SCHOOLED: Hiphop Composition at the Predominantly White University
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Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE August 2017 SCHOOLED: Hiphop Composition at the Predominantly White University Tessa Rose Brown Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Tessa Rose, "SCHOOLED: Hiphop Composition at the Predominantly White University" (2017). Dissertations - ALL. 764. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/764 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT This dissertation asks what hiphop is doing in predominantly white higher-educational contexts, specifically in composition classrooms. Using ethnographic, autoethnographic, and historical methods, it finds that hiphop’s work in composition classrooms at PWIs is contradictory. This mixed-methods investigation suggests that the contradictory relation of white fans, students, and institutions to hiphop is shaped on the one hand by white listeners’ increasing identification with the historical struggles of African Americans under capitalism, and on the other hand, by disidentification or abjectification of African Americans in an effort to “win” the zero-sum game of capitalism. This contradiction results in a paradoxical situation where white fans—and white institutions—love hiphop and yet harbor antiblack views about the Black communities and Black students who make hiphop possible. However, the findings also suggest that identifying this tension offers writing instructors an opportunity to be more explicit about working towards anti-racist goals in the hiphop composition classroom. The dissertation’s historical study, ethnographic and autoethnographic studies, and review of contemporary hiphop and composition scholarship suggest that teaching and practicing reflexivity are core solutions to the paradoxical rhetorical action of hiphop in predominantly white spaces. This entails teaching students to reflectively identify and write about their own positionalities as well as asking teachers and administrators to recognize and explicitly acknowledge their own positionalities. The first chapter introduces the problematic of hiphop’s significant presence in elite PWIs despite hiphop’s emergence as a revolutionary Black art form in 1970s New York and the contemporary mass closure of public educational institutions for Black and poor students in the United States. It argues that, given the widespread uptake of Black language and discourse practices by millennials and youth, all composition classes should teach Black language and discourse practices, including at PWIs. Chapter 2 positions critical reflexivity as the central methodological value of this mixed-methods research study, contextualizing the white female author’s relationship with hiphop and the development of her research within research and writing on whiteness in hiphop culture and hiphop pedagogy. Chapter 3, a historical study of the Open Admissions movement at the City University of New York, recontextualizes early hiphop culture within the creative production of Black and Puerto Rican youths’ artistic and educational movements of late 1960s and 1970s New York City, arguing for a reconsideration of the role that creative writing teachers of color and cultural rhetorics education broadly defined played both in the successes of Basic Writing under CUNY Open Admissions and the early history of hiphop. Chapter 4 offers hiphop as a critical intervention to the Writing About Writing movement, arguing that the movement’s prioritization of institutional writing practices over students’ extracurricular and power-saturated language practices constitutes linguistic innocence. A classroom study of 4 hiphop composition classrooms demonstrates the pervasive antiblackness of students’ attitudes about language and advocates a reflexive, literacy-focused hiphop composition pedagogy to teach students a socially conscious understanding of the major concepts of composition studies. Finally, chapter 5 considers hiphop composition in the context of writing program administration, including issues of labor, disciplinarity, and graduate student teaching, retention, and training. Using dialogue with and materials from Nana Adjei-Brenyah, who taught two of the classes studied in chapter 4, this chapter highlights the role hiphop can play in valuing the diverse language practices and writing expertises of graduate student composition instructors from non-normative identity groups. The dissertation closes with a call for composition instruction that recognizes how whiteness, Blackness, and power circulate through all students’ everyday language and composing practices. SCHOOLED: Hiphop Composition at the Predominantly White University By Tessa Brown B.A., Princeton University, 2008 M.F.A., University of Michigan, 2011 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of Philosophy in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, Syracuse University. Syracuse University August 2017 Copyright (c) Tessa Brown 2017 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to the Mellon Mays Foundation, which has been supporting me as a scholar since my undergraduate days, and whose generous support made the archival research in this dissertation possible. Thank you, too, to the many archivists who supported that work, including the archivists at the Radcliffe College Archives, Yelena Novitskaya and Naromie Lormil at Medgar Evers College Archives/Special Collections, Sydney Van Nort at City College of New York Archives and Special Collections, Louise Sherby at Hunter College Archives and Special Collections, Marianne LaBatto at Brooklyn College Library Archives and Special Collections, Dan Brenner at Queens College Department of Special Collections and Archives, Allen Thomas at Bronx Community College Archives and Special Collections, and Holly Smith at Spelman College’s Women’s Research and Resource Center. Dr. Patrick Berry: thank you for your support of this project, and of me, from day one, your insistence that I could be a researcher and a creative writer as long as I did both well, your incredible attention to detail, and your dedication to my success. Dr. Gwen Pough: thank you for your teaching on hiphop feminism, your pragmatism, your honesty, and your encouragement. Dr. Becky Howard: thank you for teaching me about research methods but also keeping me from losing the forest of my argument to the trees of the methods I used to make them. Dr. Steve Parks: thank you for encouraging this project from my first writing assignment in my first seminar at CCR and for your unwavering support for my path through the program. Dr. Marcelle Haddix, the Zen G, thank you for offering a vision of literacy education that puts student identity first, and for modelling what it means to be a centered academic. Dr. Erin Rand, thank you for your early, careful readership as my creative nonfiction classmate, which helped me see how my critiques of white femininity could be enriched by a queer reading. v The CCR faculty is small and each member helped me on my path, but special thanks go to Dr. Kevin Browne (now at the University of the West Indies—St. Augustine), for introducing me to the rhetorics of the African diaspora and for believing in me as a rhetorician; to Dr. Tony Scott, for your help on early versions of chapter 4; to Dr. Eileen Schell, for your mentorship and support on my journey towards becoming a feminist rhetorician and historian; and to Dr. Aja Martinez, for your example and your friendship. To the inimitable Dr. Minnie Bruce Pratt, thank you for challenging me to produce personal scholarly writing that is rooted in the material reality of the struggle, which is the material reality of poetry. Thank you to the scholars across the country who have welcomed me into the work of hiphop composition: Dr. E—that is, Dr. Elaine Richardson—for your community building and the incredible space that is the Hiphop Literacies Conference; Dr. Todd Craig and Dr. David Green for your encouragement and engagement; Dr. Adam Banks, for setting the bar, and high; and Alexis McGee, fellow traveler, hiphop head, compositionist on the come-up, and friend. Thank you to Dr. Macklin Smith, who taught my hiphop poetics graduate seminar at the University of Michigan, for your enthusiasm and mentorship and for helping me believe in hiphop in higher ed. My gratitude, too, to the hiphop composition instructors who shared their teaching with me, anonymously and named: Victor Del Hierro and Drs. Tamika Carey, Marcos Del Hierro, Faith Kurtyka, Shawanda Stewart, and Anita August. And to the many compositionists teaching hiphop across the country, who I’ve been lucky to meet, present with, and tweet with, thank you for your work and your collegiality. We out here! Hugest of thank yous to writer, teacher, and overall baller Nana Adjei-Brenyah. Your generosity and brilliance fill the pages of this dissertation, and I feel lucky to call you a collaborator and a friend. Many thanks to the undergraduate students I’ve taught, those whose vi words are and aren’t included in this dissertation: this project is a testament to you and my belief that you deserve the writing class you want, and that it should be bumpin. Thanks to the staff members who made sure my journey through my doctoral program actually happened: Kristen Krause,