the concept of collective liberation, which I believe should be central to scholarly pursuits, I must recognize that I can only develop the tools to come to terms with who I am (Smith 1999, hooks 1991, hooks 1993, Crass 2013). We can only begin to speak form our experiential truth and how it has shaped our interactions with the physical, social and conceptual world around us. When we let go of the desire to exert power over, by speaking about and theorizing the experience of ‘other’, we are practicing an act of resistance. We are resisting notions of domination; we are rejecting the tools of the coloniality of knowledge and power. We are rooting knowledge in self.
        My intention is to cultivate a practice of transparency where I openly express my privilege in the spaces I occupy, the relationships I have with individual persons and community, and in my scholarly writing. When I am engaging with community members I need to be open about my project aims while acknowledging the built in systems of oppression that exist within institutional productions of knowledge. I will attempt not to replicate/perpetuate these hierarchies of oppression (Carjuzza and Fenimore-Smith 2010, Kirkness and Barnhardt 1991).
         It is this experiential knowledge that motivates me to study and generate hip hop knowledge on concepts of migrancy and resistance, which are grounded in an understanding of displacement and a desire for belonging. Resistance research is political and holds multiple meanings for the practitioner. These meanings are rooted in a knowledge of multiple ‘historical’ legacies. The legacy of resistance to the coloniality of power and knowledge which has been fought with bodies willing to die rather than suffer enslavement, bodies willing to take on the violence of the state to shield the bodies of ‘others’, bodies willing to mock empire with their very existence (Roy 2004). It is the legacy of struggle against totalizing forms of knowledge, found in the educational legacy of Friere (1970), and the (de)institutionalization of knowledge that took place in such spaces as the Black Panthers’ community works (Cleaver and Katsiaficas 2001). It is the (dis)placement of authoritative forms of knowledge and the recommitting to communities and experience. It is the realization that hip hop culture and values were a convergence point of these legacies. Hip hop values and culture were formed through the collective intelligence and consciousness formed by individuals experiential knowledge, critical pedagogies, the political/social organizing of groups like the Young LordsBlack Panthers, Nation of Islam, Zulu Nation (Chang 2007, Rose 1995, Flores 2000).
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