Welcome note

Greetings, everyone. This is a welcome post to a blog that I plan to maintain for at least the next six months on the work I'm doing with community-based hip-hop. Thanks to a brief work sabbatical and a research grant, I will be traveling starting next Friday, July 12, 2013, to Washington, DC; Seattle, Ithaca, NY, to visit the hip-hop archives at Cornell University; and to New York City in November to visit another set of archives at the Schomburg (the New York City public library's branch in Harlem) and to participate in the third Hip-Hop Education Think Tank. Pre-dating this work has been several months of interaction with teachers, professors, and hip-hop artists through NYU's Hip-Hop Education Center. I've been part of a committee tasked with coming up with a glossary of key terms that we see as defining both the culture of hip-hop and its educational component.

Let me introduce myself a bit further. My name is Himanee Gupta-Carlson. I am deeply interested in hip-hop culture and the impact that it's having on society, but I need to preface that I am from "outside" the hip-hop community. I am a professor of history, and my research interests focus on race and ethnic relationships, diaspora community formations, and new social justice movements, of which hip-hop is a part. I began teaching at the college level in 2001 while doing my doctorate in political science, and have taught at the University of Hawai'i (where I did my doctorate), Cornish College of the Arts, Tacoma Community College, and a variety of other institutions. I began my present position as assistant professor at SUNY Empire State College in April 2010, and the title of this blog, "Hip-Hop America: The Evolution of a Cultural Movement," also is the title of an online advanced undergraduate course I developed at Empire.

Being an outsider to hip-hop often means I tread cautiously as I enter the topic and the community. I often find myself feeling that I am privileged because I have been granted the right to listen. I stumble over language associated with hip-hop culture, and I try not to presume or create a presumption that I have some sort of special access or knowledge of the culture. At the same time, I have been researching hip-hop for at least five years, and have gained a certain level of familiarity with it. It is from that space of cautious comfort that I create this blog. I believe that it is laudable to plead ignorance if one is unfamiliar with a particular topic, or an aspect of it. However, I do not believe it is appropriate to remain in that space of ignorance. I continually strive to grow and learn.

My work on hip-hop began most formally with an individual artist grant that I received in 2009 from the City of Seattle's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs to begin pulling informal interviews and conversations that I had conducted with female b-girls (break dancers) in Seattle into a more formal document. From January through August 2010, I conducted fifteen formal interviews with women involved in hip-hop in the Seattle area. I also created a free public reading of my work that featured performances by seven of the women whom I interviewed. As I did this work, I also ended up relocating to upstate New York to take my current position. Moving to New York was exciting for me because it made New York City and the neighborhoods where hip-hop was born all the more accessible. At the same time, the move heightened in me a keen interest in trying to understand hip-hop as a multi-dimensional culture that gained its own unique identity in the different locations in which it moved. While there are some unifying aspects of hip-hop that allow those involved with it to connect across neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations, the local manifestations often are results (or perhaps catalysts) of the identity of the particular region where the art is being practiced.

Taking a job with Empire State College created a major upheaval in many aspects of my life and how I had previously articulated an identity to place and integrated with that place. The college is located in a small tourist oriented town. It has a population of approximately 40,000 and is over 90 percent white. The music of choice in the many bars and clubs that dot the downtown strip is Irish, folk, and a little bit of country. Hip-hop does not exist.

Or, so it seems, at first glance.

A conversation with Frank, an auto mechanic, opened my eyes to a different view of Saratoga.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.