Tracing Resonance at "Global" and "Local" Scales in Youth-Led Hip-Hop Collectives' Playful (Political) Expression

• In Event: The "Invisible" Resonance: (Re)Imagining Writing for a "Just Present" in Local and Global Technoscapes

Abstract

People, environment, experiences and histories, discourse and materiality (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022) shape and inform youths’ everyday literacy practices– with digital technology situated as an enabler in the global flow of literacy practices. This paper critically interrogates the directionality (and remixing) of global and local flow of practices and culture by examining the “intertextual connections” (Olsen, et al., 2018) and “resonance” (Author & Colleague, 2014) in youth media and writings of two youth-led hip hop collectives in New Delhi, India. This study foregrounds youth perspectives on the networked discourses, ideas, and ‘collective literacy practices’ that find uptake and resonance in and across youth-led collectives engaged in a global practice.
This study is undergirded by decolonial frameworks to understand how knowledge is collectively constructed in a mobile, digital world- and helps contest universalizing discourses around flow of knowledge and practices (Mignolo, 2009; Quijano, 2007) in a globally connected media ecology. This work engages with critical feminist epistemologies (Ghiso, 2015; Mohanty, 1997; Moya, 2002; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) that center relationality and collectiveness to offer an understanding of youth lives as always unfolding in relation to another. Finally, critical scholarship on literacy moves us to look at how young people read their worlds (Friere, 1987) and towards participatory literacies (Gee, 2017; Vasudevan, 2010).
This participatory “connective” ethnography (Leander, 2008) combines ethnographic methods–participant observation, interviews, and focus groups with digital methods that allow for centering of youths’ perspectives. Screen capture recording, scroll back method (Robards & Lincoln, 2017), and media go-alongs were used for tracing the hip hop collective’s online discourses, connections, and networks. Video Cued Elicitation (VCE) was used to elicit youths’ responses on the context, content, and perceived influences on their media. Twelve individual hip hop artists (15 to 21 years) joined in as participants. Data sources included field notes, analytical memos, interview transcripts, audio/video recordings of discussions, screen capture videos and images, artifacts (hip hop videos and written lyrics), and VCE transcripts.
While youths’ hip hop practice and discourse look ‘globally familiar’ through the embodied practices and hip-hop rituals (Dattatreyan, 2020), these are locally situated (Sarwatay, 2020). Youth adopt a critical stance that is unique to their political and social contexts (“Our beats might be more western but I learn most from underground hip hop artists from Delhi who talk about my context.”). And the intertextual moves in their speaking and writing in relation to western (mostly U.S.) artists' rap reveal a call and response (“Our rap responds to theirs for example when they say, ‘this is poverty’ we reply to them by saying…well this is ours). These intertextual connections emphasize a more distant (though important) dialogue with the global and the prominence of the hyper-local. This paper situates this as a necessary conversation; by looking at the local and global scales of intertextuality and resonance, this study highlights for literacy educators and researchers, the centrality of the local ‘parochial context’ and offers a rupture to colonizing logics (Mignolo, 2011) that often situate the flow of practices and discourse as unidirectional.

Authors

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania

• Shivek Kranti

• Shivam Dean

• Sahil Beniwal

• Sumit Vaastav