Indigenous Hip Hop Generation: Edutainment and Sonic Sovereignty

Catalog description

This seminar explores the growing generation of young musician-activists reshaping global hip-hop to express their Indigenous roots and advocate for their community's rights. It focuses on Indigenous hip-hop as an emerging transnational cultural phenomenon linking communities and diasporas, spanning from New York to some of the world's most geographically remote nations. Because of its oral tradition, communal spirit, resistance culture, and decolonial pedagogical praxis, hip-hop is a natural vehicle for reviving Indigenous languages and cultures, including ways of knowing, thinking, and sustainable living. Indigenous hip-hop draws inspiration from various cultures and traditions, both ancient and modern, global and local. It serves as a soundtrack for Indigenous youths rejecting essentialist and static notions of Indigeneity, instead reclaiming their language and cultural practices, promoting gender inclusivity, Indigenous memory, and the healing of centuries-old trauma and violence. This seminar will examine mainstream and underground hip-hop to understand how Indigenous musicians borrow and reshape globally-circulating elements of hip-hop by integrating Indigenous languages, music traditions, and resistance politics. To foster critical thinking and creativity, in-class discussions include analyses of academic works, hip-hop cultural productions, as well as intellectual reflections with guest speakers, including hip-hop scholars and rappers.