Phillips: English 540 Week Three Response

Connecting Key Critical Issues to Personal Research Interests

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For this response, I begin to analyze the ways in which two scholars, Carrie Louise Sheffield and Alastair Pennycook, approach hip-hop from their own situated knowledges. I consider how each interpellates me (or doesn’t) as a developing scholar interested in third-wave feminism and social justice for marginalized peoples.

In my last post, I juxtaposed Adam J. Banks’ work on hip-hop to Pennycook’s. Banks’ worked with a Syracuse, NY African American community to help that community understand their own musical history specific to hip-hop and their cultural and historical identities. To be clear, I have a cursory-only understanding of hip-hop, informed by Adam J. Banks and my interest in American blues and roots music. As my last post suggests, I believe Banks and Pennycook come at hip-hop from completely different points of view.

Carrie Louise Sheffield writes about contemporary hip-hop artists whose aesthetic and rhetorical sovereignty draws from African American hip-hop and rap, Native American spoken-word and music practices, and decolonial survivance tactics meant to resist the results of historical trauma and the “cumulative psychic wounding” inherited by Native American youths via genocide’s “far reaching effects” (106; 94). Sheffield writes: “Most teenagers and young adults in the United States, regardless of their cultural identity, are more likely to turn on the radio than pick up a book. As such, music is a far more useful genre for enacting change and bringing about healing within young groups” (97). Sheffield suggests that Native American hip-hop artists have the potential to reach far more young Native Americans than an academic ever will (99-100). This doesn’t mean that we should all give up and go home, however. Sheffield is not unlike Pennycook in that both scholars want to increase the general public’s knowledge about subjects that have been marginalized by status quo research practices. To that end, both Sheffield and Pennycook engage with public “history” projects. Granted, each scholar’s research focus is different—feminist Native American rhetorics and cultures in the former, and sociolinguistics in the latter. Underneath it all, their exigencies may be similar, but the way they grapple with hip-hop, identity, and resistance to hegemonic ideologies is different.

I’ll begin with their approach to identity and identity formation via language and teaching. Sheffield’s pedagogic imperative directs us to consider deploying hip-hop as a classroom tactic to segue to more “challenging” literary materials—like poetry, prose, and scholarly papers. I don't think Pennycook advocates for this. Despite sometimes “violent and misogynistic” messages, Sheffield believes that “hip-hop is a locus for (re)building positive Native American identity and community” (100). In this stance, she is similar to Pennycook. She privileges two Native American rappers in particular, Night Shield and Maniac: The Siouxpernatural. I listened to several tracks from both artists, as well as several other artists including Happy Frejo, a Pawnee-Seminole female rapper from Oklahoma City. Her work is not violent or misogynistic. Her work does demonstrate pain and loss, but mostly hope and humor.

Pennycook suggests that “to work sociolinguistically” he “intend[s] to take seriously the politics of language and the ordinariness of diversity” (95). I take issue with the statement “ordinariness of diversity,” for while I realize Pennycook is attempting to collapse polarizing language, I’m not so sure his tactics benefit historically marginalized populations. Perhaps, I misread, but, to my mind, he makes it too easy to ignore certain embodied realities that on the outside look much different from his own body. Many now find so-called “identity politics” distasteful and passé, but some folks have more reason to be invested in “strategic essentialism” than in “strategic inauthenticity” (99). I worry that Pennycook’s position delimits consciousness-raising activism if we’re all just diverse together. Nevertheless, I see merit in Pennycook’s “traditional pitfalls in the analysis of popular music,” {and here I would add culture} which are:

•  “…[T]he tendency to work from an unacknowledged normative position, namely the bourgeois-leftist politics common in cultural studies; thus bands that convey an anti-capitalist, anit-globalist, anti-racist, environmentally friendly pro-feminist message may be seized upon, praised and held up as examples of the ‘progressive’ aspects of popular culture, while those that rage too violently, or take up unacceptable cultural and political positions are carefully avoided” (95).
•  “[T]he tendency to indulge…[liberal notion] of hybridity” {i.e. hybridity for hybridity’s sake}  (95).

Confronting violence sometimes means showing the ‘progressive.’ Privileging that rhetorical velocity, particularly when it is placed in opposition to violence and misogyny so prevalent in many hip-hop cultural contexts makes more than bourgeois-leftist sense. Of course, my own ideologies, beliefs, and values inform my uptake of both Pennycook and Sheffield here.

We witness history’s effects based upon our social interactions, personal temperaments, and institutional enmeshments. One cannot fully separate the art of hip-hop from the artifacts of culture, and the effects they have on us are complex. Pennycook and Sheffield recognize the need for the acceptance of diversity and difference among our languages, cultures, and I would add bodies. They also offer resistances to hegemonic power structures that damage hope and limit creativity. Sometimes the spaces created by hip-hop artists and performers are contentious places, and they are meant to be. Conflict, internal or otherwise, can be a productive space for creative solutions to real world problems.

Sheffield, Carrie Louise. “Native American Hip-Hop and Historical Trauma: Surviving and Healing Trauma on the ‘Rez.’” Studies in American Indian Literatures. 23:3 (2011):94-110. Print.