Everyday I'm Hustlin? Hiphop Rhetorics and the Art of Makin? Do

The field of Rhetoric and Composition traditionally centers the Greco-Roman tradition, specifically rhetorics and theories attached to privileged, white males, as the most important voices, while marginalizing rhetorics from other communities such as people of color, women, and queer folks. This dissertation makes interventions in the field of Rhetoric and Composition by privileging rhetorics created and innovated by communities centering non-written texts, non-linearity, everyday practices, and embodiment. It looks at how hiphop produces resistance, survival, agency, and pleasure through everyday practices and rhetorical traditions based in African, Latino/a, and Indigenous ways of knowing. Rooted in sociopolitical resistance and survival against colonial histories of oppression and erasure, I theorize ?tha art of makin? do? as a method employing tactics able to re-imagine, re-purpose, and re-deploy the material and immaterial in accordance to immediate and long-term needs.

Hiphop Studies scholar Tricia Rose writes that the ability to manage and navigate the concept of ?flow,? ?layering,? and ?ruptures in line? builds a hiphop methodology for survival that ?suggest[s] affirmative ways in which profound social dislocation and rupture can be managed and perhaps contested in the cultural arena.? This hiphop methodology produces voice, subjectivity, and agency as weapons to combat oppression, challenge discourses, and produce knowledges. I theorize how hiphop rhetoricians employ the art of making do through remixing, pastiche, mimicry, parody, and embodied rhetorics to shift power structures and relationships.