Awad Ibrahim

Becoming Black: Rap and Hip-Hop, Race, Gender, Identity, and the Politics of ESL Learning.

This article is about the impact of becoming Black on ESL learning, that is, the interrelation between identity and learning. It contends that a group of French-speaking immigrant and refugee continental African youths who are attending an urban Franco-Ontarian high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada, enters a social imaginary—a discursive space in which they are already imagined, constructed, and thus treated as Blacks by hegemonic discourses and groups. This imaginary is directly implicated in whom the students identify with (Black America), which in turn influences what and how they linguistically and culturally learn. They learn Black stylized English, which they access in hip-hop culture and rap lyrical and linguistic styles. This critical ethnography, conducted within an interdisciplinary framework, shows that ESL is neither neutral nor without its politics and pedagogy of desire and investment.

Will They Ever Speak with Authority? Race, Post‐Coloniality and the Symbolic Violence of Language

Intersecting authority‐language‐and‐symbolic power, this article tells the story of a group of continental Francophone African youth who find themselves in an urban French‐language high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through their narrative, one is confronted by the trauma of ones own language being declared an illegitimate child, hence becoming a ‘deceptive fluency’ in the ‘eyes of power’ thanks to race and post‐coloniality. They are fully consciousness of this situation and their ‘linguistic return’, thus gazing back at the eyes of power and declaring themselves ‘subjects’ capable of love and desire. I briefly address questions of hospitality and language ownership and conclude by addressing the need to re‐think the connection between race, power and language.

Research as an Act of Love: Ethics, Émigrés, and the Praxis of Becoming Human

Conceptual in nature, this paper revisits the debate on the nature and ethical implication of what it means to conduct research with/in immigrant communities. The view from “inside” is different from the view from “‘outside,” I am contending, and both are mediated by what I am calling I–Thou Research Ethics. This is an Ethics that places émigrés as our neighbors, engineers, doctors, etc. Mexico now lives next door, I am arguing, and Mexicans are now hyphenated: Mexican-Americans (for example). Gilles Deleuze (2005) refers to this as “post-identity phenomenon.” To deal with it, I shall (a) discuss its ethics through The Stephen Tyler Affair (hooks, 1990); (b) build an “I–Thou Research Ethics” as a response to this Affair; and (c) conclude with a genuine dialogue in which research becomes an act of love, and “researcher–researched” becomes an “‘I–Thou relationship.” Only then can we hope for the transformative praxis of becoming human.

Don't Call Me Black! Rhizomatic Analysis of Blackness, Immigration, and the Politics of Race Without Guarantees.

What happens when the syntax of race meets immigrants whose bodies are assumed to be “Black” in North America but who either do not have the history or the conception of Blackness in North America or are not familiar with the North American Black-White dichotomy? Dealing with three empirical studies and a novel, in the present review essay, I answer this complex question by entering a rhizome and a cartography (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) where race is a complicated, nuanced and ever-shifting/ed category; an identity politics without guarantees; whose outcome is so contingent and tentative that it is unpredictable (Hall, 1992). I will conclude with a sketch of a critical pedagogy that attempts to decolonize the unidimensional nature of Blackness as currently existing in North America.

Body without Organs: Notes on Deleuze & Guattari, Critical Race Theory and the Socius of Anti-Racism.

My aim in this article is to epistemologically read Deleuze and Guattari (D & G) against critical race theory (CRT) and simultaneously delineate how D & Gs notion of ‘body without organs’ can benefit from CRT. At first glance, especially for language instructors and researchers, these two epistemological frameworks not only compete against each other but in most cases also do not meet. For some, their utility might not even be as obvious given their philosophical and abstract nature. This article is conceptualised to show, in a modest way, their utility on the one hand and how, on the other hand, where and when they meet to create an ‘anti-racism line of flight’. For those who are interested in race, language learning and institutional analysis, this is a line of flight that is full with infinite possibilities, twists and turns and pleasant surprises, which I hope to epistemologically explore.

How Do You Mourn A Strong Poet

There is pain to mourning, especially when death takes them so young. There is a singularity to death, to be sure, but we are always aghast of its repetition. It was an afternoon. A graduate student and a friend sent me an iMessage indicating that Greg Dimitriadis had just passed away. That “just” was no more than few minutes. Thankful to have known so quickly, but horrified—or was I paralyzed?— by the news. On the phone with the friend: “What do you mean by passed away? It can’t be. I just saw him at AERA in Philly few months ago.” Greg and I had a promise to meet at least once a year at a conference and catch up with our news. In Philly, he told me about his newfound love. He complained, “We work too much.” I nodded strongly, “So we gotta balance things, Awad.” “Damn right, Greg; damn right!” To know strong poets is to know them in person and through their work. Greg and I know have known each other through our work, first. Located within the politics of radical pedagogy, our paths crossed as each, in our separate corners and countries (mine in Canada and his in the United States), was invested in the poetics of hip-hop, radical cartographies of youth culture, and its ability for social transformation, and new forms of literacies, where identity, pedagogy, and hope are central. His ability to produce as much in such a short life, on the one hand, and to maneuver between these rhizomatic spaces, on the other, is what qualifies him as a strong poet. In academia, we have too many poets: those who are brilliant in their own way, who definitely know how to write and work their way into the system, but who write and work for tenure and securing their lives in the academy. Strong poets are altogether different. Strong poets, according to Richard Rorty (1989), do not simply write verses. They definitely do not write articles to get tenure, even though they may acknowledge our need to secure our jobs, because if one is not good to one’s self, one is no good to anyone. Daring in more ways than one, the strong poet is someone who not only has the language, but also the vision to tell us something new or invent the known in an unknown language. As such, Maxine Greene, Paulo Freire, Joe Kincheloe, Roger I. Simon, and Michel Foucault, among others, as well as the emerging (but cut way too short) figure of Greg Dimitriadis, all fall under the term. For me, Greg is a strong poet precisely, as Rorty put it, because he was horrified of simply being “a copy or a replica,” he had the courage and audacity to engage, look for and think through the “blind impresses” (p. 43), the gaps and the blind spots of thoughts, ideas, and practices. Three central blind spots that Greg has identified: the poetics of hip-hop, the politics of difference within cultural studies, and how to

Arab Spring, Favelas, borders, and the artistic transnational migration: toward a curriculum for a Global Hip-Hop Nation

ABSTRACT Straddling between the purely political and the poetically artistic, I am arguing, is a Global Hip-Hop Nation (GHHN), which is yet to be charted and its cartography is yet to be demarcated. Taking two examples, the first a Hip-Hop song from within the Arab Spring and the second from the favelas in Brazil, my intent is to show what Hip-Hop can do socially, racially, and politically, on the one hand, and how, despite the fact that this GHHN is clearly global, it grounds itself deeply in the local, on the other. Through these examples, I call for an ill-literacy, one where creativity is taken as serious as grammar and where literacy becomes ill: intimate, lived and liberatory.