Item Details

Double Entendre Got Bodied: Strategic Ambivalence and Latinx Young Men Rappin’ under the White Gaze

Issue: Vol 5 No. 2 (2018) Special Issue: Hip Hop Activism and Representational Politics

Journal: Journal of World Popular Music

Subject Areas:

DOI: 10.1558/jwpm.37842

Abstract:

I explore how two Latinx young men made use of rapping within a creative and healing afterschool hip hop space at a California Bay Area High School. I argue that they performed a calculated, strategic ambivalence. That is, just as they composed raps that made use of wordplay with double or more meanings, they constructed personhoods that quite literally embodied double or more meanings. They became the embodiment of double entendre, strategically performing, rapping and narrativizing personas that allowed them to synchronously survive the classroom and the 'hood, subverting the "White gaze" and the gaze of the streets.

Author: Casey Philip Wong

View Original Web Page

References :

Alim, H. Samy. 2004. You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Alim, H. Samy, and Django Paris. 2017. “What is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Why Does it Matter!”. In Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, 1–21. New York: Teachers College Press.

Aranda, Salvador Maldonado. 2013. “Stories of Drug Trafficking in Rural Mexico: Territories, Drugs and Cartels in Michoacán”. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies/Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos Y Del Caribe: 43–66. https://doi.org/10.18352/erlacs.8393

Bada, Xóchitl, and Andreas E. Feldmann. 2017. “Mexico’s Michoacán State: Mixed Migration Flows and Transnational Links”. Forced Migration Review 56: 12–14.

Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Clay, Andreana. 2003. “Keepin’ it Real: Black Youth, Hip-hop Culture, and Black Identity”. American Behavioral Scientist 46/10: 1346–358. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764203046010005

Delgado, Fernando Pedro. 1998. “Chicano Ideology Revisited: Rap Music and the (Re)articulation of Chicanismo”. Western Journal of Communication (includes Communication Reports) 62/2: 95–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570319809374601

Dimitriadis, Greg. 2001. Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice. New York: Peter Lang.

—2003. Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs: Young Black Men Coming of Age in Urban America. New York: Teachers College Press.

Fisher, Maisha T. 2005. “From the Coffee House to the School House: The Promise and Potential of Spoken Word Poetry in School Contexts”. English Education 37/2: 115–31.

Flores-Gonzalez, Nilda, Matthew Rodriguez and Michael Rodriguez-Muniz. 2006. “From Hip-Hop to Humanization: Batey Urbano as a Space for Latino Youth Culture and Community Action”. In Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change: New Democratic Possibilities for Practice and Policy for America’s Youth, edited by S. Ginwright, J. Cammarota and P. Noguera, 175–96. Abingdon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Haupt, A., Q. E. Williams and H. S. Alim. 2018. “Introduction: ‘It’s Bigger than Hip Hop’”. Journal of World Popular Music 5/1: 9–14. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.36670

Hill, Marc Lamont. 2009. Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity. New York: Teachers College Press.

Love, Bettina. 2012. Hip Hop’s li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. New York: Peter Lang.

Martinez-Morrison, Amanda. 2014. “Black and Tan Realities: Chicanos in the Borderlands of the Hip-Hop Nation”. Alter/nativas 2: 1–24.

McFarland, Pancho. 2008. Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

—2013. The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje. East Lansing, MI: MSU Press.

—2018. “Expanding Chican@ Hip Hop Anti-colonialism”. In Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anti-colonialism, 56–64. New York: Routledge.

Merchant, Norman. 2018. “Hundreds of Children Wait in Border Patrol Facility in Texas”. Associated Press, 18 June. Online: https://www.apnews.com/9794de32d39d4c6f89fbefaea3780769 (accessed 1 July 2018).

Morgan, Joan. 1999. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip Hop Feminist. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Paris, Django. 2009. “‘They’re in My Culture, They Speak the Same Way’: African American Language in Multiethnic High Schools”. Harvard Educational Review 79/3: 428–48. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.64j4678647mj7g35

Perry, Imani. 2004. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386155

Pulido, Isaura. 2009. “‘Music fit for us minorities’: Latinas/os’ Use of Hip Hop as Pedagogy and Interpretive Framework to Negotiate and Challenge Racism”. Equity & Excellence in Education 42/1: 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665680802631253

Tyson, E. H. 2004. “Rap Music in Social Work Practice with African-American and Latino Youth: A Conceptual Model with Practical Applications”. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 8/4: 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1300/J137v08n04_01

Vizenor, G. R. 2000. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Zayas, L. H., K. M. Brabeck, L. C. Heffron, J. Dreby, E. J. Calzada, J. R. Parra-Cardona and H. Yoshikawa. 2017. “Charting Directions for Research on Immigrant Children Affected by Undocumented Status”. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 39/4: 412–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739986317722971