''Moments of Clarity''and Sounds of Resistance: Veiled Literary

“Moments of Clarity” and Sounds of Resistance: Veiled Literary Subversions and De-Colonial Dialectics in the Art of Jay Z and Kanye West A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Language and Comparative Literatures of the College of Arts and Sciences by Sha’Dawn D. Battle B.A., Central State University 2007 M.A., Wright State University 2009 November 2016 Committee Chair: Sharon Dean, PH.D. Abstract “‘Moments of Clarity’ and Sounds of Resistance: Veiled Literary Subversions and De- Colonial Dialectics in the Art of Jay Z and Kanye West” employs rap music as an object of inquiry into the question of contemporary manifestations of anti-Black oppression, demonstrating the ways in which the art of rappers Jay Z and Kanye West in particular, covertly elucidates the conditions and discursive and ideological mechanisms of power that make possible the exploitation, repression, and destruction of Black bodies in America. In the first two chapters, I argue that this illuminative potential is, in part, what attributes to the political utility of mainstream rap music. My first goal is therefore to make apparent mainstream rap music’s rightful place in Black liberation politics given its ability to unveil the functionality of age-old Eurocentric, white supremacist paradigms, such as rendering Black bodies incorrigibly animal, denying Black bodies access to subjectivity, or negating Black ontology. These ideologies give rise to exclusionary monolithic constructions of what it means to be human, pathological constructions of “blackness,” Black masculinity especially, and subsequently, the arbitrary conferral of power (to both state apparatuses and individuals racially coded as “superior”), which manifests in the form of systematic and institutional racism, and ultimately, Black male disembodiment. The final chapter of the dissertation underscores how the subversive capacity of the art form also owes to its sites of covert contestation of oppressive forces. Through Kanye West’s art, my explications reveal the clandestine presence of colonial mimicry and ii hybridity. These de-colonial strategies undermine discursive constructions of “blackness” that emanate from what I term the "white supremacist-colonial monster." In short, visual and lyrical narratives of Jay Z’s and Kanye West’s art covertly illuminate how ideology justifies hegemony, given that epistemological inaccuracies where Black culture and male bodies are concerned, “rationalize” the relations of domination in America, with respect to (but not limited to) the white-Black racial divide. Yet, as I interpret Kanye West as demonstrating in his 2013 track (and accompanying video) “Black Skinhead,” one method of subverting white supremacist-colonialist “monsters” that produce misrepresentations of Black identity is by satirically assuming the identity of the white oppressor and consequently carving out a third, hybrid space of identity in the process. Doing so exposes the ambivalence of their discourses and de-authenticates their power, thereby enabling the reclamation of an internally, holistically defined Black male identity. Literary texts—Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie, and Toni Morrison's Beloved—serve as additional lenses through which to examine the subversive potential latent in the artistry of both Jay Z and West. Key words: De-Colonial Theory, Jay Z, Kanye West, Black Male Disembodiment, Colonial Mimicry, Hybridity iii iv To “8335” and my late father, “Chip” v Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..ii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………..vi Dissertation Introduction………………………………………………………………..1 Ch 1: A “Moment of Clarity”: A Genealogical Interpretation of Plato’s Allegory, Through the Lens of Jay Z as Artist and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man……………63 Ch 2: “Blues” for the Black Body: Fanonian “Non-Alterity” and the Discursive Politics of Black Male Disembodiment, as Seen Through the Lenses of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie and Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead”………...131 Ch 3: Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead”: Reclaiming the “[Black] Agents Buried Beneath” Discursive Constructions Through Colonial Mimicry and Hybridity…219 Introduction Appendix A……………..………………………………………………293 Ch 3 Appendix A………………………………………………………………………305 Ch 3 Appendix B………………………………………………………………………328 vi “Moments of Clarity”1 and Sounds of Resistance: Veiled Literary Subversion and De-Colonial Dialectics in the Art of Jay Z and Kanye West Dissertation Introduction: “[I]t is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others – for their use and to our detriment.” Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 1984 I. Contesting Rap Music’s Bad Rep’: Layered Meanings and Sounds of Resistance Rap music is the lens through which I make sense of the world and my place in it as a Black female body navigating a white superstructure. Rap music, at its elemental level, is poetic verse over a rhythmic beat, and is an evolved tenant of hip hop’s five pillars.2 Born in the late 1970s in the South Bronx of New York, and a byproduct of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, hip hop is a culture that originated as a response to centuries of white hegemony in America, systemic racism, and structural violence3 experienced in poor, American, mostly Northern, urban cities by youth of color. Though many use the terms “hip hop” and “rap” interchangeably, others insist upon recognizing their distinction, insofar as the latter, they argue, is devoid of social and political consciousness. For instance, in The Rap Anthology (2010), editors, Adam Bradley and Andre DuBois argue that hip hop is “a more politically and socially conscious approach”; they reduce rap to “a gritty style” of gangsta “commercialized music” (xxix). Yet, they confirm that hip hop is an “umbrella term to describe a multi- faceted culture of which rap is but a part” (xxix). This dissertation, however, will demonstrate the fallacy of the view that rap is a politically impoverished discourse. Rap has served as the integral discursive space of hip-hop culture, adopting, in my opinion, many of the political imperatives that defined 1 the culture at its inception. If hip hop has achieved commercial dominance in popular culture, this success is largely attributed to the commercial viability of rap music.4 But the rapper, the MC as he was formally titled, was and is still the nucleus of the genre; he is what allowed rap to become a counter-discourse. In Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain in the US, the editors, Monica Miller, Anthony B Pinn, and Bernard “Bun B” Freeman elaborate on the significance of the MC: The MC is the heart of hip hop, the centripetal force that draws the varied elements of the culture to its rhetorical center. The MC’s story is hip hop’s story, and vice versa, since they came up together in the same hoods and either floundered or prospered under the same racial and economic forces. The MC carried the symbolic weight of hip hop in his throat from the start as the art form rode the golden throats and silver tongues of its greatest artists. (xvii-xviii) The MC’s import, as they continue to explain, is such that he (and in a few instances “she”) is also a byproduct of “Ronald Reagan’s voodoo economics” (that impoverished communities of color), the rise of unemployment rates in which Black males suffered the most, and an “abysmal” public school system. Thus, the MC, they argue, “is the lightning rod and arbiter of hip hop’s meaning . .” (xviii). Just as hip hop has assumed a burgeoning presence in the academy as a formalized discipline (the 1990s marked the advent of the interdisciplinary “Hip Hop Studies”5), so, too, has rap music, since the discourse is born out of the rapper’s throat. Nevertheless, rap music has been judged as an insufficient and ineffectual hermeneutic lens through which to arrive at meaning, truth, and knowledge about subjects on which scholars and theorists have ruminated for eons, such as why Black bodies are regarded as 2 abject and expendable by the said dominant race, or how the lived experiences of Black people in America are oftentimes encumbered by the psychological dynamics of Negrophobia. If one considers the socio-political and economic factors that precipitated the birth of hip hop, and by extension, rap music, if the Aristotelian postulation that art imitates life has any merit still, and if art is propagandistic, as W.E.B. DuBois said it should be in 1926,6 then it is not farfetched to deem this mode of expression socio- political commentary that oftentimes (yet admittedly not always) critiques the condition of Black life in America, even if on the surface, it espouses hedonistic and violent themes. If something more complex lurks beneath the shadows of rap music’s aesthetic expressions of violence and hedonism, then any hidden messages can only be decoded or unearthed if one abandons the notion of the fixity and singularity of language and meaning. The discipline of poststructuralism and semantics has theorized about the layered and unstable nature of language. For example, in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), Jacques Derrida has insisted that we observe the “freeplay,” or the continuous substitution between the signified and the signifier. Derrida argues that there is not always a stable relationship between the two. Conceding his theory, materialistic lyrics, such as the famous 1999 anthem, “Big pimpin’ spending cheese” (“Big Pimpin’”), from the Marcy Projects hailing rapper Jay Z— notwithstanding the visual performance of materialistic indulgence depicted in the video—refuse any reductive interpretive analysis. Perhaps, conferring on the language of rap discourse the same mutability that Derrida suggests would require that we avail ourselves of the layered meanings in rap 3 music.

Load more