"I Can't Believe She Got Lizzo to Feature!" Envisioning Culturally Relevant Pedagogies at the Intersection of Comics, Hip-Hop, and Fan Studies

• In Event: Hip-Hop, Comics, and Speculative Education: (Re)Storying Equitable Education for the 23rd Century

Abstract

In 2018, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds wrote, “hip-hop and comics speak the same language” noting that, “it’s the voice of the outcast made good.”As a scholar of popular culture, that makes sense. Yet as a teacher, I find that we often ignore the power of forms like comics and hip-hop to affirm the experiences of those who have been minoritized or made to feel like “outcasts” in our classrooms. Instead, we champion sanitized efforts at “diversity and inclusion” that may provide for increased representation, but only through established forms such as the novel.This presentation draws on scholarship about culturally relevant pedagogy to foreground the importance of multimodal approaches to instruction. We know that comics and hip-hop, individually, are productive sites for culturally responsive teaching. In 2009, Roderic R. Land and David O. Stovall claimed hip-hop could, “engage youth in social discourse, which fosters critical thinking and academic and media literacy.” Moreover, we have seen an increase in publications about teaching with comics or hip-hop, affirming the pedagogical value of each. Yet despite this boom, few scholars have written about teaching at the intersection of these cultural forms.
With that in mind I turn to a comics series, Children of the Atom(2021), which functions as a microcosm of the intersection between comics and popular music (including hip-hop). As part of theX-Men umbrella, this series follows teenage mutants who decide not to live in the utopia of Krakoa and instead grapple with life as “normal” high school students and superheroes. I am interested in the role that Dazzler (a fictional mutant performer) and Lizzo (a hip-hop and multi-genre artist) play in helping them to make sense of their identities and their “outcast” status. Aisha S. Durham has noted that, “media are formidable pedagogical tools for teaching audiences about their distinct social worlds,” and hereI focus on how narratives about music popular media figures (real or fictional) can open up spaces for students “to interrogate their own presence in a culturally diverse and media-saturated world.”
In this instance, I am attentive to how one cultural form (comics) draws on and incorporates another (hip-hop and popular music) to create a multimodal nexus for negotiating cultural identities and adolescence. Drawing on Dazzler’s history as the first visibly “out” mutant and Lizzo’s status as what Durham calls “the oppositional hip-hop body,” I demonstrate how the overlap between comics and hip-hop enables conversations about fandom and popular culture that model the culturally relevant teaching practices advocated by scholars like such as Gloria Ladson-Billings.
Indeed, this overlap between cultural forms provides students with necessary language for interrogating how narratives of belonging function. Moreover, I illustrate how comics and hip-hop provide what Marc Lamont Hill calls “complex sites of identity work, enabling [students]to fashion new notions of self within and outside of formal schooling spaces”and posit that teaching at this intersection can produce a pedagogy that is attentive to how students negotiate identities.

Author

• Nicholas E. Miller, Sayre School