This dissertation is an ethnography that investigates how Chicago-based artists and organizations use hip-hop performance as a tool for grassroots education and communal dissent. By exploring these local artistic approaches, this research reveals the salience of hip-hop performance in cultivating social movements, embodied politics, and choreographic repertoires that respond to youth-of-color criminalization and police brutality. Chicagos racial and economic segregation, history of police misconduct, and concentrated poverty continues to render the mobility of, namely, Black people precarious. Each chapter reads these forms of curtailed and regulated movement against hip-hops kinesthetic practiceswhether animated through slam poets physicality, the sonic imaginaries of freestyling, or through raps activist ethos. In doing so, it asks: How does hip-hops liberating employment of the bodyits insurgent kinesisoperate within and around regimes of power that seek to contain, curtail, and foreclose personal freedom? \tI explore this question in my ethnographic research in two specific sites: (1) Kuumba Lynx (KL), a hip-hop community arts organization in Chicagos Uptown neighborhood where Ive spent five years collaborating with instructors and students to better understand their artistic praxis, and (2) Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC), a five-story detention center for incarcerated adolescents, where I have taught digital music production since 2014. My participant observation and interview data, combined with a detailed analysis of a local gangster rap subgenre called œdrill music, spotlight how my interlocutors use performance to carve out spaces of liberation from within constricting environmentsthat is, how they get free. \tChapter one details how KL uses stylized movement, grassroots theater, and political education to interpret and critique the inequalities their students face. Through partnerships with local activist groups, students learn to safely comport themselves during police searches, often using artistic exercises to œrehearse these interactions. Chapter two spotlights how JTDC residents, in lieu of material freedom, use rap music to traverse the centers immobilizing setting and extend their voices beyond its walls. Finally, chapter three analyzes how drill rappers residing in the South Sides restricting geography use social media to reach audiences outside of their neighborhoods. Their complex gang-oriented performances in music videos comprise movement vocabularies that communicate kinship, belonging, and mourning, while also propagating œChiraq, a moniker for Chicago that equates the city to a militarized zone of violence. Together, these chapters rethink hip-hops impact on Chicagos youth of color as they embody, reimagine, and negotiate their freedom in the age of mass incarceration and amid shifting national conversations around race.

Last modified

• 11/25/2019

Creator

• Justin Zullo

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-efhb-zw62

Subject

• Performance Studies

Keyword

• social justice
• hip-hop pedagogy
• cultural studies
• sound studies
• juvenile justice
• urban ethnography

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright