Black Feminist Poetics and MCing as Critical Scholarship and Knowledge Production

• In Event: "Not Like Us": Using Hip Hop Sensibilities to Broaden Notions of Knowledge, Expertise, and How to Disseminate It

Abstract

I embrace Black feminist poetics and MCing as critically engaged, culturally responsive, relevant, and sustaining scholarship and research methods. Thus, in this spoken word performance and discussion, I explore the connection between Black feminist poetics and MCing; center hip hop as critical scholarship and knowledge production; and play with poetic form. I also explore Black feminist poetics as/in artful inquiry aligned with hip hop tenets and adopt Sullivan’s (2021) definition of Black feminist poetics and apply Cutts (2020) concept of ars spirituality as a foundational concept. I argue Black feminist poetics and MCing encourages various linguistic forms, bodily expression and movement, and spirituality. Further, I argue Black feminist poetics and MCing are/can be used to highlight violence against Black women and femmes, resist oppression, center joy, and engage world-building. I invite attendees to participate in the performance through call-and-response, imagination, and creative centering. From this focus, I hope attendees will be inspired to acknowledge, to study, and to integrate—with appropriate, intentional attribution—Black women’s scholarship and creativity in their teaching, research, and lives. I also encourage qualitative and hip hop scholars to identify Black women’s intellectual and cultural Black feminist poetic and MCing contributions and promote Black women’s liberatory work as models for in/with/for qualitative methodologies. Finally, I invite Black women scholars to acknowledge the ways the academy’s training requires Black women to disassociate from our ancestral knowledge and encourage us to (re)member and embrace Black feminist poetics and MCing in our research and lived experiences.

Author

• Qiana Cutts Givens, Mississippi State University