Song & Subversion: Hip Hop, Black Lives and America at a Crossroads
When: Fri 30 October 2015 18:30-20:30
Where: Logan Hall (IOE)
Decolonising Our Minds are delighted to welcome renowned Professors Monica Miller and James Peterson from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, United States, for an event which will explore the fundamental cultural, social and political moment we are currently observing in the US.
Monica R. Miller is Assistant Professor of Religion & Africana Studies and Director of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University. Professor Miller is the author of "Religion and Hip Hop" (Routledge) and co-editor of "The Hip Hop and Religion Reader" (Routledge) and "Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain in the US" (Bloomsbury). Her work has been featured in a host of regional and national media venues. She currently serves as a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies, contributing editor at Marginalia, and is a member of the "Culture on the Edge" international scholarly collaborative project.
Professor Miller's talk is titled "K(no)w Where to Go?: Hip Hop, Black Life, and White Li(v)es in a Post-Civil Rights Era", and is motivated by W.E.B. DuBois's poignant question of "How does it feel to be a problem?" Taking the two-ness of, on the one hand, the ostensible permanence of American racism under-girding the notion of blacks as a permanently-fixed American underclass, and, on the other hand, the affirmatively rebellious post-civil rights "faith in the flow" evinced by continued BLM and Hip Hop efforts to forge mobility within the durability of black fixity, this talk considers the manner in which both BLM and Hip Hop culture recast “home” and strategies and tactics of social protest, to “remake black history” and re-situate the "who" at the centre of the "what”. Such ingenuity involves mapping new approaches, (re)presenting those historically ignored and suppressed, and remaking new spaces and plans so that those under continued threat “know where to go,” while remaining attentive to the many marginalised social actors who had, and continue to have, “nowhere to go.” Taken together, and with BLM and Hip Hop in mind, this talk considers the "what" in the query: “What kind of moment is this?”
James Braxton Peterson is the Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. Professor Peterson is the author of "The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture" (Palgrave Macmillan), and he hosts “The Remix” on Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate, WHYY. “The Remix” is a podcast that engages issues at the intersection of race, politics, and popular culture. Professor Peterson has written for The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Reuters, and The Daily Beast. He is currently an MSNBC contributor and has appeared on Al-Jazeera, CNN, HLN, and other networks as an expert on race, politics, and popular culture.
Professor Peterson's talk is titled “A Song, A Slogan, and A Service: Dispatches from the Movement for Black Lives”, providing several updates and insights on the Black Lives Matter movement: the adoption of Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” as an anthem for the movement; the challenge to pursue equal justice for women and members of the LGBTQ community, looking at "#SayHerName" as a movement within the movement that’s challenging the blind spots of contemporary Black social justice efforts; and finally, recounting to the audience his experiences in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where Professor Peterson recently attended service."