Represent!: Hip-Hop and the Self-Aesthetic Relation

Abstract

Hip-hop culture has been consistently marginalized, to a significant extent vilified, in dominant cultural discourse. At the same time, it continues to increase its prodigious influence over youth culture, broadly speaking. This study claims that inflamed rhetoric about hip-hop culture is based on misinformation and shortsighted notions and therefore seeks to make inquiry into the culture in such a way as to oppose the mainstream conversation about hip-hop with more complete and authentic understandings. In so doing, it seeks to practice philosophy through the use of critical ethnography. This method is rooted in Paul Willis's Learning to Labor (1977), a critical ethnographic study that articulated philosophical ideas, albeit implicitly.

The study makes use of philosophy and critical ethnography in two ways. One, it uncovers the deep connections between philosophy and hip-hop culture, at least as philosophy is recast in Cornel West's project of "prophetic pragmatism." Two, it uses ethnography of local, so-called underground hip-hop artists in Chicago to address, more overtly than Willis, philosophical questions about the construction and maintenance of a self, specifically how the self is constructed and maintained through hip-hop aesthetics.

This philosophical and ethnographic examination of hip-hop culture has yielded important insights with regard identity formation, organic intellectualism, praxis theory, and spirituality and how these notions interact with hip-hop's particular aesthetic sensibilities. It is of interest to all theorists with an interest in identity, urban youth culture, and education.