• DOI:10.1353/PAL.2013.0026
• Corpus ID: 194069014

Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination

@article{Stallings2013HipHA,
  title={Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination},
  author={L. H. Stallings},
  journal={Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International},
  year={2013},
  volume={2},
  pages={135 - 139}
}

• L. Stallings
• Published 31 October 2013
• Art
• Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International

Most recently, Cathy Cohen’s Democracy Remixed has eloquently captured how multiple moral panics about hip hop shape black politics, and so it seems necessary to make more comprehensible the nature of hip hop as a movement with different aims and levels. As with most black liberation movements, we must consider the above ground and below ground tactics. Hip hop traffics in above ground and below ground actions. Such fluidity might be best read through the lens of queerness. Queer studies and queer theory enable a conversation about space and place in hip hop that is less about origins and dispersal shaped by race and nation, as Murray Forman theorizes in “Represent: Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music.” Instead, it helps us consider the nook and cranny spaces of transitional bodies and public spheres as well as moves us away from a privileging of forms and mediums such as music, dance, graffiti, deejaying, and fashion in these discussions. This same privileging of forms has contributed to the proliferation of a gender hierarchy since they are susceptible to commodification by corporations that divest hip hop of all its queerness. Hip hop has been used in ways that belie its misogynist, homophobic, sexist tag when it is centered on transitional bodies in transitional spaces, rather than a fixed body in transitional spaces. Hip hop is black funk’s intervention on Greek and Roman eros. In Sylvia Wynter’s parlance, it unmakes the imperialist project of Western modernity, the order of knowledge, and its overrepresentation of man. Taking my cue from Freedom Dreams: Black Radical Imagination, in which Robin D. G. Kelley insists that “surrealism recognizes that any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire forum