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  • True Heads:Historicizing the Hip_Hop "Nation" in Context
  • R. Scott Heath (bio)

Hip_hop culture is intricately linked to any comprehensive understanding of race and national identity in the United States at the turn of the twentieth-first century. What was initially developed as a mode of marginal expression, conceived as a countermeasure to the material and social inequities of American postindustrialism, has, in the past several years, become perhaps the most prominent medium by which blackness is represented in the U.S. and by which blackness and Americanness are represented globally. And hip_hop, which might best be imagined as a way of reading and critiquing public culture, is itself troubled by the ways that it is read and recontextualized by its detractors and proponents alike. For this reason it is imperative that we explore the extent to which hip_hop discourse seems to typify American convention as much as it informs it, particularly in light of recent international events that have reignited some tough discussions about what Americanness means. This project elucidates the challenges of historiography as it concerns a cultural practice that has been racially marked as black and that has been understood as a site of militant, class-based struggle and resistance.

Hip_hop and conversations around hip_hop almost necessarily compromise the boundaries of private and public expressive spheres, challenging us as critical thinkers to account for the consistent evidence of alternative intellectualisms and revised epistemologies. The work facilitates a dialogue through which parameters of nationalist community and cultural authenticity are defined and readjusted constantly. In addressing hip_hop as a functional cultural text, I am giving some fresh attention to its transition from a system of alterity to an internationally operative organizing mechanism, and I am pushing my instinct that the idea of this transition will become increasingly less compelling unless we begin to investigate more intently the details of this process and its ramifications for the ways that African Americanness is constructed and appropriated. Considering some new theoretical possibilities around a holistically situated hip_hop, this project brings together some apparently disparate cultural media and found objects toward a useful critical effort.

Brooklyn in a Box: Institutionalizing Hip_Hop Culture

In December 2000, I visited the Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes, and Rage exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA). 1 The groundbreaking project, which had begun its [End Page 846] tour at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, was comprised of more than 400 artifacts—from original party flyers to vintage shell-toe Adidas sneakers—juxtaposed in such a manner as to document what was referred to in this case as the thirty-year history of hip_hop culture. The items were arranged thematically with the intention of situating hip_hop within a continuum of African American popular expression. This headlining display included interactive centers (mock turntables and the like) that extended into the lobby of the BMA, creating a noisy spectacle in contrast to the typically sober atmosphere of the building. And, as if to emphasize hip_hop's commercial resonance and consumerist propensities, the museum shop was fully stocked with t-shirts, stickers, CDs, and other wares to accommodate a traffic of patrons that was certainly larger, more ethnically diverse, and more bustling than usual. I dodged elbows and tight surveillance and somewhere among the smudged glass cases, amid the chicken scratch of Tupac Shakur's composition book and Queen Latifah's diary, I located a space of inquiry about who had organized this information and about who were its intended readers. Cultural critic Tony Bennett discusses the function of museums in the formation of the bourgeois public sphere and in the enlistment of art and culture for the cause of social reform through the governance of knowledge acquisition. In a statement about alterity and the shaping of cultural identity, he observes that

The construction of the public sphere as one of polite and rational discourse [. . .] required the construction of a negatively coded other sphere—that comprised the places of popular assembly—from which it might be differentiated. If the institutions of the public sphere comprised places in which its members could assemble and, indeed, recognize themselves as belonging to the same public, this was only because...

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