"I Am Both, Yet I Am Neither": Exploring the Fifth Element of Hip-Hop as Spiritual Social Justice Praxis Through Spoken Word Poetry

• In Event: 18.044 - A #HipHopEd Compilation: Hip-Hop as Education and Knowledge of Self

Abstract

Spoken word poetry performance has been my reckoning, my accountability, my reflection and my pedagogy for the last decade. I remember struggling to bridge what felt like an immeasurable distance between my artistic performance as a spoken word artist and my aspirations for my scholarly work as an educator simply because I had no language for the spiritual experience that performance always is for me. KRS-One (2002) taught us all that the fifth element of Hip-Hop, “knowledge of self” is central to the role we play as artists and cultural practitioners, because knowledge of self creates a chance to “know the universe and God”. I understand spoken word poetry as both an intense embodied performance and a spiritual process which overlaps with my hip-hop pedagogy and praxis as it is a “reflection of Hip-hop culture and [has] particular strengths in teaching” (Emdin, Adjapong, Levy, 2016, p. 319). My artistic body of work is translated through my physical embodiment, one that Hip-hop feminist Aisha Durham (2010) insists we must acknowledge in scholarly work, because the art it produces causes us “to react at a visceral level” (p. 129). This paper explores three aspects of my subjectivity that spoken word poetry performance continues to interface with and elevate: artist, educator, activist.
My exploration into these subjectivities is grounded on Watson’s (2017) framework for understanding spoken word poetry as a tool for deep learning, a tool she asserts as powerful enough to transform a traditional classroom setting into “sanctuary” where “something sacred” is taking place (p. 15). The fifth element, knowing who we are, is the spiritual component of Hip-hop that extends and deepens the roots of our Hip-hop Ed praxis and can be effectively cultivated through spoken word poetry. Emdin, Adjapong, and Levy’s (2016) ground-breaking critical inquiry argues for a pedagogy that invites students to vocalize and express their lived experiences and insists on attention to both the emotional and intellectual processes that take place. Indeed, they remind us “hip-hop provides such spaces because of the ways in which it captures the imaginations” and if Hip-hop praxis encourages the use of imagination for youth of color, then it also allows for learning to occur as a spiritual process (p. 309). This paper offers concrete examples of co-creating social justice spaces and practices toward dismantling what Kelly (2016) describes as a system of silence.

Author

• Crystal Leigh Endsley, John Jay College of Criminal Justice