Hip Hop Studies Commons^™

Motherland Drip: Examining Performativity In Southern Black Motherhood, Daisha Huiel

Master's Projects

This capstone project explores the possibilities of the societal standards of southern Black motherhood creating oppositional experiences for Black women and their claims to freedom and bodily autonomy. I am writing about the lived experiences of southern Black women, including myself, within their communities to explore anti-respectability themes in the lives and performances of southern women and female hip hop performers through the lens of intersectionality. This creative nonfiction1 and scholarship reflect my academic exploration into the ways foundational Black feminist theory and relevant texts connect to my individual lived experiences of motherhood and identity within the post-hip-hop generations. I …

Form In Hip-Hop Music: Sections, Songs, And History, Stephen M. Gomez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores musical form in recorded hip-hop music from 1979–present. Form, defined as the large-scale organization of songs, is a parameter that artists consider in the creative process and fans experience while listening. Hip-hop’s historical foundation as a live, improvised, party-oriented genre influenced formal functions and patterning from the earliest days of its popular recorded life, beginning with the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. While many of the section and song form labels used by scholars of pop-rock music are transferable to the analysis of hip-hop, the latter genre conveys a unique sense of time rooted in …

A Meditation On Afrosurrealism, Black Gender, And The Non-Human, Logan K. Shanks

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

Quotidian Black life is characterized by our ability to alchemize violence into generative life-sustaining properties of matter. In this paper, I will measure Black matter based on anything produced and engaged by Black collectives. While Black existence is not tied to white violence, descendants of enslaved Black people enter our worlds of worlds greeted by a white captor. It is not until we consciously recognize that we are in his dream that we can work to escape the white captor’s circadian rhythms. Through this paper, I will tease out the contradictions of our Black living-unliving. I will employ an anti-methodological …

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

The Sounds Of The Shore: An Afrofuturistic Double Record Performed Through Vernacular Technology, Collin Bright

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Predominately white institutions are socially exclusive hostile environments that uphold white heteronormative patriarchal systems (Harper, 2013; Holliday & Squires, 2021; Razzante, 2018). The everyday task of existing on campus is a struggle for students of color as they are asked to enter spaces/places that are not diverse, inclusive, equitable, or accepting. To address the oppressive and dismissive forces of campus, my thesis uses Afrofuturism to reimagine what it means to exist as a student of color at a PWI. Afrofuturism is a “counter-imaginative cultur[al]” aesthetic-based practice that uses creative postcolonial critiques to reimagine future possibilities (Asante & Pindi, 2020; Pirker …

Give The Drummer Some: A Dive Into Drum Breaks And Drum Break Production, Kyle Kaldhusdal

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper traces the history of hip-hop culture through the evolution of the drum break, the original context of drum breaks in funk and soul music, their influence on DJ culture, and the subsequent impact of drum breaks on music and music production. It follows the development of breakbeat compilations in the 1970s and 1980s, parallel to the development of turntablism and sampling techniques. It also examines in detail how copyright litigation in the 1990s shaped the development of sample-based music genres and created a niche market for originally-recorded drum breaks over the subsequent decades.

(Transforme Des Mines De Plomb En Or): Webster Et L'Alchimie Du Nous (En Rap), Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Auteur de plusieurs disques et de nombreux ateliers d'écriture internationaux, d'un livre pour enfants et d'une d'exposition sur des escclaves fugitifs au Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec¹, le rappeur <> Webster (de son vrai nom Aly Ndiaye) est connu pour la profondeur de ses chansons, nourries d'Histoire (fidèle à sa formation d'historien), mais surtout d'un humanisme qui fait face non seulement aux attitudes racistes qu'il a dû affronter pendant sa jeunesse, et aussi à l'isolement créé par des barrières artificielles imposées par la société québecoise dont il fait partie.

Can Anyone Withhold The Water...?, Brandon Keith Lacey Sr

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

Abstract

Thesis

Contextualization and indigenization have always been necessary and expected components of establishing Christian communities of faith and practice. Failed or obsolete attempts at contextualization and indigenization in evangelism and missions continue to harm the development of the African American Church. This results in the development of spiritually marginalized communities alienated from the very relationship with God that such communities need. Preventing such spiritual marginalization in communities requires a training curriculum that combines a working theology on appropriate contextualization and indigenization with a framework for practical implementation. The outcome would decrease the tendency to replicate non-contextual religious practice and …