2PAC WAS A TRUE PAKI: A BRIEF SURVEY OF SOUTH ASIAN PARTICIPATION IN HIP HOP Sabina Raja TC 660H Plan II Honors Program The University of Texas at Austin May 15, 2019 __________________________________________ Snehal Shingavi, Ph.D Department of English, College of Liberal Arts Supervising Professor __________________________________________ Martin Kevorkian, Ph.D Department of English, College of Liberal Arts Second Reader Acknowledgements I would like to begin by thanking Dr. Snehal Shingavi and Dr. Martin Kevorkian for their guidance, expertise, support, and patience throughout the process of writing this thesis. Their supervision and critiques made me a better writer and helped me craft a robust thesis. Without them, I could not have written a project that I am now incredibly proud of. In addition, I am grateful to the Plan II Honors program for giving me the opportunity to pursue this project in fulfillment of my undergraduate degree. I am also incredibly indebted to my friends and family for their never-ending support, because I would not have been able to complete this thesis without their encouragement. They acted as my sounding boards and voices as reason, and they were my pillars of strength throughout this whole process. I would like to specifically thank my parents, Mona and Waheed Raja, for being my rocks and biggest cheerleaders. And I would also like to thank my dear friends Sarah Ahmed, Haven Koehler, Khalid Ahmad, Karim Zahran, Rachana Jadala, Sonia Uthuph, and Maryam Khamisha for giving me patience, encouragement, and love as I worked on this project this past year. I would like to thank Vijay Prashad, Nitasha Sharma, and Sunaina Maira whose works acted as guiding lights as I researched and wrote my thesis. Their contributions to the academic literature about South Asian Americans served as the basis for the work I did, and I am incredibly grateful. They are also inspirations for me, because they serve as examples for scholars that are creating work that is meant to benefit their communities and build a more nuanced and dynamic image of the South Asian American experience. And most importantly, all praise due to the Most High. Alhamdulillah. 2 Table of Contents Page Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 4 Introduction 5 Chapter 1: The Desi Hip Hoppers’ Roots 14 Chapter 2: Time to Get School’d on Hip Hop 24 Chapter 3: Law Enforcement in Flow 37 Chapter 4: The Ideal Man 49 Chapter 5: Cash Rules Everything Around Desis 56 Chapter 6: Do It For the Culture 61 Conclusions 70 Bibliography 72 3 Abstract Author: Sabina Raja Title: 2pac was a true Paki: A brief survey of South Asian participation in Hip Hop Supervising Professors: Snehal Shingavi, Ph.D & Martin Kevorkian, Ph.D There is a proliferation of Desi Hip-Hoppers who are part of a new wave of South Asian Americans that are creating Hip-Hop music that is deeply influenced by their hybrid identity. My research question asks why these South Asian Americans are taking to Hip-Hop as an expressive medium. In the wake of the politicization of South Asian ethnic identity in post-9/11 America, how do South Asians find themselves within the shifting racial landscape of the US? Beginning with exclusionary immigration laws passed at the turn of the 20th century to surveillance policies enacted in 2001, South Asians’ racial and sociocultural identity has largely been constructed by American policies. Desi hip hoppers have been cast to the margins of society, so they take to Hip-Hop, a medium created to express feelings of exclusion. Through the process of social positioning, South Asian Americans craft representations of self in their participation in Hip Hop that reflect their identity. And in doing so, they command cultural citizenship to have the right of inclusion despite their difference. In this project, I will be examining their lyrics to delve into issues that they are grappling within their songs. From identity to global politics, South Asian hip hoppers are creating work that is dynamic and multifaceted; these raps are stories for these artists. I will tease apart the references, analogies, and prose of these raps in order to formulate how South Asians have constructed their own unique American identity in the United States and used culture as a site for representation. 4 Introduction We at war We at war with terrorism, racism But most of all we at war with ourselves - Jesus Walks by Kanye West South Asian and American. These identity markers felt at odds with each other when I was growing up. I did not know how to negotiate my Americanness that taught me the values of individualism and freedom with my South Asianness which taught me the importance of community and colored so many aspects of my life. It was especially complicated for me after 9/11 when my Muslim identity also fell under attack. I grew up quite confused but affirmed in the fact that I would be able to be both of these things despite the fact that I felt in the margins of American society and just not South Asian enough. When I entered college, I was excited to learn more about my people. As I browsed the course catalogue my freshman year, I only saw classes about the histories of India. As a Pakistani American, I did not feel like that was my history or experience to claim. While I was contending with my identity my freshman year, Kanye West’s College Dropout played in the backdrop every day. There was something so visceral that resonated with me as Kanye reflected on higher education, religion, identity, and family. The angst Kanye expressed about feeling like an outcast echoed the feelings I was experiencing. Feeling limited by circumstance and pressured to follow a path that was expected of me, Kanye’s debut album spoke to the things I was grappling during my first year in college. 5 Fast forward to 2016, I had dropped out of college for the year, and Donald Trump was campaigning for President of the United States on a platform that advocated for a “Muslim Ban”. The xenophobia and bigotry he espoused made me, and so many around me, feel like we were on shaky ground in this country. Come October, just one month before the presidential election, a Hip Hop duo that went by the name Swet Shop Boys dropped their debut album Cashmere. Riz MC and Heems, the duo behind this album, were South Asian. The album was politically charged and centered around the difficulties of being South Asian and Muslim in this country and more globally. When I first heard the album, I was dumbstruck. I had never interacted with media that spoke so closely of my experiences. When it came time to decide my thesis topic, I knew I wanted to write about South Asian Americans as we are not a very thoroughly studied demographic in academia. I had also wanted to write about the power of narratives and use my academic experience as a sociology student to drive my analysis. Drawing from my experience, I found that there was something striking about the fact that a young Black boy’s album about the pressures of life in the Southside of Chicago resonated with a South Asian girl from Houston. It was even more powerful that I was not the only South Asian that seemed to relate to this album and genre of music. I found that the resonances of Hip Hop had come full circle to the point that I was listening to South Asian Americans rapping about their experiences. The more research I did, I saw a clear thread between South Asians and the power of Hip Hop as an 6 expressive medium. This thesis is an exploration of that relationship and a foray into why Hip Hop? Historical Context The United States enacted a series of exclusionary immigration policies that specifically targeted South Asians beginning in 1917 and extended into the 1960s1. After the enactment of the Hart–Celler Act in 1965 which granted entrance to South Asians without any restrictions on the basis of occupation or country of origin2. The 1980s marked a large wave of migration of South Asians into America. The large majority of South Asian American youth are children of those immigrants that made the journey in the eighties. The community, despite being a burgeoning group, only account for 1% of the population in the United States, residing in mostly coastal urban cities. 9/11 marked a drastic shift for South Asians and their place in the United States. Surveillance policies were enacted following the attacks in the name of national security that codified markers of Muslimness as threats. This cast South Asians from their outsider status to being perceived as a threat to the integrity of the American fabric3. Hip Hop was born out of the Bronx in the 1970s, which was an incredibly tumultuous time in the burrough. Marked by high rates of unemployment, poverty, 1 Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 2 Timothy J. Hatton, "United States Immigration Policy: The 1965 Act and Its Consequences," The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 117, no. 2 (2014): , doi:10.1111/sjoe.12094. 3 Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 7 and gang violence, the Bronx was labeled as an urban wasteland. In 1973, a young immigrant boy that would come to be known as DJ Kool Herc hosted a back to school jam party that marked the beginning of Hip Hop, a cultural movement that would not only captivate young Black and Latino youth but the whole nation.