Archives of the Ordinary

(In the spirit of cross-postings, I have also posted this piece to guptacarlsonshortstories@blogspot.com)

        I have had the opportunity to return this week to the Hip Hop Special Collection at Cornell University. After spending time at the archive last fall and experiencing the collection of materials on hip-hop stored in the Rare Manuscripts Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, I was much better prepared for what I might encounter on this visit. I am in Ithaca this week for a few days attending a conference, and am using free spaces in between the various conference offerings to spend time in the archives.

Knowing that I would have a little more luxury of time, I decided that I would request access to materials donated to Cornell by Charlie Ahearn.

What I have found in my first day with the two big boxes of materials that Ahearn donated is mind-boggling, puzzling in some ways, and very touching. Even though I have never met the man and until my first encounter with his materials in the Hip Hop Special Collection knew very little about him and his contributions to hip hop's history and evolution as a global culture, my experience with his materials makes me feel as if I would like to get to know him. I am intrigued by what he took the time to save and chose to donate to Cornell, and I am eager to find out more.

Who is Charlie Ahearn? Most people in hip hop circles know him as the director of Wild Style, a 1983 documentary style film that is regarded as one of the classic films of the early beginnings of hip hop. What I learned from a quick Google search after poring through a series of images, media articles, photographs, handwritten notes, and postcards is that he has been a longtime film director, freelance writer, and radio host. He was born in 1951 in Binghamton, New York, and moved to New York City in 1973 to attend a studio arts program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. With his twin brother John, he became involved with an artists group known as Colab -- or Collaborative Artists.

His interest in hip hop was seeded when he began filming kids in the Smith projects neighborhood where he lived in the late 1970s who were dancing in the streets. "There was a gym at the Smith projects and kids would come there and dance," Ahearn said in an interview with JayQuan, available at http://www.thafoundation.com/charliea.htm." I distinctly remember hearing the DJ cutting up James Brown , and the kids would drop to one leg , and stick the other leg out in synchronous fashion like a line of guys at once. To this honky from upstate New York it looked like tribal dancing , I had never seen anything like it , and I didn’t know what Breakdancing was at the time. But I did have my camera and I would tape this even though I didn’t know what it was. I was very excited by this." Adding to the mix were giant-sized murals that renowned graffiti artist Lee Quinones was making at the time.

Intrigue with the arts escalated into professional practice as Ahearn began creating films to show in the area projects, interviewing the artists themselves, and then in 1980 meeting Fred Braithwaite ("Fab Five Freddy") who told Ahearn he wanted to talk to him about making movies. From there, he was in the middle of hip hop and his work on "Wild Style" began.

Some of Ahearn's Wild Style contributions were part of the "Now Scream" exhibit that the Cornell Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection (of which the Hip Hop Special Collection is a part) organized in 2013. What I went through at the Hip Hop Special Collection today, however, differed from what I remembered viewing in that exhibit last fall. While I still have several more folders and another big box to go through, what I saw today offered a variety of different perspectives on what hip-hop meant in its beginning years. Ahearn, for instance, saved flyers for a kung-fu school and a range of images featuring martial arts performances, often in publications in Asian languages. He himself described kung-fu movies as "the common bond for '70s street culture as kids from all boros poured into the 42nd Street theaters" in a pitch for a "Wild Style prequel" that he included in the collection. The multi-racial and multi-lingual dimensions of these works interested me as they seemed to speak to the hybridity of forces that cohered into the artistic and cultural practices that are associated today with hip hop. With this poly-cultural focus also came a sense that preparation for war and performance of dance were interdependent. This aspect of Ahearn's collections resonated with understandings of the practice of martial arts that I had picked up in my studies of tai chi in the 1990s as being simultaneously about promoting personal health and preparing one's self for battle and self-defense should the need arise.

Also built into Ahearn's contributions to the archive was a sense through his journalistic writings of living conditions in the New York City boroughs where hip hop thrived. They weren't pretty. Even after the early hip hop artists (Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and DJ Kool Herc, among others) began promoting their messages of self-discipline, knowledge, unity, enjoyment, and peace, life was violent. Ahearn's articles document a shooting at a jam where Grandmaster Flash was spinning as well as violence in the South Bronx neighborhood where his brother John was making plaster casts of individuals for an upcoming gallery show. These "tell it like it is, not how you'd like to imagine it to be" slices of hip hop life are instructive as I continue to try and build my knowledge of a past in which I was alive but did not (could not?) live as those who created hip hop did.

These insights were underscored by a review of "Wild Style" in the collection that described the film as follows: “Shot in the sturdy, no-frills manner of a 1950s industrial documentary, Wild Style rises above the cartoon cooning of feel-good bullshit like Breakin’ (1984) and Beat Street (1984) and Rappin’ (1985). Ahearn mixes into the narrative performances from true schoolers like the Cold Crush Brothers and the Rock Steady Crew, and reveals the roots of hardcore hip hop." The reviewer goes on to note that Wild Style also "takes a political view of the Downtown art scene, celebrating its racial diversity but also exposing its ‘voyeuristic fascination with the other.’ "

I left the collection when it closed at 4:30. Reflecting on the experience later, I thought about what it meant to save and what it meant to discard. One could make an argument that library archives house nothing that is outside the realm of the ordinary. What Charlie Ahearn offered were boxes of pictures, images, newspaper clippings, typewritten pages of manuscripts, posters, flyers, brochures, and materials of a similar nature. They were pieces of his life, and because he became a documentarian of hip hop, they have become valuable to those of us who seek to explore hip hop more. Within this ordinary past emerged something quite extraordinary that is likely to persist for generations to come.

Giving it up

Source: http://www.sweetgreen.com/blog/tag/bread-for-the-city/

I moved to a smaller, predominantly rural community about four years ago after living in large, metropolitan areas for about thirty-one years. Where I live now is in a town of about 3,000 residents, which is minuscule in size compared with even the town I grew up in, a town that I've often described as representative of "small-town America."

I moved for a job, and was very happy to make the relocation. And, anyone who has been following my updates on Facebook and my postings to the various blogs I maintain would know that I am living a life that I am quite happy with. I spend my days writing, working with my husband to grow our own food, teaching, volunteering in the community in which I live in a number of ways, and running, swimming, cycling, doing yoga and getting eight hours of sleep. Life couldn't be better.

Yet, sometimes my life seems out of synch with the research agenda that fuels my passions: searching out suppressed histories, seeking alternative ways of understanding America, serving youth and adults in inner-city urban neighborhoods, being a part through teaching and activism of hip-hop's movement toward social justice. How do these interests jibe with an environment where more people listen to country-western music and drive pick-ups trucks than understand the layout of an urban bus system or subway map?

My husband urges me not to draw such hard and fast lines between the urban and rural, noting that raising one's food is an act of social justice and that opting to share it before selling it is a way of igniting thought outside of capitalist economic structures.

His view was reinforced today in the words of Bill Bennett, a farmer who is based in the far northern stretches of New York and was named the "Farmer of the Year" by the Northeast Organic Farmers Association of New York.

He opened his keynote address at the annual NOFA-NY conference today with a reference to Detroit and Flint. I don't have his exact words etched in my memory, but essentially he said that if one destroys farms, the nation would die. If one destroys cities, cities will rebound. Then, referring to Detroit and Flint, he noted that both of these cities, suffering mightily from the deindustrialization that has rocked the Rust Belt since the late 1970s, are undergoing a sense of rebirth through a reestablishment of smaller communities centered on urban agriculture. The farm essentially was helping to rebuild the city, after the farm had almost been destroyed by the push to industrialize earlier.

Bennett grew up in Indiana, like me. Unlike me, he grew up on a farm. He quipped that his mother hated farms and said she feared one of her children would grow up to become a farmer just to torment her. He fulfilled the prophecy by completing a bachelor's of fine arts degree and then declining a scholarship to a prestigious art school in order to fulfill his dream of farming. His wife cried. A lot, it appears, based on the personal story he told.

He was a good speaker, with a great sense of humor. But one point that he made particularly hit home. Your only wealth is what you have available to give away. This bit of wisdom seemed to capture a sense of abundance in an amazingly clear way.

How might it unite my research passions with my way of life? One way to approach this answer is to consider how hip-hop and farming connect.

The way I am coming to understand hip-hop is that it at its core is about connecting through sharing, essentially giving what you have to help others learn as you once did to create something new. The hip-hop artist is always innately a teacher, and a learner, one who participates in a cipher through sharing knowledge and receiving its benefits, too. Yesterday, at the NOFA-NY conference, I ran into two farmers -- Steve and John Otrembiak -- who are regular vendors at the Saratoga Farmers Market. We have struck up a friendship over the past few summers over karela -- the Indian name for the bitter melon vegetable that few people in their immediate customer base purchase. Because they grow bitter melon, they sell it, and because I am quite fond of bitter melon, I buy it from them. Over the years, they have shared seeds, starter plants, and any kind of advice they could give me about how to grow it successfully. My husband and I finally had some limited success over the past summer when one plant bore three or four fruits.

I encountered Steve at the conference in a workshop for beginning farmers. I was very surprised to see him in a beginner's workshop and introduced him during a break to one of the other workshop participants -- a dietitian from Long Island -- as one of my local farmer mentors. During that same workshop, I had asked the presenters what suggestions they had for building a community when one was a newcomer to a place where everyone else seemed to have long, deep roots and family members all in the immediate area.

Later, I ran into John and when he asked if we had started planning our garden, I told him about our plans to brood baby chicks for meat. I also mentioned that I was surprised to see Steve in a beginner's workshop. John's response was that even though they were seasoned farmers they could afford to learn more about the business sides of farming. He then asked me where we were going to brood our chicks, and when I mentioned our upstairs bathroom (where the heat and natural light are fairly good), his face crinkled with worry. "You know, they're going to kick up a lot of dirt and debris when they start learning to fly," he said. "Your house might get pretty dirty."

Later, I saw Steve. He told me he had heard we were going to raise baby chicks and reiterated his brother's concern. He suggested we keep them someplace where they could be warm and messy, so they would grow up fairly freely without turning our house into a dust bowl. He then mentioned that he had some large wash tubs and a heat lamp we could borrow. "You know where we're at," he said. "Just stay in touch."

I walked away from the conversation feeling floored both by the knowledge he had shared and the generosity he'd extended. Reflecting on the moment and comparing it with hip-hop, I could see the connection. In a sense, the conference had created a cipher based on the premise that your wealth resides in what you give up. Steve heard the call and offered a response. Like the party flyer from an urban block party that illustrates this post, giving what you have up is a way to create more wealth all around.

What It Means To Teach A Revolution

           

Jasiri X (from http://www.communityjournal.net/
rapper-jasiri-x-releases-video-inspired-by-police-brutality-report/

Jasiri X is a Philadelphia based rapper and educator. He often warms up audiences at the academic hip-hop conferences I attend with quick spurts of what he defines as "edu-tainment". He is not into "the college thing." He started, didn't do real well, and dropped out. But he educates all the time, and the vocabulary embedded in his raps makes it clear that he understands the language of academia quite well.

            He also understands politics, as this statement delivered at the Hip-Hop Education Center's Think Tank III aptly illustrates:

            "Hip-hop is a counter culture," he said. "As such, it's a direct response to white supremacy. When we bring it into the classroom, we cannot forget that."

            I hear iterations of this statement at numerous hip-hop education conferences and I appreciate its value. I feel like it's the reason why the songs by Seattle artists Rogue Pinay and El Dia, and other women who rapped about the intersections of race and immigration among Asian Americans moved me so much and made me feel that it was vital to bring them into my political science classes back when I was still teaching political science in the Seattle area. It seemed like the message brought together history, economic, politics, and society in a way that I could not get students to grasp through readings, lectures, discussions, free writes, quizzes, role plays, and all the other tactics I had tried. I also appreciated the fact that the music was fearless. It seemed to suggest that telling the truth could be done without leaving one with threats, guilt, or defensiveness. One didn't have to point fingers or blame or nag about the need to step outside a comfort zone and get involved. It was almost as if knowing the truth -- or what I would describe as the realities of the conditions of the time and place in which one lived -- would be enough to motivate one to make a change.

            And, so I wonder, can one bring a statement like hip-hop is a direct response to white supremacy into a classroom and get away with it?

            I suppose that's what we do anytime we talk about the history of slavery, the legacy of white privilege, working class struggles for justice, immigration history, and continued inequities in society. But I think we bury the statement in a lot of material and sort of wishfully hope that the students will wade through and hit a point of understanding and consciousness, instead of stating it directly and providing the evidence that supports the statement. It might be because we ourselves are afraid of the statement and what articulating it might do to our careers.

             I often think back to an interview I gave in March 2000 to KHON-TV in Honolulu after spending the night sleeping at the campus center in support of Hawaiian sovereignty and in protest of the Rice vs. Cayetano decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that severely disempowered Hawaiians in their quest for rights and a voice in the self-determination of their lands and their lives. I was a working journalist for a mainstream newspaper at the time so the action had decided consequences: My employer put a letter of sharp rebuke in my personnel file, and invoked a steep cut in my hours which resulted in a significant loss of salary. At the time, I wasn't sure I would survive the repercussions, or if the personnel letter would follow me. (Given my post-2000 resume, I am guessing it has not.) Over the years, I have wondered if this incident made me timid or if it made me wiser. It certainly made me more aware of economic power of corporations in the United States and probably the world. It also made me aware of the difficulties one faces if they go it alone.

            And, I guess that's what gets me to an interchange that has been bothering me for several days. At the Hip-Hop Education Center Think Tank, I was speaking at one point with a white male who started out by flattering me, saying how much he appreciated the work I was doing and the things that I had to say. The conversation went into some rather odd directions as he kept interrupting me for a pen, to write something down, to ask for two sandwiches when the conference organizers had explicitly asked us all to take just one, and then not letting me finish a sentence. I was trying to explain how there was a different answer outside of the capitalist structure and how one needs to look at the socio-cultural milieu in which one operates when one frames one's activism. He kept insisting that participation in the revolution was essential and that participation was making noise, protesting, marching. He interrupted me so many times that I finally said, "You know,  you need to stop interrupting me if you want to hear what I have to say." That statement stopped him short in his tracks. The rest of the lunch was more or less me finishing my thoughts and him staring at me with a stony silence.

            I felt bad later because I felt I had excluded him from the cipher. But I also felt bad because I felt as if what I was trying to say was being devalued because it was not within a frame of understanding that made sense in this individual's perspective.

            After that incident, I saw Jeff Chang. I decided to introduce myself. He was the keynote speaker in the morning, and I appreciated what he had to say. Reading over my notes, I feel several days later as if they address the question of "what it means to teach a revolution". I offer my notes here:

            "Not a rapper; that’s why I teach, why I write."

            He followed with a rather stodgy bit of verse, and then described it as "the oldest story ever told; underdogs achieving against all odds. Finding their voice. That’s the story of hip-hop."

            "Hip-hop has said a lot of things that need to be said.

            "It's also said a lot of things that didn’t need to be said – global commodity culture is displacing radical movements and helping to privatize the world.

            "But it’s still capable of a radical different consciousness.

            "It didn’t begin with a manifesto, as a political movement. It began with kids saying, 'We are here.'

            "That might be a reason why it looks chaotic to others.

            "Call and response is a mode of correction in a lot of ways.

            "Cultural change precedes political change, which is why we continue to believe hip-hop has the power to change the world.

            "We start with hip-hop education with gratitude and humility – homage to the pioneers, perhaps fewer than 300 people.

            "Hip-hop is a testament to power of youthful creativity to take over the world. Consequences of the movement resonate everywhere we travel in the world. It still unites people above the babble of confusion of languages, cultures, religions."

            "Hip-hop study in the academy is what’s recent. The early journalists and some of the early students – Marc Anthony Neal, Tricia Neal – are the academic pioneers in a lot of ways."

            "Scholarship precedes the journalists and us. It goes to the beginnings of the culture. When Herc et al were loading up their crates, they were building a body of knowledge. It didn’t become knowledge because we put it in the university. Hip-hop doesn’t need the academy, but the academy needs hip-hop because it’s an institution in dire need of transformation.

            "Putting it into classes/schools doesn’t automatically make it more relevant. Lot of people are interested in it because they see it as a magical solution … no. There’s issues of bad policy, bad funding, bad leadership.

            "Good hip-hop pedagogy is good pedagogy, period. It’s going to be tough. It’s going to transform teachers, students.

            "Much of the published research is probably years behind the point where most practitioners are currently working.

            "Advantages of gatherings like this – allows practitioners to reflect.

            "We can’t be shy about hip-hop’s contradictions. We have to teach the same criticality that we impose on ourselves. We have to instill in them that they have the power to bring about what’s not there yet but can come."

            "Hip-hop is not so much a movement as much as it is a living, breathing entity."

A public library archive

Using materials in the Schomburg's collection is a bit different from the Cornell archives. One needs a library card with the New York Public Library system, which I now am happily the proud owner of. One also needs, once again, to really know what they're looking for. One needs patience, and one needs to make a commitment to make return visits, and one needs to be prepared to fill out a lot of forms.

            I spent five hours at the library. Most of it was efficient and well-spent. When I arrived, I realized that I wasn't sure where the archives was stored, and it also was clear that the receptionist at the information desk was unsure, too. I also was not sure what kinds of materials would be allowed in the reading room so I asked at the coat check. The receptionist at that counter was not even aware that the Schomburg housed a hip-hop archives, but she told me I could take all of my things to the Rare Manuscripts Collection reading room. I had already taken off my coat so I left it with the coat check, and decided to take a guess that the Rare Manuscripts Collection space was the proper site for the collection.

            I guessed right. When I arrived, there was an archivist at the front desk. I had done a little bit of searching of the New York Public Library system a month earlier and had decided that it would be good to focus my time on a collection donated by Steven Hager, a journalist who had helped develop the film Beat Street and had written what seems like an awesome history of hip-hop. When I requested that particular collection, the archivist knew what I was talking about and handed me a series of forms. Upon learning that I did not have a library card, she sent me to the ground level to apply for one. That was a quick process and I was very happy to discover that the card would be good for three years. It would make several return trips to the Schomburg and the collection possible.

            I went back upstairs, filled out the paperwork, and got a drill down on the reading room policies. As at Cornell, notebooks and pens were not allowed. I could take photographs, but I had to fill out an additional form detailing what I wanted to photograph. I also could take notes on my laptop, but I could not let folders or documents within the folders touch my laptop. I also needed to keep the folders positioned in a way that they would be visible to the front desk.

            Hager's collection consisted of one box with two folders. Both were absolutely joyful gold mines of new information. The first thing that I discovered was a stack of index cards on which was handwritten what appeared to be more or less a book synopsis. The stack of 28 cards, three by five inches, read like a storyboard, which I immediately realized could be a valuable teaching tool for Digital Storytelling.

            I went through the folders quickly, taking a lot of notes and noting a lot of "notes to self." The bulk of the material was the proposal for the book. Its title changed several times, but it ultimately was published as Hip-Hop, with a subtitle that integrated the arts of break-dancing, graffiti, and rapping. It included a couple rough cuts for the proposal, the actual proposal, a sample chapter, and several articles written between 1981 and 1983 on the rise of hip-hop. I marveled at the ways that these stories, written in a particular time period, helped bring figures like Afrika Bambaataa to life. I also felt as if I gained a deeper on-the-ground understanding of what was occurring in the Bronx in terms of gang warfare, drugs, and white flight than I had had previously. It also seemed that the rhetorical questions that Hager presented in his pitch about the meaning and impact of hip-hop remain alive and well today.

            For instance, the formal book proposal stated: “How did hip hop originate? Who are its principle innovators? What has its impact been on American culture? These are some of the questions that will be answered by ‘Bronx Beat’. It is the story of teenagers in the ghetto who have struggled to create something meaningful, artistic and exciting with their lives.”

            I typed this quote into my computer and underneath it typed a "note to self": I think these three questions continue to inform research project on hip-hop, including mine. "Teenagers in the ghetto" … translates now to "young people everywhere who are struggling to create something meaningful, artistic, and exciting with their lives."

            Hager was born in 1951. He began worked as a reporter for The New York Daily News in about 1978, and was laid off around mid-1981. At that point, he embarked on a freelance career and became more deeply involved in chronicling hip-hop's early roots. I began working in journalism in 1985, about a year or so after Hager's book was released. Reading through his stories, I recognized many conventions of journalistic writing that seemed particular to the "new journalism" forms of narrative of that time. I wondered why I hadn't known about Hager earlier or why his stories hadn't been used in the classes and writing workshops I attended through the 1980s and 1990s. As the afternoon wore on, I also started to detect in Hager's writings a narrative voice that tends to turn me off. It's hard to define that voice: male, a bit arrogant and authoritative, tough, boisterous.

            But I do look forward to digging out and finding the book.

Archiving Hip-hop

A piece of a Buddy Esquire event flyer that
illuminates the presence of locality in hip-
hop. (From Cornell University's Hip-Hop
Special Collection.)  

A portion of the Keep-Mills Research Grant that I received last year for my ongoing research on hip-hop was aimed at funding visits to a couple of the archival collections of hip-hop artifacts that some libraries are beginning to amass. I made the first of these visits this afternoon, traveling to Cornell University to visit its Hip-Hop Special Collection, which is housed in the university library's rare manuscripts collection.

            My visit was brief, and it hopefully will become the first of many. But before I describe the collection and my experience with it, I should offer a few qualifiers.

            The first is that even though my scholarly work does delve into history, library archives are not familiar places for me. The second qualifier is that I was unsure as to what I might find at Cornell that might be useful to me.

            I had met the collection's co-curators at NYU's Hip-Hop Education Center Think Tank in November 2012. We chatted briefly, and they both invited me to use the aspects of the archive that they had digitized via Internet and to follow up with them via e-mail if and when I decided to make a personal visit. I was impressed with the open-ness of the archive to researchers outside Cornell and did include a number of photographs of the 1970s Bronx and early hip-hop party flyers from the archive as visual materials in my course Hip-Hop America. Several months later, I met one of the curators at the Words Beats & Life teach-in in Washington DC, and re-introduced myself. By this point, I had figured out that I could combine a day trip to Ithaca, NY, with travel to the Imagining America conference in nearby Syracuse and mentioned that I would like to visit the archive and do some research in early October. She asked me what I was researching, and when I mentioned that I was hoping to develop a book based on the interviews I had done with b-girls in Seattle, she responded that she didn't know if the archive would be of any help to me because almost all of its materials had come from New York City. She mentioned the names of various individuals who had donated materials to the archive, and I said that I thought the material would be helpful anyway because it would deepen my understanding of hip-hop's roots. She invited me to follow-up with an e-mail, which I did after spending some time browsing their collections page to get a sense of what the archive held.

            Which bring me back to my first qualifier. The collections page indicated that the archive held hundreds of photographs, party flyers, video footage, record albums, tape cassettes, and images of graffiti. This seemed impressive, and a little overwhelming. My mind was going back to a presentation about archives that Dr. Kathy Ferguson, one of my doctoral committee members, had given at the Western Political Science Association in 2011 about her experiences of using archives in researching her wonderful biography of Emma Goldman. The archive, Ferguson said, was not a library. It was not an organized, catalogued experience. It was, in many cases, a mass of boxes, handwritten notes, and seemingly haphazard collections of personal materials and historic documents organized not with the research scholar in mind. Ferguson's description had rung through somewhat when I had first visited the Cornell hip-hop archive collection online. While I was careful to choose materials from the digitized resources for my course that I knew to be significant, I wondered what looking at scads of similar types of materials might accomplish. How much more could I learn from a party flyer that was circulated in the Bronx in the early 1980s, for instance?  These questions gained more currency as I wondered whether digging in archives was more useful for those with specific research questions or for those seeking a more general base of understanding.

            Cornell's Rare Manuscripts Collection asks that requests for specific boxes of items be made online at least a day in advance of a visit. Deciding that I would treat the visit as a sort of exploratory field trip, I filed requests for a half-dozen or so boxes, figuring that even if I only got through a couple of the items, I would be able to get a feel for what the archive held and how I might better understand it on return visits.

              At the collection's reading room itself, researchers are given access to one box of materials at a time. The first box that I opened was a box of flyers from the personal collection of Buddy Esquire, an artist who became known as "the flyer king" for the more than 300 flyers he produced between 1979 and 1984. At the top of the box lay an extra-large t-shirt, promoting one of the hip-hop events that Buddy Esquire created flyers for. I unfolded the shirt, and my eyes lit up. Immediately, I could see that this artifact itself illustrated the roles of locality, identity, and language in hip-hop. The shirt, like all of the flyers in the box, featured a black-and-white design. What stood out for me was Buddy Esquire's tag near the bottom of the design, illustrating his signature and thus his identity in hip-hop; and the fact that he included bus and subway directions to the event's venue, highlighting the sense of locality. The shirt would only make sense to someone familiar with the boroughs of New York City, and particularly the Bronx. It could not -- like so much of hip-hop's commodity products today -- hold market appeal (beyond perhaps historic or nostalgic interest) beyond that area. The flyers repeated this pattern as I went through them, photographing them with my iPhone. They called out the names of local DJs, high schools, and particular dates (like back-to-school, New Year's Day, and Christmas). I saw a link between these flyers and the materials that members of 206 Zulu had put together in a small hip-hop museum at Washington Hall in Seattle. Quickly, I could see how sitting with the flyers, sorting through them, and reflecting on the places, spaces, people, and specific events that they brought up filled an understanding of hip-hop that wasn't only global.

            The second box that I opened was a collection of magazines, brochures, postcards, and other materials donated by Jorge Fabon, who also is known as Popmaster Fabel. I had heard Fabon speak at the Words Beats & Life teach-in, and had attended a screening of his film-in-progress on his experiences as a gang member turned b-boy in Spanish Harlem. As a result, I was particularly interested in his collection.

            The first piece that I found in his box was, for me, a gem. It was not from Spanish Harlem but Seattle.

           "This is priceless!" I wrote in my notes. It was a Downtown Seattle Association brochure about the detrimental effects of graffiti. It contained a glossy picture of Seattle's downtown skyline and waterfront and a series of highly biased and distorted definitions of hip-hop, graffiti, crews, and tags. Not only did this brochure offer an insight into the relationship between the elite business sector and the grassroots arts movements in Seattle. It also offered a powerful teaching tool for students seeking an understanding of how corporate and commercial interests have co-opted and corrupted hip-hop.

            Much of Fabon's other materials dealt with the performance group GhettOriginal, which created a Broadway show Jam on the Groove that toured internationally. The box also held magazines that included features or interviews with him on hip-hop dance that were published in South Africa and on the West Coast in the 1990s. Holding these materials in my hands and thumbing through the pages in the quiet space of the reading room helped me see something that statements repeatedly made about hip-hop's power as an international movement could not: the real impact that recognition of talent had had on the men and women who as teenagers had pioneered the movement. The articles and accompanying photographs showed how widely known and revered these figures had become, and offered a sense of how much their messages of the often harsh conditions in which they lived resonated throughout the world.

            Dr. Ferguson had emphasized the importance of creating your own system of library cataloguing in using archives. What I found with this first trip to the Cornell hip-hop collection was that the cataloguing found its own order, based on what I knew previously about the history of hip-hop and what I had been told by others but had not fully understood for myself. My challenge now rests in making the knowledge that emerges from this experience translatable to others. I look forward to the next step. 

A few thoughts on how hip-hop works

My work with hip-hop over the past few weeks has been focused on drafting what my Hip-Hop Education Center "Def" Committee colleagues have described as the "foundation" for a document defining key terms within Hip-Hop Pedagogy for a think tank gathering at the Schomburg in Harlem on Nov. 9-10. Our committee work began in March, and has taken place mostly via monthly (and sometimes weekly) conference calls and video-chats via Google Hangout. At some point in the game, around early May to be exact, I offered to begin synthesizing the ideas and thoughts that were accumulating in a Google Docs file that our committee moderator created as a shared electronic space for us to work in. From that point onward, I became deeply vested in the process of trying to understand what being a college faculty member and teaching about and through hip-hop actually meant. The drafting work (which I'm tempted to put in quotation marks because it feels like the document that currently exists is the product of many more hours than one might associate with a draft) culminated more or less with a phone call Thursday with one of my colleagues on the committee, whose hip-hop name is Blue Black. The phone call, like so many "ahh-ha" moments that occurred during the past five months, gave me a sudden and refreshingly new perspective on how hip-hop works.

Before I go further, a little bit of back story might help. Our committee consisted of three faculty members, a high school teacher, and a newly minted PhD holder as well as an associate director of the Hip-Hop Education Center at New York University and one emcee/community organizer. The latter individual was Blue Black.

I am, of course, one of the three faculty members. I felt honored to be a part of the committee and at the same time somewhat anxious. I was not sure what my place in hip-hop was or if I could be regarded legitimately as an expert on hip-hop. Sure, I'd received a couple grants for my work, had had articles and essays published in both scholarly and general interest publications, and had developed an online course for my college that carries the same title as this blog. But did I know hip-hop? Was I hip-hop? How would I know?

Blue Black raised the stakes of the conversation during our second conference call. Positioning himself as the practitioner who stood outside the academy, he began questioning the premise of hip-hop education from the get-go. Hip-hop has its own way of teaching and learning, he asserted. Hip-hop didn't need the Academy. What was the Academy's motive in trying to create hip-hop?

Defending the Academy, I noted that there were both college administrators and faculty members whose values resonated with ideas of self-knowledge, the acquisition of valuable skills through training in the arts of hip-hop, and valuing the gifts that students held inside them as contributors to the learning community of the classroom. I also noted that I had evaluated some requests for college credit through learning that had occurred outside the classroom (or prior learning assessment) in hip-hop and had found that the knowledge that the students brought approximated what they might learn in a college class. Blue Black's response to this was, "Prior Learning, I dig that. But that's still serving the Academy, not hip-hop."

Blue Black's words struck a hidden nerve, much as a Hawaiian graduate student did back in 1997 when she responded to my questioning of the value of teaching oral traditions with a retort that "we (meaning Hawaiians) don't want you in our community." Both the Hawaiian student and Blue Black were speaking truth to power, and, in the process, I was seeing myself quite uncomfortably in a position I didn't like. In both cases, I was speaking from a privileged position and had revealed how being in that position had given me the ability to deny (or simply not see) how powerful institutions of education could demean the marginalized. In both cases, the pill they tossed me was quite hard to swallow because I had felt that as a woman of color I, too, was of the "minority" contingent in society and therefore an ally. But, of course, being of brown skin does not automatically make one an ally.

I left the call feeling that my heart had turned to lead. A long overdue revision of an essay for a book on teaching practices ground to a halt as questioned what I was doing and pondered how I could share hip-hop with others if I was in the position of the privileged and didn't understand it all that well myself. At the same time, I knew I couldn't back out. I am a believer in the idea that one learns as one teaches, and I had entered hip-hop as a teacher who sought to learn. So, if this was learning, I wanted to experience it, even if it made me feel rather small.

The next call came and our very efficient and supportive moderator suggested we start with a discussion of where we were at with the terms. I chimed in quickly, saying that we'd covered some sensitive topics in the last call and that perhaps it might make sense to check in on those points first. The conversation that ensued broke the heaviness, and created an environment where we, as a committee, were able to start doing what hip-hop refers to as "building". Barriers had been broken, so in the ruins we could, like hip-hop did in the early 1970s, plunge into the rubble and start to create something new.

Writing and editing (which might be thought of as another form of compiling and smoothing out the thoughts of many into one) is a strength for me, and a tool for learning. So I offered at the end of the call to begin pulling together a draft of what had been contributed to date. The draft evolved through June, into July and August, and finally the first week of September. I worked with words offered in the Google Docs file by others, ideas and issues that were voiced in conference calls, and with documents, readings, and narratives that Blue Black began sending me and some others via e-mail. As I worked, I found myself swinging like a pendulum between two emotional extremes: On one end, I felt pride in what I was doing and the document that was emerging and on the other hand, I felt like I was asserting too much authority. I tried to step out of the authoritarial position on several occasions, hoping others would seize the reins. But nobody did. And deadlines being deadlines, we had a draft to finish.

Then, came the call on Thursday with Blue Black and the insight into how hip-hop works.

"What you have done, or what you and I have done is the first step," he said. "We have built the foundation. Now, it's time to let everyone else have at it, with their comments and their critiques, and to then have someone else build from there."

Build, destroy, build. That's the process of creating something new. That's the logic of hip-hop; its rules, its procedure.

The insight offers great peace when I place it in the context of both academic and other metaphors. In academia, deconstructionists break down the congealed relationships of power within such nuggets of knowledge as "facts" and "isms", with a goal -- often forgotten in the brilliance of the breakdown -- of reconstruction from there. In sports, coaches work athletes hard in order to break the inhibitions that reside within their bodies so the athletes can understand what is possible. In Seattle, b-girls Naj and Bean both shared with me stories of how they both went bald trying to learn how to spin on their heads. In the process, they noticed that they were the only women at the breakdancing practices and in noticing this point they also started to see how women were systematically categorized as weak, incapable, and unworthy across multiple sectors of society. B-girling showed them what they -- as women -- were capable of achieving and has made them both into powerful leaders in Seattle's community based hip-hop scene today. What the metaphors suggest parallels what my doctoral advisor once said: If you're feeling uncomfortable, that's good. It means you're thinking critically. It means you're going through growth.

The Hawaiian graduate student's comments "broke me" in 1997, and in doing so, helped me understand how to build a scholarly life centered on a commitment to continue to learn to listen as much as possible, particularly to those who in the past have not been in a privileged space to speak. Blue Black's comments in 2013 "broke me" again. In doing so, they helped me understand how being up front about what I know and what I do not know facilitates the process of learning and, at the same time, of teaching. It is from this space that I look forward to the next steps of building within hip-hop.

Organizing Principles

(You also can find this post on my blog about Writing and Storytelling, available at http://himaneeguptacarlson.blogspot.com)


I'm attending the Rensselaerville Writers Festival as I write this post, and during a morning workshop, a reference to walking came up. Workshop facilitator Peter Trachtenberg was leading us through an exercise of discovering affiliations and passions, and points and places in life where those affiliations and passions converge. He suggested -- in a delightful way in which he hinted that the idea had just come to him -- that this is the point where one should begin to write.

I loved the suggestion because I realized that one affiliation and one passion on my list converged with a point and a place in life that would help me wrap up my writing on my soon-to-be completed book manuscript, and that a second affiliation and passion converged with the same place but a different point in a way that might provide the perfect entry point for my second book project. What's relevant to this essay is that the place of convergence in both instances was Seattle, which brings me to walking.

Writing workshops usually include a certain amount of sharing among participants, either of writing generated in prompts during the workshop or of work prepared beforehand to be brought in for discussion. The only writing we did in this workshop was the lists of affiliations, passions, points, and places so that's what we shared. Time was short so we were only allowed to share one.

When a participant shared walking as a passion, I realized that walking also was a passion for me even though I hadn't put it on my list (opting for running and bicycling and swimming more generally). I also realized that it underscored the passion I did share out loud -- making things myself, creating something out of nothing -- that I shared, and that walking was tied up intrinsically in the affiliation I shared, of writer. Walking also took me to Seattle, which was the place where I realized that many years earlier I had begun walking first as a matter of course, then as a vehicle for discovery, which evolved into curiosity and inquiry, and ultimately into an organizing principle for life. Trachtenberg suggested that when something becomes an organizing principle in life, it can serve also as a guiding force for writing, moving the pen and the narrative through rain, snow, sunshine, clouds, sleet, and wind toward destinations that might be unknown at the moment but become clearer as the principle's organizing logic unfolds.

I think I can trace the start of my walking to an impulse that has kick-started many other endeavors in life: a desire to be less wasteful and to save money. I used to work at The Seattle Times and paid $20 a month (yes, seriously, in 1989, that is how much I paid) to park my car in a lot three blocks from the newsroom. At some point, the parking fee went up, and I decided that since I actually lived less than a mile from the newsroom, I could give up my parking spot and walk to work. I did need my car on days that I had interviews or other out-of-the-office commitments, but for years I was able to manage to find street parking anywhere from one to eight blocks from the newsroom.

At first, my walks were fairly straightforward treks down the hill from my apartment to the newsroom, but over time evolved into longer and wider breadths that took me across unfamiliar streets and into new neighborhoods. The walks sometimes helped me discover new styles of landscaping, new activities or new projects and translated from there into stories for the newspaper.

The practice stretched away from Seattle and into new cities that I would visit, both inside and outside the U.S. My boyfriend and I at the time often organized our weekend jaunts around walking treks and labeled ourselves urban walkers.

In graduate school in Honolulu, walking became a way to ease stress, to understand urban life in the islands, and often to get exercise. I remember one time period in 2000 when a series of life-changing events occurred, throwing me into a crisis of self-doubt. Walking through the crisis introduced me to people who began walking with me and sharing their stories of personal strife, of asking me to talk to them about Marxism and colonialism (after they found out I was a graduate student). Walking through the crisis also helped me save my own life. Walking in 2000 led to running, and to my first marathon.

When I moved back to Seattle in 2006 with my husband, we did so without a car. The 1988 Honda Civic that I had bought new when I had moved from Kansas City to Seattle died with 217,000 miles on its odometer and went to the Honolulu office of the National Kidney Foundation as a donation. A couple of other clunkers we owned briefly also went to the donate-able scrap heap. We figured we could get around Seattle with buses, bicycles, and our feet -- and until I began teaching in the outer suburbs of the city, we did. And even after we got a car -- a 1990 Volvo for $500 -- we continued to walk as much as we could.

The post-2006 walks got me through two more marathons, and numerous part-time and contract jobs. They opened my eyes constantly to changing conditions in Seattle and to the shocking state of the devolution of daily life in our post-industrial era. They also exposed me to expressions of hope: plum trees growing in the inner-city, wild blackberries, public art of both the legal and illegal kind, impromptu music and dance, and ultimately hip-hop. Hip-hop artists showed me how, in a changing society, one could sustain a good life, reinvent one's self, and continue to create something new. In my head, I often felt like a parenting voice questioning the artists' motives: Shouldn't you be getting a "real job" with all that talent? Where is your passion for dance or for music going to lead? If I voiced the questions out loud, the artists would laugh and mutter something about eventually "teaching or leading workshops or doing something like that" when they had figured it all out. Truth was, they had sort of figured a lot of things out, and they were teaching me that I, the middle-aged professional struggling to pay a mortgage, that I could figure it out, too.

Three weeks ago, I went back to Seattle to reconnect with the city, some of the artists I had interviewed, and the manifestations of hip-hop I had discovered. My goal in going back was to begin pulling together ideas and materials for a book that would somehow weave together hip-hop, b-girls, race politics, Seattle, and my experience of being a part of the city. I knew even before I began planning the trip that I would walk. I would walk everywhere.  I would eschew rides from friends and rental cars. I would even avoid taking the bus as much as possible. I wasn't sure why I would be walking.

Today, I realized I walked then and I walk now because it is an organizing principle in life.