After the high drama of the US election and a week off from AIAC Talk to collect ourselves, we're back to discuss hip hop and its relationship to politics.
Today's episode looks at the relationship of hip hop to politics, both on the continent and in the US. Taking as a point of departure Su'ad Abdul Khabeer's article on the site, The Hip Hop President? in which she writes:
"First, while I don’t think hip hop support for Trump is particularly astute, I also do not find it so surprising. If getting paid is the aim, then capitalism is the game, and that by its nature will lead to all kinds of relationships to power. Second, it is a call for interrogating what really are our visions of liberation. If, as the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, capitalism requires inequality, racism enshrines it, then can we really financially plan our way to freedom? Can we all be billionaires? And should that even be our goal? Simply put, can we get rid of racism if we don’t also get rid of capitalism?"
Su’ad is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, a scholar-artist-activist whose work examines the intersections of race, religion and popular culture. She is the author of “Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States” and has a deep commitment to public scholarship. She is also Senior Editor at Sapelo Square, an online forum that celebrates and analyzes the experiences of Black Muslims in the United States, creating a space in which to reflect on the vitality of Black Muslim Life and the long tradition of Islam in Black America.
Su'ad is joined by Tseliso Monaheng and Warrick Moses. Tseliso, a longtime contributor to the site whose writing has appeared in print and online in Chimurenga, The Guardian, The Fader, Red Bull and Rolling Stone as well as New Frame, joins us from South Africa to give some perspective from the continent.
Warrick Moses received his PhD in African and African American Studies with a secondary field in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University in May 2019. His dissertation project, "In the Mix," explores expressions of “mixed race” or “coloured” socio-political, linguistic, and cultural identity in Cape Town-based hip hop music. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the CIPHER Hip Hop Interpellation project at University College Cork, Ireland.
