Prison Cells and Cemetery Plots: The Shifting Memory Archive in Hip Hop

• In Event: Cultural Studies Approaches to Questions of Race, Memory, Nation, and Latinidad.

Abstract

Richard Terdiman argues that “Memory is the precondition for any intertextuality, for any dialogism.” Hip Hop uses intertextuality as a new form of memory. Hip Hop as a new art form, from its origin and in its musical score, has always a need for dialog and memory. There is no Hip Hop without a sample, a groove, a “break” taken from another source. There is no Hip Hop without forms of collecting or recollection.
The proposed paper will explore the ways in which Hip Hop has shifted its memory project. Since its birth, Hip Hop has been preoccupied by young minoritarian males' relationships to prison and death. It has been established by Hip Hop Academics like Dyson, Ogbar and Thompson, that there is a gap between the Hip Hop generation and the civil rights generation of the 60s. The gap was due to Cold War era politics, “supply-side economics” (widely known as “Reaganomics”) and the crack cocaine epidemic. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech became a reminder that the African-American communities then and Latino communities now, live a nightmare, without access to essential services that the rest of society readily acquired. What academics have failed to explore is how the image of the incarcerated young Black or Brown man and/or their death are a form of memorializing the failures of the Civil Rights Movement. I will focus on this aspect of the Hip Hop generation’s memory project: death and prison as reminders and remains of these failures, and simultaneously, as a place of memory.

Author

• Angel M Diaz Miranda, Hollins University