Halifu Osumare
University of California, Davis
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Archive | 2007
Halifu Osumare
What is it about hip-hop culture that has allowed it to defy its critics and pronouncements by media pundits that it would only be a passing youth trend? What has allowed all its artistic elements to proliferate globally and take root across the world in greatly disparate societies? Countries both in proximity to and far away from American borders, as well as those localities continually in the throes of political warfare, often reflect today’s hip-hop culture and style that is being exported by Viacom’s MTV and BET, the major recording distributors, and any number of multinational clothing lines in the United States. For instance, Toronto, Canada, just across the U.S. Canadian border, is in proximity to New York City and benefits from having immediate access to some of the seminal U.S. emcees and b-boys. Toronto has, therefore, enjoyed a long-term close relationship with hip-hop, and has created local Canadian deejays such as Ron Nelson, who produced many successful early concerts with Run DMC, Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Big Daddy Kane. The predictable outcome of this geographical proximity is that it spawned early Canadian emcees, such as Ken E. Krush and the Dream Warriors, as well as several breakers and graffiti artists, particularly in the Toronto suburbs of Scarborough and Mississaugua.1 In contrast, global sites remote from U.S. hip- hop urban centers, such as the Palestinian West Bank, have less direct contact and, therefore, a more generalized influence.
Archive | 2007
Halifu Osumare
The cultural history of the Americas is partially defined by African continuities, reinventions, adaptations, and significations. As in any culture, these constitute actual modalities of representing and negotiating the self as subject in the social world through expressive values. One reading of the sociopolitical history of the Americas is the attempt to control this aesthetic and its black producers, while simultaneously appropriating it for economic gain and for forging various national cultural identities (i.e., Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad, Brazil, the United States). Hip-hop youth culture is the current cultural practice in a long history of vital black expressivity lodged within the ambivalent realities of U.S. cultural history. Dance Studies scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild reveals that in the new-millennium-hip- hop-era, “it is not only rap’s content that rankles; it is also the form. This genre is all about rhythm, a component that can inspire fear in a Europeanist culture that knew enough about the power of African rhythm to prohibit drumming by enslaved Africans.”1 The exploration of this seductively powerful and often threatening Africanist aesthetic in hip-hop, as a global export, is the subject of this chapter.
Archive | 2007
Halifu Osumare
After exploring the Africanist aesthetic in hip-hop and demonstrating its globalization and adaptations internationally through connective marginalities, particularly in Hawai′i, I turn in this chapter to another dimension of the culture’s implications in the confluence of the global flow of capitalist commodification and popular culture. I argue that the Africanist aesthetic plays a crucial role in hip-hop’s commodification, as does the World Wide Web with its requisite commercialization in the post-modern era. I use the terms “postmodern,” “postmodernism,” “postmodernist,” and “postmodernity,” as I have throughout this text, as descriptive constructs for various arguments about hip-hop’s insinuation in economic, technological, and social dynamics in the era of globalization.
Archive | 2008
Halifu Osumare
Tourism Management | 2007
Philip Feifan Xie; Halifu Osumare; Awad Ibrahim
Archive | 2007
Halifu Osumare
Dance Research Journal | 2002
Halifu Osumare
Archive | 2012
Halifu Osumare
Archive | 2012
Halifu Osumare
Archive | 2018
Halifu Osumare