Raising Communities: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Affective Labor in an Exemplary Community-Based Hip-Hop Organization

• In Event: The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Hip-Hop Pedagogy From the United States to South Africa

Abstract

Hip Hop has historically centered the experiences and aesthetics of peoples of the African diaspora, as well as those on the margins, to create expressive practices that confront racialized and classed oppressions. This is not just a subtext or peripheral current through Hip Hop's trajectory, but a dominant aesthetic that has defined Hip Hop's artistic and cultural legacy (Chang, 2007). In other words, Hip Hop has demanded that artists have a "knowledge of self" (i.e. 5th Element). This knowledge of self demands that you have an awareness of your racialized and classed position relative to those who surround you (Hill, 2009).

This Hip Hop aesthetic was the impetus for the rise and spread of the Universal Zulu Nation, a collective of arts practicing youth that built solidarity across youth gangs in the South Bronx. Similarly, Hip Hop became the medium for social cohesion against racialized and classed oppressions in a working-class community in the California Bay Area (“Bay Grove”) (Chang, 2007). For a large portion of its history Bay Grove was a socioeconomically isolated working-class city with predominantly peoples racialized as Black. Through the 80s and 90s, Bay Grove saw the influx of a large Latinx population, as well as a significant influx of peoples from the Polynesian diaspora (Cutler, 2015). Like in the South Bronx, Hip Hop became the thread between youth.

One community-based Hip Hop organization saw this thread and began incorporating Hip Hop pedagogy into its programming. Assessing the results of over 500 hours of participatory action research and life history interviewing at this organization, we explore how they gained prominence as a community-based organization due to their effective use of Hip Hop pedagogy to enrich the lives of youth. As Bay Grove faced ongoing tensions across race and class, due to eerily familiar politics of abandonment and containment that had impacted the South Bronx, the community-based Hip Hop organization was asked to step in to bridge differences between youth. Making use of Hip Hop pedagogy, they have been credited with supporting youth as their lives have been disrupted by the divisive forces of poverty, policing, mass incarceration, and resegregation. They have stabilized youth and thereafter strengthened the bonds of families, friends, and members of the wider community in ripples of resistance, agitation, and survivance.

However, while Hip Hop served the role of gathering youth together, offering moments of catharsis, we argue that it was the affective labor of predominantly women that allowed the organization to reach its full potential (Giddings, 1996; Gutierrez-Rodriguez, 2014). “Affective labor” here refers to the work that one undertakes to express care and produce emotional experiences (Oksala, 2016). Affective labor of women in the organization helped regenerate relationships, sustaining and stabilizing youth and the wider community. Affective labor provided youth with the emotional capacity to build a knowledge of self (“5th Element”) and the strength to organize for social change. We argue that affective labor needs to be recognized, understood, and valued as vital to Hip Hop pedagogy's promise and future.

Authors

• Reagan Ross

• Adorie Howard

• Measha Ferguson-Smith