WRITING IN HIP HOP

Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions is another attempt, after COLD, to “write in Hip Hop.” Because, at the time it was composed, I was a doctoral student, submitting it as a dissertation for a Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University – a former plantation on which enslaved people were held – Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions, I surmise, consequently stands as evidence of the policed body, the voice that comes from the body, resisting arrest and surveillance, making itself known as that upon which law is dependent. Its evaluation and adjudication in a “scholarly” space, by an academic institution, can be viewed as “a pushing forward” because of the tension created by its thesis and execution. If this performance of scholarship (and others like it) is indeed interpreted as deficient, inferior to “proper” or “properly academic” performances, its evaluation and rejection – its misunderstanding (a miss because of its standing…under) – can be understood as confirmation of the thesis. Its acceptance doesn’t exactly disprove the argument; however, it can be interpreted – because of the necessary pushing back that occurs in the evaluative process – as pushing through, forward, perhaps.

I go underground to attempt to further articulate this point. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten guide my thinking into the depths, below the surface. They offer perspectives of how one might engage the university and fugitivity. They write, in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, “the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings” (Harney 26). They write that eventually “[s]he disappears into the underground…into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong” (26).

My project, an archive and album presented to a graduate school, housed on a semi-converted plantation, highlights this tension, the necessary pushing back to push forward. It is Black study, the work of fugitive planning. It is work for and against the university (for its ideals and academic mission; against its refusals to acknowledge its pasts spilling into its presents), for and against disciplines, for and against verification and validation. The object of Owning My Masters is the aim of Owning My Masters. ¹⁵ The work is underground. This introduction is a bad document identifying the fugitive as a citizen.

Another guide through this underground creative space is Hortense Spillers. She offers:

“Certain idols of narrative have lost their explanatory power for American culture in general and for African American culture, in particular, if its contemporary music tells us anything, so that the key question for the black creative intellectual now is: How does one grasp her membership in, or relatedness to, a culture that defines itself by the very logics of the historical?” (92)

Spillers poses this query in a 1994 essay—a look back at Harold Cruse’s 1967 work, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From its Origin to its Present.¹⁶ She situates his book’s import on the moment in which her essay, subtitled “a post-date,”¹⁷ is written.

She asks, in other words, “What is the work of the black creative intellectual, for all we know now?”

Her answer to her own question is that “the black creative intellectual must get busy where he/she is. There is no other work, if he/she has defined an essential aspect of his/her personhood as the commitment to reading, writing, and teaching” (92 – 93).

She goes on to encourage the Black creative intellectual to seize the “intellectual object of work in language” by embracing “the black musician and his music as the most desirable model/object” (93).

She explains:

“While African American music, across long centuries, offers the single form of cultural production that the life-world can “read” through thick and thin, and while so consistent a genius glimmers through the music that it seems ordained by divine authority its very self, the intellectual rightly grasps the figure of the musician for the wrong reasons: not once do we get the impression that the musician performer promotes his own ego over the music, or that he prefers it to the requirements, conventions, and history of practices that converge on the music: if that were not so, then little in this arena of activity would exhibit the staying power that our arts of performance have shown over the long haul. In other words, though ego-consciousness is necessary, it is the performance that counts here, apparently, as we know black musicians and remember them by the instruments of performance, and performance marks exactly the standard of work and evaluation that has not changed…” (93 – 94).

Spillers calls for “performative excellence,” and states, “this is the page of music from which the black creative intellectual must learn to read” (94). From there she (parenthetically) conjures the journey of Solomon Northup, referencing a story in his narrative from the 1850s in which bonded persons were made to dance for their masters. This historical connection is salient to me primarily because she is providing the foundations on which she bases her appeal to Black creative intellectuals to model their work on the Black musician, “music in black culture achieved its superior degree of development, in part, because its ancestral forces were occasioned, allowed. The culture’s relationship to language is the radically different story too familiar to repeat” (94). Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions is a product of Spillers’ challenge in her reflections on Cruse. This project, as an answer, is not much different than hers; this is hip hop. What Spillers calls for loops through Black creative intellectual life infinitely. As bonded persons danced for their masters, the Black creative intellectual’s performance is perpetual. The aim of Owning My Masters is the object of Owning My Masters.

Also invited into this cipher are Gregory Ulmer and Cathy Park Hong. I want to practice what Ulmer calls “the representation of the object of study in a critical text” (Ulmer 83). Hong reminds us to consider the history of the avant-garde movements, which she states, “is to encounter a racist tradition” (Hong, Web.). Ulmer’s “Object of Post-Criticism” speaks of a transformation in criticism in the way that “literature and the arts were transformed” (83). As I journey with Ulmer, Hong reminds us that what we’re moving toward “has been an overwhelmingly white enterprise, ignoring major swaths of innovators – namely poets from past African American literary movements – whose prodigious writings have vitalized the margins, challenged institutions, and introduced radical languages and forms that avant-gardists have usurped without proper acknowledgment.”  

And so, I beckon to the center Ralph Ellison. He’s speaking what Alexander Weheliye hears as “Sonic Afro Modernity.” Weheliye brings Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and W.E.B. DuBois, among others, with him to ask, “what happens once the black voice becomes disembodied, severed from its source, (re)contextualized, and (re)embodied and appropriated, or even before this point?” (Weheliye 37)

This is one question to which these words, those rhymes, this project responds. And to respond we turn back to Ulmer—the music, the sounds, the words and rhymes, the project, being “the compositional pair collage/montage” he borrows from Derrida (83). Specifically, “the transfer of materials from one context to another and … the “dissemination” of these borrowings through the new setting” (84). Thus, we will “shift away from commentary and explanation, which rely on concepts, to work instead by means of examples…. approaching the object of study at the level of the examples it uses” (90).  

“It’s not a matter of simply rapping.
I really happen to have a strategy being enacted.
If you know, you know I ain’t afraid of spitting
what I know is true ‘cause I’m south of the Mason-Dixon.
If I know the truth it’s my duty to make revisions;
showing my peoples’ beauty and skewing what They envision.
I make my living off the things that I think.
Therefore, I am.
I’ll give that a minute to sink
in.”
—“Dissertation [Part I: The Introduction]”

¹⁵ This sentence and the language that precedes it are direct references to/borrowings from Jared Sexton’s essay in Lateral 1 (2012), “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts,” in which he writes about “pushing back [being] really a pushing forward,” and, “The object of black studies is the aim of black studies.

¹⁶ New York Review of Books, 1967.

¹⁷ Spillers, Hortense J. “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date.” boundary 2, Vol. 21, No. 3 [Autumn, 1994], pp. 65-116. Duke University Press.