This project repositions the researcher, as listener of knowledge instead of interpreter. This being said, the archival process and the creation of mixtapes made logical sense as a means of communicating my critical understanding of (dis)placement and decolonizing notions of (forced) migration. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman argues that, "Hip hop questions a politics of how knowledge is produced, remembered and mobilized." In listening to her words questioning the establishment of institutionalized archives of hip hop, I realized that each mixtape creates a sonic archive, a moment in my process of coming to terms with my social conditions of existence. This first mix is an audio commentary on my methodology and epistemology in framing my understanding of border imperialism, and how we hack devalued forms of knowing and being to resist hegemony, and reclaim our power through poetics and aesthetics of counter hegemonic cultural production.

The voices heard in this mix are the voices of women who mobilize hip hop, spoken words and scholarly pursuits to weave a picture of the historical legacy of coloniality as it is experienced on bodies in space. As women and diasporic cultural producers, the narratives on this mix challenge matrices of power simply by being heard. Subjectivities are brought to the forefront and power is grounded in our experiential knowledge. These decolonial narratives challenge the creation of both physical and conceptual borderlands which exclude persons from one another and a collective sense of human experience. Many of these borderlands exist in the spaces of racialize hierarchies, labor precarity, gender, sexuality, criminalization, and other global industrial complexes that are built on bodies.

Begin this path

1. Global Flows-Mixtape 1: sonic archive as decolonizing methodology

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