Shouting at the Wall: Learning From Hip-Hop to Synchronously Sustain Abolitionist and Decolonial Methodologies

• In Event: “Between Shadow and Substance”: Examining What It Means to Move Toward Collective Freedom Through Methodologies

Abstract

Objective. While abolitionist and decolonial methods have increasingly come to be academically differentiated by justice-focused academic researchers (Tuck & Yang, 2018), this paper examines how an adolescent Palestinian emcee (MC Abdul) engages in a mode of gathering, interpreting, and sharing knowledge that epistemically, ontologically, and axiologically brings these two justice projects together. The objective of this paper is to examine how MC Abdul accomplishes this methodological task through his widely circulating piece, “Shouting at the Wall.”

Theoretical Framework. In their work, Toward What Justice?, Tuck and Yang (2018) elucidate how justice has come to be primarily associated with two projects: abolition and decolonization. Considering existing research and activism, they elucidate how abolition has come to be widely understood as being about confronting anti-Blackness and the systemic oppression of peoples for their labor, while decolonization as being about ending anti-Indigeneity and the systemic elimination and removal of people in order to exploit their lands and waters. Primarily developed within the U.S., these academic research frames have come to frame Blackness as being in opposition to Indigeneity (i.e., especially Native Americans), disrupting the roots of both movements in collective freedom (Davis, 2016; Maynard & Simpson, 2022). It is from this standpoint that this paper considers abolition, decolonization, and the work of MC Abdul.

Data and Methodology. Data comes from available digital documentation on how MC Abdul has engaged in Hip Hop knowledge production, and lyrics from his piece “Shouting at the Wall.” Digital documentation included interviews, social media, and new stories. Primarily gathered and interpreted through hiphopographic sociolinguistic methods (Alim, 2006), discursive and poetic data was examined for rhetorical and indexical markers to understand how knowledge was gathered, interpreted, and shared through linguistic, paralinguistic, and kinesthetic acts by the emcee (i.e., MC Abdul).

Substantiated Conclusions. MC Abdul’s piece “Shouting at the Wall” makes use of an “organic” (Alim & Haupt, 2017) Hip Hop-based mode of inquiry that operates from the ontological vantage point of African freedom culture, which sees gathering, interpreting, and sharing knowledge as interconnected processes tied to peoples and contexts (Alim, Williams, & Haupt, 2021). In this way, MC Abdul’s Hip Hop knowledge production overcame the ontological, and thereafter methodological boundary, which has come to undermine visions of collective freedom espoused by abolitionist and decolonial methodologists. In this way, as theoretically invoked by Edouard Glissant (1997) as knowledge production through a “poetics of relation,” MC Abdul builds knowledge that centers relations across ontological bodies often differentiated, categorized, and segregated through European-descended methodologies; as what has been taking place within widely circulating “academic” frames of abolitionist and decolonial methodologies (Patel, 2015).

Scholarly Significance. Abolitionist and decolonial methods are now widely considered as being at the forefront of methodological innovation for advancing justice-focused research (Tuck & Yang, 2018). Likewise, Hip Hop-based knowledge production has been widely invoked, but rarely assessed to understand its modes of inquiry (Alim & Haupt, 2017). This paper aims to advance understandings of Hip Hop knowledge production in ways that offer needed ontological development of abolitionist and decolonial methodologies.

Author

• Casey Philip Wong, Georgia State University