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Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion Group at AAR

Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion Group at AAR

Last updated on: November 11, 2013 at 9:01 pm by Guest Contributor

Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion Group at AAR 2013-11-11T21:01:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Panels from the Hip Hop and Religion group of the American Academy of Religion that meets in Baltimore, Maryland November 23-26.

Theme: The Religion and Hip Hop Cipher: Ciphering the Critical Approaches

Christopher Driscoll, Rice University, Presiding

Saturday – 1:00 PM-3:30 PM

Convention Center-326

In hip hop, the cipher is a locale where artists of various backgrounds, commitments, and training come together in a linguistic battle of wit and passion, where “aporetic flow” erupts into competing norms, and yet, community. To “cipher” is to decipher the discursive power arrangements of a community and to “play” a linguistic game, embodying and speaking into existence a variety of impossible possibilities. Thinking of the panel as an academic cipher of various disciplinary examinations of the hip hop cipher (i.e. ‘playing’ with the two definitions of ‘cipher’), specific paper topics will include an engagement of Adorno and Fiasco, examination of the life and art of Walter Lobyn Hamilton, issues of gender and inclusion in ciphers, Deluze and the hierophic, and a process-focused analysis of hip hop’s aesthetic religion emerging from within the cipher.

Papers:

Jon Gill, Claremont Graduate University

The Freestyle MC Cypher as Propositional and Ritual Aesthetic Religious Shrine Organism (A.R.S)

The “miracle” of extemporaneously articulating one’s hip-hop discipline flawlessly in the cypher (1) astonishes co-participants and the audience while (2) indirectly communicating through experience the underlying quasi-religious “collective consciousness” spoken of by KRS 1, a common consciousness in which hip-hoppers experience unity through the objectives of the culture such as peace, knowledge, and having fun. Therefore, the cypher serves as a living and processural “shrine” that both practitioners and enthusiasts of the four elements of hip-hop “enter” and experience. I will base this analysis of the freestyle rap cypher as “shrine” on Brian Masumi’s idea of “activist philosophy,” or the idea that the event of a thing has no substance but fluidity, which interfaces with the mystery of the cypher’s perpetual spontaneous creation. Also, Whitehead’s definition of “adventure” as undetermined creative aim will be used to discuss the cypher’s quasi-religious status.

Courtney Bryant, Vanderbilt University

The Cost of Admission: The Politics of Gender and Inclusion in the Hip Hop Cipher

The Cipher — Competitive, aggressive, often times vulgar– has historically been deemed a space inappropriate for women. Still women leverage their sexual, spiritual and “masculine” capital to gain access to the constructive potential this sacred circle repre

sents. This essay considers the politics of gender, space and religion in the cipher and explores how the criteria for women’s participation compromises the art, the community and its participants.

Kamasi Hill, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

Sampling Broken Pieces: Historical Memory and Hip-Hop Aesthetic in the Vinyl Art of Walter Lobyn Hamilton

Walter Lobyn Hamilton from Indianapolis, Indiana is a former DJ turned visual artist who creates “popart” from broken vinyl shards. Hamilton’s work utilizes a hip-hop aesthetic – “sampling” vinyl records. However, Hamilton takes vinyl that is broken, shaped, and altered from its original state and re-imagines them on canvas in the form of a historical figure, musician, symbol or entertainer. Very rarely are the shards the same size and most of them are taken from records across genres thus resignifiying a vinyl sampling aesthetic from fluid sound to fluid visual representation. Hamilton’s work pays homage to the veracity of the vinyl record as a historical artifact. Cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal, artist Jay-Z, and scores of others have written and discussed how vinyl records were central to their formative years, not merely as the arbiter of music but a symbol of love, community, literacy, and creativity. Utilizing, the framework of race and representation in bell hooks Black Looks, my project will explore the connection between historical memory and aesthetics of hip-hop in the vinyl artwork of Walter Lobyn Hamilton. The project will locate Hamilton’s use of vinyl as a site for cultural and religious signification and representation, thus extending the notion cypher and its inclusion of visual artists and the products they produce.

Ilya Merlin, University of Western Ontario

The Cipher: “Its” Discursive Hierophany and Propensity for Capture

The link has been established, both by Emcees and scholars, between historical chains of material oppression and the iced out chains that presently adorn hip-hoppers. This year’s emphasis on the cipher demands examination of other chains. This presentation explores Jacques Lacan’s notions of signifying chains—metaphor and metonymy—vis-à-vis Gilles Deleuze’ idea of “creative lines of flight.” If, in becoming subjects, we are subjected to ready-made signifying chains (language) that necessarily subordinate our thought thus actions, the event of cipher holds promise for breaking free from the oppressive “objectivism” that such chains inevitably (re)present. The cipher is an organic human event wherein the signifying chains that keep us chained to “common sense” modalities are ruptured—liberating the orating and witnessing participants—if only fleetingly. We find discursive hierophany within the cipher, as it displaces “it,” and Lacan and Deleuze help us understand the ethical purport of keeping “it” fresh and real.

Joseph Winters, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Constructing Constellations: Adorno, Lupe Fiasco, and the Work of the Negative

It has become quite commonplace to associate Theodor Adorno with resentment toward popular culture and black cultural forms. This reductive association usually hinges upon his notorious critique of jazz. In this paper, I challenge this trend by identifying other dimensions of Adorno’s thought and practice that resonate with contemporary cultural expressions, particularly hip hop. I look specifically at his use of constellations, a term that refers to the assemblage of disparate ideas, images, and motifs, an assemblage defined by the dissonance, tensions, and playful relationships that exist among the gathered concepts. Because constellations attest to the fissures and breaks within our lifeworlds, they expose and thwart desires for stability, comfort, and assurance. I argue that Lupe Fiasco’s 2006 track, “American Terrorist,” performs a constellational style, placing concepts and images together in ways that unsettle conventional understandings of terror, history, and the relationship between the past and present.

Religion and the Social Sciences Section and Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion Group

Theme: The Meaning of Methods: Religion in Hip-Hop Meets the Social Sciences

Saturday – 4:00 PM-6:30 PM
Convention Center-327

Now over 40 years old, hip-hop culture has proven a noteworthy and robust terrain of critical analyses for some time. Today, texts such as R3’s Ebony Utley’s Rap And Religion: Understanding the Gangsta’s God (2012) and Monica R. Miller’s Religion and Hip-Hop (2012) and many others highlight hip-hop’s religious diversity, existential weight, social and cultural texture and thugged-out philosophical edges. Yet, within religious studies, few opportunities have been offered that allow for extended discussion of how various methodologies interact, overlap, compete—and work together to push studies in religion and hip hop forward. As such, this panel is made up of leading scholars working from fields such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies for the study of religion, theology, and hip-hop culture. The invited panelists will provide a rigorous account of the ways in which various methodological endeavors engage and unearth new insights regarding hip-hop material culture and religion.

Panelists:

Carol B. Duncan, Wilfrid Laurier University
John L. Jackson, University of Pennsylvania
Alton B. Pollard, Howard University
Margarita Simon Guillory, University of Rochester
Ralph Watkins, Columbia Theological Seminary

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