Redefined What is Meant to Be Divine: Prayer and Protest in Blue Scholars

This article examines the biographical narrations of spiritual redemption in Blue Scholars (2004), the debut album of the Seattle-based hip-hop duo the Blue Scholars. The article shows how the album inherits the soulfulness of the avant-garde community group isangmahal arts kollective, which itself emerged from a sprawling network of experimental Filipino American creative communities in the 1990s. As a nostalgic homage to these communities, Blue Scholars gives evidence of the mutuality between themes of spiritual redemption and leftist political agitation in Filipino American cultural politics. The article argues that a new Asian American culture of defiance (as seen in the Asian Pacific Islander American Spoken Word and Poetry Summit) is indebted to a tradition of Filipino American decolonial spiritual politics as documented in Blue Scholars.