Browsing by Subject "Hip-hop"
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Item Digitizing ethnonational identities : multimediatic representations of Puerto Rican soldiers(2012-05) Avilés Santiago, Manuel Gerardo; Kumar, Shanti; Mallapragada, Madhavi; Arroyo-Martínez, Jossianna; Rivero, Yeidy; Fuller, JenifferThe silence and invisibility of Puerto Rican soldiers in fictional and non-fictional representations of U.S. Wars has motivated me to look for alternative spaces in which these unaccounted voices and images are currently being produced, stored, circulated, and memorialized. Within this framework, my dissertation explores the self-representation of Puerto Rican servicemen and women in social networking sites (SNS), (i.e. as MySpace and Facebook), in user-generated content (UGC) platforms, (i.e. YouTube), and also in web memorials. I am interested in understanding how Puerto Rican soldiers self-represent their ethnonational identity online within the overlapping of second-class citizenship. The theoretical framework proposed for this research will apply theories such as 1) articulation; 2) the notion of contact zone; and 3) colonial/racial subjectivities. To complete this goal, my research method draws on online ethnography, textual, and critical discourse analysis. Firstly, I will discuss the limited repertoire of images of Puerto Rican soldiers in TV and film. My argument is that, besides the massive omission of this history, the images and motifs that do escape de facto social censorship will be in conversation with the self-representations. The second chapter is the result of four years of the process of online ethnography on which I analyze the instances of self-representation of Puerto Rican soldiers in SNS. My interest was seeing how those spaces were inflected by an ethnonational subjectivity. The third chapter explores the ways Puerto Rican soldiers, embedded in mash-up cultures, uses UGCs platforms to upload videos that transform the soldiers from passive consumers of images to active producers of content, which tend to disrupt dominant narratives of power. The last chapter explores the emergence of web memorials dedicated to the Puerto Rican soldiers. My main argument is that these instances of self- representation in online spaces are in conversation with the moments of silences and misrepresentations of Puerto Rican soldiers in traditional media, but also have become acts of enunciation in which the particular Puerto Ricanness of the Puerto Rican soldier is affirmed within complex, layered histories of imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and second-class citizenship.Item Freaks of the industry : peculiarities of place and race in Bay Area hip-hop(2010-05) Morrison, Amanda Maria, 1975-; Hartigan, John, 1964-; Flores, Richard R.; Stewart, Kathleen; Perez, Domino; Wakins, CraigThrough ethnography, I examine how hip-hop’s expressive forms are being used as the raw materials of everyday life by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, home to what many regard as one of the most stylistically prolific, politically charged, and racially diverse hip-hop “scenes” in the world. This focus on regional specificity provides a greater understanding of the impact hip-hop is having on the ground, as an aspect of localized lived practice. Throughout, I make the case for the importance of ethnographically grounded localized research on U.S. hip-hop, which is surprisingly still relatively rare. Most scholars simply stress its continuity within a set of deterritorialized Diasporic African and African-American verbal-art traditions. My aim is not to contest this assertion, but to add to the body of knowledge about one of the most significant cultural inventions of the twentieth century by exploring hip-hop’s racial heterogeneity and its regional specificity. Acknowledging this kind of diversity allows us to reconceive what hip-hop is and how it matters in U.S. society beyond the ways it is usually framed: as either an oppositional form of black-vernacular culture or a co-opted and corrupted commodity form that reinscribes hegemonic values more than it actually contests them. Examining hip-hop within a specific, regionally delineated community reveals how hip-hop’s role in American life is more nuanced and complex. It is neither a pure vernacular expression of an oppressed class nor merely a cultural commodity imposed upon consumers and alienated from producers. In the Bay Area, hip-hop “heads” simultaneously consume mass-produced rap while producing homespun forms of music, dance, slang, fashion, and folklore. Through these forms, they construct individual and group identities that register primarily in expressive, affective terms. These novel cultural identities complicate rigid social markers of race, gender, and class; more specifically, they challenge the widely held perception that hip-hop is solely the terrain of inner-city young African-American men. More fundamentally, a sense of belonging is engendered through localized modes of expression and embodied style that manifest through shared practices, discourses, texts, symbols, locales, and imaginaries.Item A hero's journey : a modern musical exploration of the monomyth(2009-12) Brace, Conor Lane; Mills, John, saxophonist; Hellmer, Jeff; Fremgen, JohnThis thesis presents and analyzes the author's original jazz composition "A Hero's Journey," based on the ancient and widespread storytelling pattern that Joseph Campbell called the "monomyth." Using major concepts from the monomyth, the author composed a suite for ten-piece jazz orchestra consisting of six scenes divided into two acts. Although rooted in the jazz tradition, the piece borrows freely from classical music, African music, Indian music, and modern rock and hip-hop to create an adventurous and continually evolving musical experience. This thesis first provides an overview of the entire suite, then discusses its important melodic themes, and finally analyzes the techniques used for harmonic development within the piece.Item Performing and sounding disruption : coded pleasure in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Otis”(2013-05) Maner, Sequoia; Paredez, Deborah, 1970-From minstrelsy to hip-hop, the black performer has always been entangled in a complex network of branding, packaging, and promotion. The black body is cultural capital and in hip-hop, the black thug and his dangerous body are the fetishized objects of desire. Despite these exploitative constraints, artists find spaces to enact what little resistance is possible. In the following report, I perform a close reading and close listening of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Otis.” Paying particular attention to the intersections of the visual and the aural, I find that Jay-Z and West encode desire, pleasure, and imagination beneath boastful rhymes and material opulence. Jay-Z and West adopt American symbols of prosperity and freedom and, in disruptive fashion, resignify black masculinity in the cultural imagination. Soul sound, as intoned through Otis Redding and James Brown, lends a politics of brotherhood and radicalism to Jay-Z and West’s articulation of affective black masculinity. I employ a collage-like network of theoretical frames that span performance, sound, and literary theory to trace how race and gender performance codes a discourse of disruption. I find that “Otis” is a type a blueprint—an instruction manual for youth of color to deconstruct, innovate, and feel deeply. Through linguistic and performative codes, Jay-Z and West create a safe space, a cipher for men of color to desire and, in turn, experience pleasure. I trace how Jay-Z and West move closer to a practice of hip-hop feminism and, in a field notorious for rampant homophobia, misogyny, and violence—that’s remarkable.Item Russian hip-hop : rhetoric at the intersection of style and globalization(2012-05) Feyh, Kathleen Eaton 1973-; Brummett, Barry, 1951-; Gunn, Joshua; Streeck, Jurgen; Garza, Thomas; Seeman, SoniaIn this work, I describe Russian hip-hop as a uniquely fruitful site of investigation of cultural cycles (innovation, commodification, dissemination, consumption, and further innovation) of style as communicative practice. The sudden Transition to market democracy—the expansion of the universal market into Russia and the Eastern bloc—allows us to see exactly what is at stake in a discussion of style, rhetoric, and agency. That is, the style subcultures before the Transition—though borrowed—operated locally, communally, and with an emphasis on ideas. After the Transition, the style culture defined around hip-hop was mostly a matter of imitating forms in a way designed to garner fame and profit. In an inversion of the cultural cycle, hip-hop arrived more as the sound of neoliberalism than as a rhetorical resource for resistance. I argue that style is a form of communicative practice, a union of form, ideology, and activity whose elements cannot be separated. Style is the language of the universal market. It is the cultural currency we use to express ourselves, experience leisure, even engage in politics. Styles are also characterized by cultural cycles, which are frameworks for capturing styles at particular historical moments with each moment’s particular social and economic characteristics. Attending to specific historical context for cultural cycles is important, because each style has a history that continues to leave traces upon it. It is increasingly through style that people identify themselves and each other as denizens of a single planet, interconnected. And it is through style that those living in advanced capitalist nations connect with other regions of the globe. Globalization is also the basis for the borrowing of styles worldwide, including into Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. In Post-World War II Soviet style subcultures privileged youth were special sources of Western commodities and information, while ordinary youth often cobbled together copies of Western styles. Soviet youth consumed the West, they imitated it, and they often innovated upon it. In innovating, they created their own versions of styles, most notably Russian rock. Style subcultures in the Soviet Union were de facto political, given that the very act of diverging from the official culture was treated by the state as a kind of dissidence. Following the fall off the Soviet Union, style cultures were mostly rendered irrelevant or folded into the developing market in popular and youth culture. For example, Russian hip-hop in is a product both of Soviet style culture and of the universal neoliberal market. The political and economic ambivalence of hip-hop as a whole and of other styles in Russia provides a lens through which we can view the effects of the development of the universal market in that country. Style is a means for people to negotiate their relationships to each other and to the state and market. The universal market is eager and quite able to take advantage of style, to package it, market it, and enforce its boundaries. Russians must go to market for the necessities of life and for leisure; it is also primarily through the market that they come to know and practice style. Still, even within hip-hop, there remains a kernel of resistance in the culture-making of ordinary people.Item “Shake your tuchas” : Jewish parody rappers and the performance of Jewish masculinity(2012-12) Tyson, Lana Kimura; O'Meara, Caroline; Seeman, Sonia Tamar, 1958-; Dell'Antonio, AndrewAmerican Jewish rappers have become an increasingly prevalent topic in Jewish popular and scholarly media, where critics and scholars seek to understand how hip-hop performance and consumption serves as a platform for exploring and articulating Jewish identity. This thesis explores the work of what I term “Jewish parody rappers”—rappers who foreground Jewishness while destabilizing normative American Jewish identity using humor or parody—in order to demonstrate how nuanced gender and ethnoracial identity performances can be found in an often overlooked segment of Jewish rap. Using Jamie Moshin’s concept of “New Jewishness,” I argue that Jewish parody rappers recontextualize tropes of Jewish masculinity through black hip-hop codes, evoking a long history of Jewish engagement with African-American performance. Through an examination of Jewish parody rappers and their performances—including the Beastie Boys, 2 Live Jews, Chutzpah, and Athens Boys Choir—I demonstrate how these New Jews destabilize, or queer, Jewish identity through hip-hop performance. The Beastie Boys’ parodic performances highlight Jewishness as a liminal identity as they use the malleable and performative markers of Jewish masculinity to foreground their whiteness in the black-dominated arena of hip-hop. 2 Live Jews and Chutzpah recuperate tropes of effeminate and impotent Jewish masculinity through their extended parodies. Harvey Katz of Athens Boys Choir plays with tropes of Jewish masculinity not only to queer Jewishness, like other Jewish parody rappers, but also to articulate an explicitly queer Jewish identity. Each of these core samples illuminates various ways in which Jewish parody rappers perform New Jewish identity; however, these rappers do not evade the specter of problematic racial appropriation as they articulate Jewishness through and against tropes of black hip-hop hypermasculinity.Item The Emcee's Site of Enunciation: Exploring the Dialectic Between Authorship and Readership in Hip Hop(2013-07-22) Del Hierro, Victor JThe relationship between authors and readers has been heavily studied in western literatures since the shift between the spoken-subject lost its privileged position to the written author. The struggle for who determines truth has formed a specific dialect that requires either the author or the reader to be silent. Since the acceptance of literary theories like the ?death of the author? and ?author-function,? we continue to map these concepts on to similar relationships and discourses. Hip-hop culture defies this dialect, instead, based around the concept of the cipher, hip-hop insists on a constant inclusive discourse. Based in African-American traditions of call-and-response, hip-hop is always looking for voices to speak to each other and push the conversation further. In my thesis, I open up an exploration of the role of an author in hip-hop. Paying specific attention to the rapper, I flesh out the ways western ideas of reading conflate and disrupt the structures of a cipher in hip-hop. Imposing an ?author-function? on rappers, displaces the call-and-response relationship that hip-hop thrives on. While hip-hop becomes more prevalent in popular culture, rappers have to learn to navigate within and outside of the immediate hip-hop community. As a case study, I examine the career trajectory of Jay Z. Sean Carter employs the site of enunciation that Jay Z creates to transcend and transform his experiences into a platform for creative expressions as well as lucrative business ventures. Finally, this thesis serves as an initial inquiry into future research plans to explore rappers as nepantler@s and listeners as ?digital griots.? Both of these designations represents important rhetorical spaces that allow hip-hop culture to continue to work within a cipher and promote inclusivity. These future plans build towards creating a possible model for more productive collaboration, education, and activism.