University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Sampling blackness: performing African Americanness in hip-hop theater and performance

(USC Thesis Other)

Sampling blackness: performing African Americanness in hip-hop theater and performance

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content SAMPLING BLACKNESS: PERFORMING AFRICAN AMERICANNESS IN HIP-HOP THEATER AND PERFORMANCE by Nicole Hodges __________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2009 Copyright 2009 Nicole Hodges ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my parents Barbara Westmaas and the late Willie Mack Hodges, Jr., my grandparents the late Alma and Ben Moore, and my husband and daughter James and Ellington Persley iii Acknowledgments I am the first PhD in my family, a granddaughter of an Algerian immigrant and an African American woman who was a descendant of slaves. Without their sacrifices, this dissertation would not be possible. This manuscript would also not have been possible without the support of friends, mentors and extended family whose love, guidance and thoughtful critiques have shaped my ideas. I would like to thank my chair, Dorinne Kondo for helping me develop my critical skills as a scholar. I thank committee members David Romàn and Meiling Cheng for their selfless mentoring, support and guidance. A special thanks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore who has taught me more than I could ever express in these few lines. I am indebted to Marcyliena Morgan for her mentoring and for offering me the support of the Hip-hop Archive family. I thank Bruce Burningham for inspiring me to think in new ways. I thank Fred Moten who has been a wonderful supporter. I must thank Harry Elam, Yvonne Yarborough- Bejarano and Ruby Tapia for their critical engagement with my dissertation proposal during the Irvine Dissertation Fellowship workshop in the summer of 2006. Thanks to Keorapetse Kgositsile and Cheryl Harris for their friendship over the years. My gratitude to Jane Iwamura, George Sanchez, Leland Saito, Greg Dimitriadis, John Jackson, Jr., and Lanita Jacobs-Huey for their encouragement and support during my graduate career. I would like to acknowledge the late Beverly Robinson, Anna Deavere Smith and Maya Angelou as the women who inspired me to conceive that I could be a performer and a scholar. I would also iv like to thank early mentors without whom I would have never pursued careers in theater and higher education, Leona Fisher, Susan Gorman Taylor, Christian Boiron, Laurent Dittman, Flora Bridges, and Joanna Banks. My respect and thanks to fellow emerging Hip-hop scholars who I am fortunate to call friends, Erinn Ramson, Dawn-Elissa Fisher, Adisa Banjoko, Dionne Bennett and James Peterson. Special thanks to Jungmiwha Bullock, Anne Laure Guyard, Shantanu DuttaAhmed and Reina Prado. My heartfelt gratitude to my entire family, husband James and daughter Ellington who together are the archive of everything good in my life; with your love and support, I have finished. v Table of Contents Dedication ……………………………………………………………………….. ii Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………… iii List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………. vi Abstract ………………………………………………………………………….. vii Chapter One: Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness is ……… 1 Hip-hop Theater and Performance Chapter Two: "Actin' and Talkin' Black": Re-articulating Blackness as ………... 83 Hip-hop in Danny Hoch's Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop Chapter Three: The Theatrical (Re) Production of African American ………… 165 Female Identities in Nikki S. Lee's "The Hip-hop Project." Chapter Four: (Re) Membering Hip-hop: Embodying Multicentric Blackness .. 231 in Jonzi D's "Tag...Me vs. the City." Chapter Five: (Re) Imagining Hip-hop: Performing African Americanness …. 292 in American Popular Culture Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………. 315 vi List of Figures Figure 1: The Hip-Hop Project. Nikki S. Lee, pictured left, with Mobb Deep. .. 170 Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. Figure 2: The Hip-hop Project. Nikki S. Lee, pictured center, is wearing …….. 171 "natural" hair posing with African American girlfriends. Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. Figure 3: Nikki S. Lee as herself. Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. ………….. 173 Figure 4: Nikki S. Lee in The Lesbian Project, 1997 (left) and The Hispanic … 180 Project, 1998 (right). Leslie Tonkonow Gallery. Figure 5: The Hip-hop Project. Nikki S. Lee pictured center with African …… 190 American women. Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. Figure 6: "The Bubble Sisters" - A Korean female R&B group in blackface. … 201 The Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Web. http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/letters/bubbles.htm 24 May 2009 Figure 7: Rapper Lil' Kim, wearing a blond weave and tanned skin. VH-1 …... 215 Video Music Awards, 2004. Figure 8: Nikki S. Lee samples from the "looks" of Lil' Kim. The Hip-hop ….. 217 Project, Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. Figure 9: Lil' Kim's blond and tan "look". MTV Publicity Photo. ……………. 217 Haitem/Contour Photos.com Figure 10: Rapper Lauryn Hill wearing a 1960s inspired Afro. Rush PR News, . 224 www.rushprnews.com. Figure 11: Lauryn Hill in another "Afro-centric" look. ………………………. 225 Figure 12: Nikki S. Lee's reproduction of Hill's Afro-centric "look". ………… 225 The Hip-hop Project, Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. Figure 13: Nikki S. Lee is pictured left wearing an Afro. The Hip-hop Project,.. 226 Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. vii Abstract Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance uses a comparative approach to ethnic studies to examine the impact of African American articulations of blackness in Hip-hop music on the performance practices of non-African American artists. Sampling Blackness envisions sampling as a theatrical improvisational process of knowledge production and identity negotiation that has the capacity to challenge dominant narratives about racial difference. Hip-hop DJs improvise connections between disparate tracks of music to create a new piece of music. The artists in this study use their voices and bodies to sample performative codes of African American identity to create and authenticate their Hip-hop performances. Offering a broad examination of Hip-hop theater and performance practices in American popular culture, this is the first study to engage the impact of Hip-hop on the artistic practices of non-African American performers in theater, conceptual art and dance. Sampling Blackness contains five chapters that address Hip-hop music’s often contradictory relationship to blackness, African American culture and multiculturalism. Using the performances of Jewish American theater artist Danny Hoch, Korean conceptual artist Nikki S. Lee and Afro-British dancer/choreographer Jonzi D, I analyze the ways these artists deploy performative codes associated with African American identity in Hip-hop. These codes are identified as: language (vernacular, stereotype, oral narratives); styles of self- adornment (dress, hairstyles, and makeup) and embodied gesture (dance moves, walks, attitudes, etc.). These viii codes, identified as African Americanness, are read as “tracks” of identity that are sampled and remixed to create new identifications that incorporate and disavow blackness. I compare the work of each artist with African American artists whose works either inspires the artistic practices of these artists or who creates similar types of performance. These comparisons enable opportunities to explore the conflation of Hip-hop music with African American identity that create a false binary between “authentic” and “inauthentic” Hip-hop performance. My findings reveal while many of these artists reinscribe existing racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes of African Americans in their performances, the artists also have the potential to enable cross- racial and ethnic coalitions. 1 Chapter One: Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance My interest in sampling and its relationship of blackness in Hip-hop began in the summer of 1997. I was conducting research on self-taught artists in Dakar. Over three months, I had the opportunity to interact with a diverse group of fine artists and performers. These youth were all originally from Sénégal, were all racially black and communicated with one another in both Wolof and French 1 . I became particularly close to a group of multi-media artists who made collages of broken glass from car windshields, splattered paint and other found objects 2 . They shared with me that the collages they created represented their cross-cultural connections to black life in the United States. The artists, all men, shared a two bedroom house in Dakar that doubled as a studio space. They were fans of African American Hip-hop artists and were specifically fond of the music of the late rapper Tupac Shakur. The men often greeted each other using Hip-hop slang borrowed from Shakur’s narratives and those of other African American rappers. Many greeted one another with “Whas’ up my nigga?” or other Hip-hop slang. When I asked them if they understood the significance of the word “nigga” some said it meant “brother” or “friend.” This translation of the word nigga came from their exposure to the music of 1 I am a French speaker and began to learn basic Wolof as I followed the artists to observe and learn from their artistic practices 2 Objet Trouvé, a term used in art history, refers to the type of art making whereby artists take every day objects and reconfigure them in new contexts as art. The use the term to identify the ways that these artists took discarded glass and reworked them to create a piece of art. We can also look at this usage of glass and other materials to create art as an example of how artists in this study use pieces of African American identity in Hip- hop to create their Hip-hop inspired performances. 2 Tupac Shakur who used the word to address his best friends or to talk about other rappers. The artists had no other understanding of the larger historical relationship between the word nigger and nigga and the different social, historical and contextual uses of the word. 3 In addition to using Hip-hop slang, the artists also experimented with using Hip-hop graffiti styles in their art and often identified African American cultural practices in Hip-hop as representative of blackness that was representative of resisting the status quo. They related to African American Hip-hop music because the narratives about African American life, urban poverty, police brutality and other themes spoke to their experience as poor youth in Dakar who were trying to make a “way out of no way.” These young people were negotiating their identities as Sénégalese men from Africa who also had to address their relationship to the remnant of the colonial presence in Dakar. Hip-hop’s circulation of African American cultural practices impacted the social and artistic practices of these non- African American artists. By sampling from Hip-pop vernacular used by African American rappers and dressing in American Hip-hop styles, they remixed new re- articulations of blackness that sampled from African Americanness in Hip-hop to articulate their Sénégalese subjectivity. The circulation of African American culture in Hip-hop also shaped the performance practices of another group of performance artists and actors. Many of 3 The word “nigga” is used in Hip-hop as well as other African American communities as a term of endearment or to designate a “low” class status within the larger African American community. The term also represents contentious relationships between blacks and whites in American culture as black people were referred to as “niggers” by white slave holders who regarded black slaves as less than human. Its usage outside the African American community is deemed pejorative and is a constant reminder of the legacy of slavery in the United States and its impact on African American culture. 3 these young men and women imitated the style of self-adornment of famous African American rappers. Citing African American Hip-hop artists such as Lauryn Hill, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur as inspirations, they denounced traditional Sénégalese clothing and instead dressed in American Hip-hop styles most often associated with African Americans. The men wore baggy pants, loose fitting tops and baseball caps. Women wore tank tops, loose fitting pants and sneakers to mimic b-girl styles. Some of the women wore long hair weaves or braids worn by African American women in Hip-hop videos. Most of the men wore tapered barber styles or bald heads imitating hairstyles worn by many African American rappers. Many of the barber and beauty shops in Dakar displayed magazine clippings featuring African Americans whose hairstyles were used as examples of “Hip-hop looks.” Besides African American styles of self-adornment in Hip-hop, they also sampled from the performance styles of Hip-hop. Sénégalese youth improvised their versions of spoken word and solo performances using rapping styles; sampling from Hip-hop speech in their poetry and monologues remixing English, French and Wolof to tell stories about their lives. These West African artists identified codes of African Americanness as representative markers of Hip-hop “authenticity” and used them to construct and validate their performances. Dakar has a thriving local Hip-hop scene that consists of many Sénégalese rappers who wear traditional clothing and rap in Wolof. The artists I met knew the music of Sénégalese rappers but were more interested in the music of African American Hip-hop artists. These interests were reflected in their sampling of 4 African American cultural practices and remixing them with their own to create a new performance of blackness. Their translations of blackness inspired me to explore how other non-African American artist engaged Hip-hop and saw their experiences reflected in the cultural expression of African Americans. These are the types of performances I explore in Sampling Blackness. Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance uses a comparative approach to ethnic studies to examine how the circulation of African American articulations of blackness in Hip-hop music and its impact on the performance practices of non-African American artists in Hip-hop Theater and Performance. Sampling in Hip-hop is similar to collage art in that sound bites of music are used instead of paper, found objects or other materials. DJs use parts of music drawn from various sources and remix them to create stories of black subjectivity in sound. Just as the DJ improvises connections between disparate tracks of music to create a new Hip-hop sound, the artists in this study use their voices and bodies to sample parts of identity associated with African American culture to create Hip-hop performances. The performative codes that discursively produce African American identity in Hip-hop can be located in the narratives, visual iconography, styles of self-adornment and embodied gestures of the Hip-hop performer. I locate these performative codes of identity as language (vernacular, stereotype, oral narratives), self- adornment (dress, hairstyles, make-up, clothing styles) and embodied gesture (dance moves, walks, attitudes, etc.) associated with African American cultural production in Hip-hop. These codes can be read as 5 “tracks” 4 of identity sampled and remixed by the artists to create new identifications within Hip-hop that incorporate and disavow blackness. By borrowing from these codes in acts of theatrical improvisation, performers in this study are able to construct and perform Hip-hop identities that sample from blackness articulated by African Americans. This dissertation envisions sampling as a theatrical improvisational process of knowledge production and identity negotiation in performance. Sampling becomes an improvised process of social and cultural collage whereby performative codes of culture associated with particular racial and ethnic groups are borrowed and re-contextualized to create new imaginings of identity. Many of the artists in this study engage African American cultural practices in Hip-hop not in attempts to “be black,” but to identify with the blackness of Hip-hop as a set of social and cultural experiences with which they wish to identify as non-African American subjects. The cross-racial and ethnic borrowings that occur in the theater, performance art and dance performance in the case studies of this dissertation are used to illustrate sampling as an improvisational theatrical process that has the capacity to challenge dominant narratives about racial difference. Scholarly work on Hip-Hop music and culture is vast and ranges from work on youth culture (Flores 1999; Dimitriadis 2000; Kitwana 2003) masculinity (Dyson 1997; Boyd 1997), sexism and technology 4 A track is the part of the music sampled. The “cut” is distinct selection of music from a recording or a compact disc; or part of music used by the DJ that is remixed into a new sound in the act of turntabalism otherwise known as DJing. Though many DJ still mix vinyl albums when performing live, because of technological advances, The CD replaced vinyl records and the description of songs shifted from “cuts” to “tracks” even though the definition remains the same. On vinyl records, the circular grooves in the album correspond to a particular cut of music. For more on digital sampling see Schloss, Jeff. The Art of Sample Based Hip-hop (2005). 6 (Rose 1994), black authenticity (Gilroy 1992; Kelley 1995) and historiography (Ogg 2001; Chang 2005). Recent conversations in Hip-Hop studies engage feminism and gender politics (Pough 2005; Perry 2005; Morgan 2009) and Hip-Hop culture as both a cultural and political identity (Kitwana 2003; Neal 2005). While there are journalistic works on Hip-Hop expressive forms such as, b-boying (Green 2003), emceeing and graffiti writing (Chang 2005) and female emcees (Cepeda 2005), this study is the first to engage the impact of Hip-hop on the artistic practices of non- African American performers in theater, performance art and dance. The performances discussed in Sampling Blackness suggest new possibilities to understand bodies, and the cultural products they engender, as public texts available for appropriation and re-articulation. Hip-hop’s Blackness: Locating African American Identity as Representative of Hip-hop “authenticity” Despite Hip-hop’s global reach and multi-racial and ethnic artist base, African American cultural production in Hip-hop and the performative codes of African American identity are most commonly cited as “authentic” representations of Hip-hop. Hip-hop performance as an identifiable cultural phenomenon began in the late 1970s by people of African descent from the United States and the African Diaspora living in the Bronx. However, claims of exclusively African American roots for Hip-hop have been contested by critics and consumers of its music and culture who cite early contributions to the genre by non-African American performers living in and around the Bronx who participated in Hip-hop’s 7 development as an art form (Hoch 2004; Chang 2005). While these contributions are subsumed under the general references to African Americans in Hip-hop, the African Diasporic, Latino/a, Asian and European retentions archived in sound within Hip- hop music reflect sampling from other cultures is intrinsic to Hip-hop’s production values. Hip-hop’s blackness is polycultural (Kelley 1996) in that it includes recognizable contributions from other cultures. Blackness is also multicentric (Cheng 2002) in that it can have multiple articulations that exist simultaneously, including those performed by non-blacks. I distinguish non-African American performers as those performers who are not of African descent as well performers who are racially black, but originate from Africa or the African Diaspora and are not descendants of black American slaves. 5 Black people of diverse ethnic, gender and national origin articulate blackness differently. However, particular articulations of blackness in various forms of cultural production have a set of performative codes than can link them back to groups of black people of various ethnic and national origins whose social experiences occur within specific socio-economic and historical contexts. Gender identities also shape articulations of blackness and are considered in this dissertation, specifically engaging how African American women articulate blackness in Hip-hop. Sampling Blackness investigates these possibilities of 5 Because many African and African Diasporic immigrants move to the United States by choice, and are not forced immigrants such as African Americans, they are often grouped under the racial and ethnic title of “African American”; a term used in the United States interchangeably with the term “black” to indicate racial and ethnic identity. However, the term “black” does not account for the diverse ethnicities and nationalities of black subjects that live in the United States that may have no direct relationship to African American cultural practices. For example, blacks from Belize and Jamaica may have very different cultural practices than African Americans who are descendants of slaves. 8 recreation in performance using four guiding questions. First, how are performative codes of blackness in Hip-hop sampled to create Hip-hop performances in the work of non-African American Hip-hop Theater and Performance artists? Secondly, what do these performances of blackness enable us to understand about the specificity of blackness as articulated by African Americans and how those cultural practices shape the artistic practices of non-African American subjects? Third, how does the performance of African Americanness by non-African American people impact how we understand and recognize blackness? Finally, how do these performances of blackness by non-African Americans impact opportunities for African Americans in theater, conceptual art and dance? Hip-hop’s dominant relationship to blackness in the United States is dependent upon its circulation of African American racial and cultural codes of identity that are reflected in the music and culture. Many non-African American artists reference these codes as markers of legitimacy that are used to validate their artistic works in the Hip-hop community. Thus, notions of “authenticity’ in Hip-hop Theater and Performance have less to do with demarcating “racial” origins or “essences” and more to do with identifying codes that would indicate some level of genuineness in their performances. I argue the performances in this study embody contradictions that have the potential to essentialize and empower African Americans. In some instances, the superficial sampling of blackness in Hip-hop by non-African Americans essentializes African American people. In other instances, the performative codes of blackness used by the performers in this study are 9 translated and remixed in a way that establishes the performer as knowledgeable about Hip-hop and its connection to African American people and culture. As an art form, Hip-hop’s complex definition as a music and culture whose aesthetic is described as interchangeably “black and/or African American” and “multicultural and/or American” is reflected in Hip-hop Theater and Performance’s cross-racial and ethnic exchanges. As a result of Hip-hop’s cultural staying power around the world, the cultural production of African Americans in Hip-hop circulates as the dominant reflection of “authenticity” in the work of many Hip-hop Theater and Performance artists. Hip- hop music and culture from the United States inspires artists of all racial, ethnic and national backgrounds. Many non-African American artists sample from blackness with the intention of rendering “authentic” representations of Hip-hop. Conversely, African American artists in Hip-hop are automatically assumed to be “authentic” Hip-hop performers because they are racially black. The conflation of Hip-hop music with African American racial and cultural identity often creates a false binary between “authentic” and “inauthentic” Hip-hop performances. Though there is no “authentic” way to “be” black, this dissertation argues that the sampling of specific codes of African American articulations of blackness by non-African American artists reveals a reliance upon performative codes of African American racial and cultural identity as representative of “authentic” Hip-hop identities in theater and performance. 10 Sampling Blackness addresses the conflation of blackness with African American identity in popular culture, explores representations of blackness by non- black people and interrogates articulations of blackness by black artists who are not African American. Therefore, my aim is to analyze the impact of African American culture on non-African American artists and popular culture. Second, I contend that African American codes of identity are the foundation upon which many popular expressions of Hip-hop are constructed. Third, by identifying many of the linguistic, physical and embodied cultural particularisms in Hip-hop linked to African American racial identity and cultural practices that are borrowed in performance by non-African Americans, I hope to open new opportunities to understand how racial and ethnic identities embody codes of learned behavior that can be performatively translated, re-articulated and re-signified in performance. I argue the performance of Hip-hop by non-African Americans becomes a re-performance of blackness that can be read as an embodied translation by diverse racial, ethnic and national groups. My use of the term re-performance samples from Richard Schechner’s concept of performance as “twice behaved behavior” (1997) and suggests the performative qualities of “behavior” reflected in performative codes of language, practices of self- adornment and embodied gestures, must be repeated over and over again to be recognized as behavior associated with people of a particular racial and ethnic identity. Thus, African Americanness as an expression of black racial identity articulated by African Americans has a set of codes that can be identified learned and “re-performed,” or behaved multiple times in performance to indicate blackness 11 without black people. The non-African American performer presents codes that disrupt the “normative” codes associated with his or her racial, ethnic, gender and/or national identification, performing these codes of blackness as “Hip-hop.” Hip-hop shares many codes of African Americanness that are absorbed into popular culture representations of blackness that are already a part of the American theatrical imaginary. The specific social and historical circumstances that produce these racial and cultural codes, that include but are not limited to slavery, imperialism and institutionalized racism that render black subjects socially disenfranchised and stigmatized as “inferior” subjects are often completely disregarded by those that sample from performative codes of blackness in Hip-hop as uniquely “cultural” texts. Although these codes are performed in various ways in the African American community 6 and are reflected in Hip-hop in a specific manner, they are generally identifiable in various circumstances as responses to environmental, economic and social and political situations lived as black subjects in conscious or subconscious responses to white hegemony. This process of incorporating Hip-hop’s blackness into popular culture often separates it from its connection to African American culture and instead, re-signifies the codes as “multicultural” representations of Hip- hop. Moreover, all performances of blackness do not reference, and cannot be reduced to, African American culture. 6 Here I am aware that the tern “African American community” is also contested. I further define this term in Chapter 2 in my discussion of Danny Hoch’s work in Hip-hop Theater. 12 By making a distinction in this dissertation to locate particular codes of African American racial and cultural identity in performance of Hip-hop Theater and Performance, my goal is to call our attention to the need for a more complex reading of blackness that considers how it is complicated by ethnicity, gender, nation and sexuality. This differentiation between black people and blackness is an important consideration that allows me to separate the performable qualities of African American racial and cultural identities used to validate Hip-hop inspired performance that this dissertation investigates. So then, blackness is employed here as a general term used to delineate what Herman Gray calls “the shifting cultural fields and social relations and the material circumstance in which black people operate” (2005, 19). 7 Though Gray conflates ‘black people’ with African Americans, I add to Gray’s definition of blackness to include the performative codes that are used to identify a particular translation of black cultural production by various black people manifest throughout Africa and the African Diaspora. I also include within these ‘cultural fields’ (Gray 2005) the artistic, linguistic, gestural and self-presentation (their choice of dress, hairstyles and mannerisms) of black people which also constitute the particularity of their black cultural production. 8 We must also include, perhaps in a marginal category, the performance of blackness by non- black subjects that also shape the repertoire of black cultural practices. Thus, there can be multiple blacknesses that are articulated and/or posited in performance. 7 Gray, Herman S. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 8 I am indebted to a conversation with Fred Moten about distinguishing differences between “black people” and “blackness” in my analysis of how blackness is performed by non-black and non- African American subjects. 13 Conceptualizing Sampling as a form of Theatrical Improvisation Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance imagines the use of sampling of music texts by Hip-hop DJs in Hip-hop music and culture as a lens to envision how non-African American artists in theater, performance art and dance use the performative codes associated with African American identity in Hip-hop to create their Hip-hop inspired performances. This dissertation theorizes sampling as a theatrical form of improvisation employed by performers in Hip-hop Theater and Performance that can be understood as a process of meaning making used by the actor, performance artist and/or dancer. The performances created by these artists engage dominant narratives about the performable qualities of racial difference enabling new possibilities to understand how artist’s bodies, and the cultural products they produce, can be read as public texts available for appropriation and re-articulation. I examine the work of three non-African American performers in order to identify how Hip-hop impacts their artistic practices. Each chapter offers an analysis of how a particular artist improvises and translates performative codes of African American racial and cultural identity to validate their Hip-hop performance. Chapter Two focuses on the sampling of Hip-hop language in the work of Jewish American solo performer Danny Hoch. Chapter Three explores how styles of self- adornment mobilized by African American women in Hip-hop are reproduced in the photographs of Korean conceptual artist Nikki S. Lee. Chapter Four investigates how embodied gestures of Hip-hop dance are translated in the choreography of Jonzi 14 D, an Afro-British choreographer and dancer. Chapter Five presents new types of theatrical improvisations in Hip-hop Theater and Performance by both African American and non-African American performers. At the end of each chapter, I compare the work of each artist with African American Hip-hop performers and/or theater artists who inspire their work or who create similar types of performance. Placing non-African American artists in conversation with their African American contemporaries allows me to investigate the complexity of Hip-hop’s relationship to blackness. It also provides an opportunity to investigate the multicentricity of blackness because both African American and non-African American artists use the same performative codes of African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance with very different material results. African American artists inspired by Hip-hop are assumed to create “authentic” representations of Hip-hop because they are African Americans. Non- African American artists are assumed to produce “inauthentic” representations of Hip-hop. These pairings consider the racial and ethnic identities of the performers not in an attempt to polarize them but rather to complicate how Hip-hop is racialized in relationship to African American culture. The comparisons also reveal that Hip- hop’s blackness is both reliant upon African American culture and contains performances of blackness by other racial and ethnic groups engaged with Hip-hop culture. All of these artists create works that represent performance practices in theater, conceptual art and dance. Danny Hoch and Jonzi D are considered pioneers 15 in the field of Hip-hop Theater and Performance in the United States and England respectively. Nikki S. Lee’s work as a Korean immigrant working the United States and Jonzi D’s work as an Afro-British choreographer in London provide global perspectives on Hip-hop inspired performance practices. All of these artists have initiated a wide range of cross-racial and ethnic discussions, collaborations and intellectual exchanges and have received international exposure for their work. These case studies provide a composite of a broad range of comparative performance practices under the sign of Hip-hop Theater and Performance. By locating the performative codes of African Americanness associated with Hip-hop, I am able to identify the circulation and translation of codes of blackness associated with African Americans in Hip-hop in and outside the United States. By placing these artists in dialogue, I offer a transnational perspective on the ways performative codes of African Americanness come to be identified as representative of “authentic” Hip-hop. I hope to establish a cultural continuity that addresses the ways these codes are circulated and translated by diverse artists. The artistic works of Danny Hoch, Nikki S. Lee and Jonzi D document the impact of African American culture on American and global popular culture (Raphael- Hernandez 2003). 9 I also contribute to broader discussions of cross-racial performance by offering sampling as a form of theatrical improvisation that can allow us to understand the artistic strategies performers use to construct 9 London: Routledge, 2003 16 performances of particular racial and ethnic identities through improvised understandings of racial and ethnic difference. I have selected the work of non-African American performers for three distinct reasons. First, my selection of performers of non-African American racial and ethnic backgrounds allows me to engage recent discussions in African American Theater, (Elam 2000; Benston 2002), American Studies (Maira 2000; Roediger 2000; Prashad 2002) Performance Studies (Kondo 1997; Johnson 2003) and Cultural Studies (Fuss; 1995; Lott 1995; Pellegrini 1996; Gubar 2000) about performable qualities of blackness that can be separated from black people. 10 Second, I use these diverse case studies to address recent trends in Performance Studies and American Studies that call for more comparative readings of performance across racial and ethnic lines. 11 Third, each artist makes explicit claims for cross-racial and ethnic collaboration and/or the potential value their performances have for enabling cross- racial and ethnic connections. Furthermore, the non-African American artists I analyze are exemplary of artists who use improvised understandings of racial and 10 Elam, Harry and Krasner David, Eds. African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Benston, Kimberly Performing Blackness: Enactments of African American Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000; Lott, Eric Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996; Sunaina, Maira Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in NYC. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002; Prashad, Vijay, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting. New York; Beacon Press, 2002; David Roediger Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley; University of California Press, 2003; Kitwana, Bakari Why White Kids Love Hip-hop: Wankstas, Wiggas, Wannabes and the New reality of Race in America, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004; Kondo Dorinne “Revisions of Race” Theatre Journal, Volume 52, Number 1, March 2000; Johnson, E Patrick Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, Durham; Duke University Press, 2003; Fuss Diana. Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995; Pellegrini, Ann. Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race. Gubar, Susan. Race Changes: White Skin, Blackface n American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 11 I am indebted to notes from my committee member David Romàn about the need for Theater and Performance Studies scholars to investigate artistic practices in a more comparative frame. 17 ethnic difference sampling from performative codes of identity that indicate racial, ethnic and national specificity different than their own lived identities. They have achieved national and international critical success in the field of Hip-hop Theater and Performance and their works have contributed to defining the genre. My goal in assembling the artists in this study is to create my own sampled remix of performance that borrows from a diverse body of work that is categorized as Hip-hop Theater and Performance by non-African American artists. This diversity of representation has allowed me to situate Hip-hop Theater and Performance within a larger historical perspective of the impact African American music has on the artistic practices of non-African American artists in American popular culture. For example jazz another “black” music genre that has been absorbed into the American popular culture has influenced the work of African American playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks and August Wilson, whose works are labeled “black” and/or African American Theater. However, jazz has also influenced the theater practices of white playwrights and playwrights of other races and ethnicities such as Asian American artist/scholar Fred Ho, 12 whose works are labeled Afro-Asian, and Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter and Bertolt Brecht, 13 who are all white yet their works are labeled simply, “theater.” 12 Fred Ho’s 1985 theater work, A Song for Manong: Part III of Bamboo That Snaps Back, premiered at San Francisco's Herbst Theater and was produced by “Life on the Water” arts collective. The work is a tribute to the struggles of Filipino immigrant laborers in the USA. Ho’s works can be read as employing elements of sampling as he combines indigenous kulintang music and dance with contemporary African American music. “Life on the Water” was an artist collective established by Bill Talen, Ellen Sebastian Chang, Leonard Pitt and Joe Lambert in 1986 to produce the work of artist of color in the San Francisco Bay area. 13 Jazz Singer, The (1925), a comedy-drama by Samson Raphaelson also demonstrates the ways that Jazz shaped American Theater and also the use of black racial stereotypes to create notions of jazz authenticity using 18 As jazz music shifted in global popular culture from being read as “black” music to American music, the performative codes associated with African American cultural identity were absorbed into representations of a “jazz” aesthetic much in the same way that African American racial, ethnic and cultural codes are absorbed under the sign of “Hip-hop.” Hip-hop, like jazz music, has made similar shifts on how it is labeled in American popular culture. From 2002-2007, I attended the performances of over fifteen different Hip- hop Theater and Performance artists of various races and ethnicities in the American and British Theater. 14 Though there were many notable performances, I chose Hoch’s work because he is a key figure in the field, and he has influenced the careers of other artists discussed in this study. I also surveyed the work of ten different fine artists and conceptual artists and eight different Hip-hop Theater dance companies in the United States and in England. I selected Nikki S. Lee’s work because she specifically engages the performative codes of self-adornment of African American women in her work as well as the fluidity of racial and ethnic categories. Jonzi D’s work was selected because he translates the embodied gestures of African American blackness. Sam Shepard’s work is most comparable to that of Danny Hoch’s in that he was fully immersed in the jazz aesthetic and a friend of many jazz musicians including Charles Mingus. Shepard’s plays borrow many of the improvisational impulses in jazz. See Brecht’s The Three Penny Opera (1928) a play that one of the first attempts to fuse jazz into the American Theater by a European playwright. See Ruland, Richard. The American Plays of Bertolt Brecht. American Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Autumn, 1963), pp. 371-389. 14 Hip-hop Theater Performances include those of Danny Hoch, Will Power, Jerry Quigley, Holly Bass, Matt Sax, Hanifah Walidah, LeVan D. Hawkins, Sarah Jones, Zell Miller, Universes, Joe-Hernàndez-Kolski, Kristina Wong, Benji Reid and Xena. Fine artists I surveyed inspired by Hip-hop include Iona Zeal Brown, Kehinde Wiley, Chris Offili, Samuel Biggers, Kamel, Senz, Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp. Conceptual artists include Nikki S Lee, Kristina Wong, Damali Ayo and Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Dance Companies include Dream Dance Company of (Oakland), Jonzi D’s Hip-hop Theater (London), Rennie Harris’ Pure Movement ( Philadelphia), The Hip-hop Conservator ( New York), The Jabowokeez (Oakland), The Real Deal, Rock Steady Crew ( New York) , Gamblers Crew (Korea) and DY and Steve (France). 19 based Hip-hop dance language using a diverse group of dancers in his work. Jonzi D has also pioneered the Hip-hop Dance Theater movement in London. All of the artists in this study translate Hip-hop’s blackness. As actors, performers and choreographers, they use the body and the voice to remix performative codes of African American identity in Hip-hop with their experiences of Hip-hop. However, often in both conscious and subconscious acts of cultural appropriation, non-African American artists see a rupture between African American racial and cultural identity and the cultural practices of Hip-hop and may not intend to further marginalize African Americans, though they are often guilty of reinscribing black racial stereotypes. Conversely African Americans artists who create and are inspired by Hip-hop often do not acknowledge the transgressive moments that occur in their performances when they sample from other cultures and often marginalize other racial and ethnic groups. What Sampling Blackness demonstrates is that there are multiple contradictions that must be addressed when attempting to locate the “authentic” in Hip-hop. The contradictions that this dissertation addresses are that African American artists producing and performing Hip-hop are often in quests to be recognized as “American” without a hyphenated racial or ethnic signifier. As they articulate their subjectivity in the music of Hip-hop, their racial and cultural identities are absorbed into popular culture and the music is often recognized as “American” music. This poses a problem since the simultaneous influence and invisibility of African American people in American popular culture are often 20 muffled under cries of “essentialism” by both African American and non-African American artists, consumers and scholars of Hip-hop. Additionally, it is possible to see the how both African American and non- African American artists are guilty of acts of cultural appropriation. Though African American articulations of blackness are sampled as the most popular interpretations of Hip-hop, both African American and non-African American artists contribute to Hip-hop’s blackness. I argue the difference between non-African American re- articulations of blackness in Hip-hop and those articulated by African Americans is directly tied to the fact that African Americans cultural and racial identities are always tied. However, African American cultural expression in Hip-hop can be re- articulated by other racial and ethnic groups. Re-articulations of blackness through Hip-hop by non-African Americans have the potential to limit the possibilities for African American artists to express themselves as “original” because of the mainstream appropriation of African American cultural practices in Hip-hop. In addressing these contradictions inherent to Hip-hop’s aesthetic, Sampling Blackness reveals Hip-hop music and culture is indebted to multi-racial and ethnic borrowing that fortify and reinvigorate its cultural production. This process of renewal created through sampling can be read as a response to the historical precedent of mainstream appropriation of African American culture by mainstream corporations and institutions that use the cultural capital (Bourdieu 1987) of African Americans to fuel “American” popular culture. It can also be linked to acts of lineage as scholar Joanna Demers argues (2005), where African Americans in Hip- 21 hop often sample from African American and other cultural texts to create a sense of history and permanency to resist white hegemony. Sampling of other cultures in Hip-hop by African Americans can be linked to other improvised strategies of articulation by African American from slavery to the present whereby black Americans borrow remnants of other cultures and re-articulate them to forge their subjectivity in a country that has systematically denied their rights for self- determination, historicity, cultural legacy and agency as a result of slavery, imperialism and cultural appropriation (Brooks 2007). We must consider the ways that Hip-hop’s acceptance by global audiences represents both the visibility and invisibility of African American people and their desire to be credited with having an impact on American and global popular culture. The performative codes that surface through Hip-hop music and culture indicate that blackness is an important facet of American cultural life and should be acknowledged. As more non-African American artists create works inspired by Hip-hop music and culture under the sign of Hip-hop Theater and Performance, there appears to be a new trend developing in mainstream theater, performance art and dance venues that privileges the work of non-African American artists who engage Hip-hop as a “multicultural” art form. African American Hip-hop artists dominate the music charts and visual culture of Hip-hop. However, in Hip-hop Theater and Performance, African American artists whose works speak specifically to African American experiences and their relationship to Hip-hop find it increasingly difficult to find work in mainstream theater spaces as “Hip-hop Theater” artists. Because white 22 theater producers often see Hip-hop as representative of “multicultural” theater and performance, no matter what the race of the particular artist, many white mainstream theater producers privilege theater pieces labeled “Hip-hop” that speak to a wide range of experiences and have a multicultural message. Hip-hop Theater pieces by African American artists that address African American experiences are often labeled “African American Theater” and are presented separately from Hip-hop Theater works. Similar trends exist in fine arts and dance. Historically, Hip-hop inspired fine art and dance pieces have been grouped in special programs exploring African American life. However, as Hip-hop’s global popularity speaks to its ability to reach diverse audiences, Hip-hop “arts” (Hoch 2004) are now presented as “multicultural” programs and feature various interpretations of Hip-hop from a wide range of racial and ethnic groups. This shift in popular culture from Hip-hop being read as a “black” art form, specifically referencing the blackness of African American culture, to a “multicultural” art form, does not suggest that we must also resignify the performative codes of African American cultural identity that are used to validate notions of “authenticity” in Hip-hop Theater and Performance. The sampling of performative codes of African American culture in various outlets from theater to dance under the sign of Hip-hop indicates that African Americans influence a wide range of artistic and social practices across racial, ethnic, gender and national lines. However, African American Hip-hop artists and their cultural products are rarely referenced as impacting American popular culture. People of all races and 23 ethnicities are identifying the performative codes of African American culture in Hip-hop as a site to explore new forms of artistic and cultural expression. The performers in this study rely on racial and ethnic codes of African Americanness that they associate with Hip-hop, often sampling from these codes as “authentic” markers of Hip-hop cultural production. Notions of the “authentic” for Hoch, Lee and Jonzi D, have to do with the identification of benchmarks of validation that determine the worth of their artistic practices. As more groups identify Hip-hop music and culture as a “multicultural” art form, we can see that performative codes in Hip-hop’s narratives, visual imagery and styles of self-adornment are appropriated by non- African Americans as markers that represent the capacity to resist dominant narratives of the status quo and are often separated from the racial and cultural identities of African Americans. For many African American artists, Hip-hop’s American and global popularity signals social and economic “arrival” for African Americans in the United States. Despite the fact that the cultural production of African Americans is often absorbed under the sign of “American” culture, I contend the recognition of the influence of African American culture in Hip-hop has the capacity to help identify new strategies of cross-racial and ethnic coalition building. It is naïve to believe that Hip-hop’s global popularity indicates that African Americans will suddenly be recognized as full citizens and will not continue to encounter racism, face institutional and economic disparities based on their race, and suddenly achieve the same possibilities for social advancement as whites. However, the influence of African American cultural production of Hip-hop on American 24 popular culture has the capacity to foster new conversations about the incorporation and disavowal of blackness mainstream American popular culture. Sampling Blackness argues that by acknowledging the impact of African American articulations of Hip-hop as enabling cross-racial and ethnic exchanges, new connections can be made that demonstrate to other oppressed groups that they that can have a significant impact on dominant culture. Methodology As an American Studies scholar who focuses on issues of race and ethnicity in theater and performance, my goal is to contribute to the understanding of American Studies as a discipline with a transnational scope. My analysis of theater and performance samples from theoretical approaches in American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Performance Studies. All of these disciplines draw from strategies in post-structuralism and textual analysis to investigate the discursive production of subjectivity, by reading of bodies as texts. Remixing these varied theoretical approaches allows me to address racial, ethnic, and cultural identifications within Hip-hop as social constructions that are complicated by class, gender and national identifications within particular social and historical contexts. The social “norms” associated with these categories of difference are fluid and can be disrupted through performance. My research on Hip-hop Theater and Performance is shaped by my experience as a professional actress and scholar trained in artistic and theoretical theories of improvisation in theater, music and dance as well as my interest in 25 emerging scholarship on improvisation in Cultural Studies (Fishlin and Heble 2003). My scholarly work on Hip-hop includes helping to develop the first archive of Hip- Hop Music and Culture at Harvard University in 2000, primarily a virtual archive on the world-wide-web that is supplemented by a gallery space. At Harvard, I developed Hip-hop curriculum in the arts for youth and was also responsible for developing one of the first blogs about Hip-hop Theater and performance entitled “Hip-hop Downstage.” I also taught Hip-hop Theater workshops as an artist in residence at the HeART Project Los Angeles from 2002-2003. I used improvisation exercises in these workshops to help youth of diverse racial, ethnic and socio- economic backgrounds create sketches about their environments and to perform them before live audiences. Additionally, I have used Hip-hop to teach Shakespeare to African American and Latino youth in Los Angeles public schools as a teacher in the theater-in-education program, LA Troupe. 15 My artistic training as a performer is also informed by artistic practices in Hip-hop. DJs sampling in Hip-hop is akin to borrowing parts of behavior, language and styles of dress in improvisational sketch comedy. Using the DJs ability to locate particular sound bites and link them together to create a new piece of music, I imagine how non-African American artists use their bodies and voices to sample from the performative codes of blackness to create Hip-hop performances. My training as a performer in improvisation with experienced improvisation at The 15 For more information about the HeART Project, an art program for youth in adult education schools in Los Angeles see www.theheartproject.org accessed 12 April 2009. For more on LA Troupe, a theater-in-education outreach program that provides classical theater training for youth grades K-12, see www.latroupe.org Accessed 12 April 2009. 26 Groundlings and Harvey Lembech Studio 16 , both highly regarded improvisational comedy schools, has informed my practice as an improvisation performer. I learned to identify and improvise codes of dress, behavior and speech in order to quickly develop characters and perform them before an audience. By improvise, I mean I would borrow various parts of language, dress, and behavior of a particular racial, ethnic and or gender group and remix them to create a composite of a new character. Because my performances were always comedic, I often relied on stereotype or idiosyncratic parts of behavior in order to make the characters vibrant and recognizable “sketches” of behavior I witnessed in my everyday interactions with diverse groups. I began to make connections between my process as an actor to those of Hip-hop DJs and the ways that bodies, and the codes used to articulate their racial and ethnic difference, could be read as “tracks” of identity. Like songs on CD’s, often referred to as “tracks,” these aspects of identity can be remixed in performance to create new articulations of racial and ethnic difference. Linking these tools of improvisation to my other artistic practices as a performer and scholar, I began to see connections between how I identified and accessed various performative codes that indicated racial, ethnic and gender identities and how those codes could be translated and improvised to construct characters in performance. These various experiences gave me insight into the work of other performers and their capacity to mobilize similar strategies of improvisation 16 The Groundlings and Harvey Lembech Studio are premier training grounds for improvisational theater artists in Los Angeles and their prestigious alumni such as Lisa Kudrow, Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri. I had the opportunity to train at both studios: The Groundlings from 1997-1998, and the Harvey Lembech Studio in 1999 and 2001. 27 in their artistic works. As I negotiate between the terrains of my artistic and disciplinary training, various models are available to me in the work of scholars of color who balance the personal with the theoretical with innovative approaches to qualitative research in various disciplines (Fanon 1967; Ngugi Wa Thiong’o 1986; Mudimbe 1994; Baker 1997; hooks 1992; Kondo 1997; Romàn 1998; Benston 2001; Cheng 2002; Moten 2003; Elam 2004; Gilmore 2007). These scholars have allowed their personal experiences to impact their approaches to qualitative research while acknowledging lived experience (Denzin and Lincoln 1989) as a challenge to knowledge production. My primary sources for my analysis include my field notes based on participant observation at performances of the artists, discussions with the artists and analyzing texts of the performances when available. I attended performances and viewed artists’ work in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and London. I employed alternative methods to gain access to the artists that include attending artist talks, personal email correspondence, reviewing the artist’s websites, blogs and consulting video archives on the web. Furthermore, I consulted popular television shows and films that pertained to Hip-hop and the work of each artist to situate their performances within larger trends in American popular culture. Theoretical Samples My concept of sampling as a theatrical form of improvisation borrows theoretically from the works of Walter Benjamin, Meiling Cheng, Judith Butler, Brent Hayes Edwards and Stuart Hall. Remixing their theories of identity 28 negotiation has allowed me to make connections between Hip-hop’s relationship to particular codes of black identity in Hip-hop and African American cultural production. Benjamin’s meditation on notions of the original and the reproduction (1935) informs my inquiry into the ways non-African American Hip-hop Theater and performance artists reproduce blackness by using their bodies to duplicate performative codes of African American identity to authenticate their performances. I examine how non-African American artists’ sampling from the performative codes that indicate African Americanness in Hip-hop evokes notions of what Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of the original. The performative reproduction of blackness in performance creates a relationship between the “original” representation of African Americanness in Hip-hop by African American artists and “reproductions” of blackness as Hip-hop by non-African American performers. I sample from Judith Butler’s assertion that gender norms are performative 17 to suggest that the social “norms” associated with the embodiment of racial or ethnic identity are performative. Judith Butler conceives gender as a series of repeated “acts” that have been performed by individuals in repetition over time (1993). Substituting Butler’s gender norms for “norms” associated with racial and ethnic identity, I argue Hip-hop music and culture relies on particular translations of performative codes of black identity that are part of African American culture. Hip- hop Theater and Performance artists rely upon the identification of these racial 17 While Butler addresses processes of disrupting dominant ideas of sexual identification, as many scholars have suggested (Kondo 1997; Diamond 1999; Elam 2000) racial identifications also are produced discursively through acts of interpellation and discursive formation. 29 and/or ethnic codes through discursive practices in theater and performance. I sample Butler’s idea that performative codes of gender identity can be reproduced through processes of repetition to suggest the performance of blackness can also be reproduced through repetition and is not exclusively dependent upon black racial identity to be recognized in performance. The non-African American artists in this study mobilize particular performative codes of blackness over time and thus shift the meanings and possibilities of what blackness can signify. These meanings and possibilities are most often perceived by the audience and their ability to identify and translate the particular codes performed. In Hip-hop Theater and Performance, the cross-racial and ethnic sampling of blackness by non-African Americans in performance disrupts seemingly “normative” performative codes of blackness in Hip-hop. The cross- racial, ethnic and cultural borrowings of the artists in this study have the capacity to re-inscribe racial hierarchies and stereotypes. Consequently, their performances are often met with what Judith Butler calls “social sanction” (423). 18 Sanction can mean “to authorize” when used as a verb and “punishment” when used as a noun. All of the artists in this study use improvisational strategies to create complex negotiations of blackness in their performances of Hip-hop identities. However, they also suggest that Hip-hop’s circulation of codes of African American racial and ethnic identity authorize non-African Americans to use them in works created under the sign of 18 In Judith Butler’s article, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” 1988, the author argues: “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo.” (61) 30 Hip-hop Theater and Performance. Do theater and performance practices enable us to see racial and ethnic identities as social texts that are appropriable with or without consent? I contend the non-African American artists in this study redefine what blackness and Hip-hop can signify in popular culture. Furthermore, my concept of multicentric blackness samples from Meiling Cheng’s theory of multicentricity which argues, “multicentricity subverts the existing power structure which takes for granted the boundary between “majority” and “minority,” between “dominant” cultures and “marginal” others (2002,1). I assert multicentric blackness can contain the expression of experiences by black people of various ethnic and national origin as well as those expressions of blackness by people who are not racially black. I highlight that blackness can be separated from black people and can be performed by those who are racially black and those that are not. 19 This is not to suggest that black people selectively perform their racial identities, in one particular way. However, there are “normative” codes associated with particular ethnic, social, cultural and/or political identifications within expressions of blackness by black people around the world. However, the uniqueness about the performances of African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance is that they do not seek to replace one “center”, but to co-exist. These 19 I am indebted to a conversation with Fred Moten about making a distinction between black people and blackness. Because of the conflation with black people and African Americans in the United States, many understand blackness to be connected to the cultural production and social lives of African Americans. However, what this dissertation suggests is the multicentricity of blackness and the multiple ways that ethnic and national differences complicate particular articulations of blackness. Blackness in Jamaica articulated by black Jamaicans has a different set of performative codes than African Americanness. Moreover, these articulations are further complicated by class, gender, sexuality and the site of expression. 31 examples give us an illustration of a “multicentric” blackness 20 as having multiple centers. Any translation or interpretation of blackness can assert itself as “center” to particular social and cultural experiences even as other dominant “centers” exist that may continue to marginalize what blackness can potentially signify. Imagining a multicentric blackness then lends itself to the identification and translation of a wide range of performative codes that indicate black subjectivity. Brent Hayes Edwards’ discussion of black Diasporic identity (2004) does not attempt to synthesize multiple black experiences into a unified African Diaspora, but shows how the translations of differences within and between blackness such as language, ethnicity, class, religion and national origin enabled coalition building through the exchange of print culture in the early 20 th century. Edwards’ concept of décalage, or that which gets lost in translation, is an important consideration in my theorization of sampling as a theatrical process of improvisation. I examine how performers attempt to translate the performative codes of African Americanness to perform blackness as Hip-hop and make both essentializing and innovative translations of blackness in performance. Edwards’ scholarship builds on the observations of Stuart Hall in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1994). In this essay, Hall argues that cultural identities are created through their similarities as well as their differences (394). If we think of Hip-hop culture as an expression of identity that is mediated through Hip-hop’s relationship to blackness, then it is becomes easier to recognize how non-African 20 For more on Cheng’s’ concept of multicentricity in performance art in Los Angeles See Cheng, Meiling In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 32 Americans relate to Hip-hop through shared codes associated with both Hip-hop and African American racial and ethnic identity. Hall argues: … shared culture, is a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’…. Our culture identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes. (51) Hall’s understanding of ‘cultural identity’ and ‘Diaspora’ are informed by his considerations of “the positions from which we speak or write” (392). Hip-hop then is created through the “similarities and differences” of the people who engage the culture it produces. The bodies of the performers in this study become sites of remix that reconfigure how blackness can be understood through its embodiment by non- African American subjects in performance (Taylor 2003). 21 While Hoch, Lee and Jonzi D identify with the “blackness” of Hip-hop music and culture as a way to speak to power, denounce the status quo and identify with the oppressed, at times within their performances they may also participate in acts of cultural tourism that amount to acts of commodification that have a long historical precedent. In both instances, these performances, categorized as theater, conceptual art and dance, all operate as mirrors of larger phenomena being enacted on the popular culture stage where everyday people also attempt to negotiate the limitations of the discourse used to perform their subjectivities in everyday life (Goffman 1959). The artists in Sampling Blackness are positioned subject(s) (Hall 392), who are creating theater 21 In Diana Taylor’s analysis of performance and its relationship to ethnography, she discusses “how gestures, body language and movement can be used to make sense of the world” (77). The performative codes of language, styles of self-adornment and gesture explored by the artists in this study are part of the process of their knowledge production. See Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 33 and performance from specific historical contexts that shape the way they understand and interpret Hip-hop. Hip-hop, as an expression of African Diasporic identity, is always already hybrid in that it must reproduce itself through “transformation and difference”(401). Chronology of Hip-hop Theater and Performance Sampling Blackness addresses recent scholarship in African American Theater, Improvisation Studies, Performance Studies and Cultural Studies that address the performable qualities of blackness. I read all of these literatures looking for conversations where blackness, Hip-Hop, identity and improvisation intersect as well as how they address the performance practices of the artists and themes they investigate in performance. Creating a broad chronology of Hip-hop Theater and Performance s allows me to highlight the absence of existing scholarship on Hip-hop performance as well as its intersection within the fields of Hip-hop Studies, African American Studies, African American Theater, Performance Studies and Cultural Studies scholarship. Hip-hop Theater and Performance is in the midst of being defined within the American Theater. Many African American theater scholars (Harrison 2002; Elam 2004) have categorized Hip-hop Theater and performance as part of the African continuum. Other theater scholars and Hip-hop theater practioners (Uno 2004; Hoch 2004) see Hip-hop Theater and Performance as a multicultural and/or polycultural theater practice because of its diverse racial and ethnic artist base. Both perspectives of Hip-hop Theater consider the ways that African 34 American cultural production has influenced and is influencing diverse groups of artists who identify with Hip-hop and its relationship to blackness. All Hip-hop theater and performance artists rely heavily on the body, voice and language in their performances. They also have a connection, both profound and superficial, to Hip-hop’s capacity to connect diverse racial and ethnic audiences who identify with Hip-hop as a space to resist the status quo and to re-imagine racial, social and cultural identifications. The language of Hip-hop, broadly incorporating verbal, oral and embodied language, operates as the text of a Hip-hop inspired performance. As diverse racial and ethnic groups identify with specific African American articulations of Hip-hop language, new connections across racial lines are forged as well as new identifications and translations of blackness. As Chris Weedon reminds us, language is: the place where actual and possible forms of social organization and their likely social and political consequences are defined and contested. Yet it is also the place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed ...subjectivity is produced in a whole range of discursive practices - economic, social, and political - meanings of which are a constant site of struggle over power (Weedon 1996, 21). The artists in this study use their bodies and voices to suggest that the social and political identifications shaped by race and ethnicity that are associated with particular groups can be subverted through processes of theatrical sampling in performance. My exploration of sampling as a process of theatrical improvisation and meaning making is located in the work of Hip-hop Theater, Conceptual Art and Hip- 35 hop Dance Theater respectively created between the years 1993-2006. This time period is important for three reasons. First, it marks Hip-Hop music’s impact on theater and other performance practices such as spoken word, Hip-hop Dance Theater in Europe, fine art and conceptual art. For example, Hip-Hop Theater emerges as a new “genre” of theater by the late-1990s, though artistic works inspired by Hip-hop have been documented as early as the early 1980s. Independent galleries were the first to feature Hip-hop inspired art as early as the 1980s including the work of Keith Haring, Jean Michel and Adrian Piper. Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1983) is a performance by Piper captured in a short film that explores white people’s relationship to Funk music and their ability to dance. Her conceptual art piece demonstrates Piper offering white people dance lessons to funk rhythms. Piper’s work gestures towards emerging “rap” styles performed in Funk music that later resurface in Hip-hop. Both Funk and Hip-hop have been used to represent black American music genres. Jean-Michel Basquiat was an ex-graffiti artist (or “tagger”) turned fine artist. Keith Haring was also a European American artist who was heavily impacted by graffiti culture. Both Haring and Basquiat were a part of the graffiti scenes in New York in the early 1980s and were friends. Keith Haring’s Hip-hop inspired cartoon-like images such as “Boom Box” (1984) and Jean Michel Basquiat’s “SAMO” crowns and poetry were equally notorious engagements with Hip-hop. The “tags” (a term often used to describe graffiti artist signatures) of Haring and Basquiat were seen on public property around New York City well 36 before their works became cross-over symbols of Hip-hop’s shift from “urban” art to mainstream “meditations” on the urban (Haltreister 2005). 22 Other early examples of theater and performance inspired by Hip-hop include African American theater artist and producer Rhodessa Jones’ The Medea Project (1989) a theater piece that used Hip-hop music, classical theater, dance and autobiography as a vehicle to speak to incarcerated women of diverse racial and ethnic groups. A solo performer and director, Jones has used Hip-hop for over twenty years to reach troubled women and youth in the Bay Area in Northern California and has hosted a Hip-hop Theater Festival at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 23 From its early stages of development, Hip-hop has also impacted the performance practices of non-African American artists in the theater. Perhaps this is because Hip-hop’s predilection for sampling from other cultures and embracing them under the sign of Hip-hop served as model for inter-textual performance. Artists such as the late Iranian born Reza Abdoh’s Hip-hop Waltz of Eurydice (1991) used sampling in Hip-hop as a theatrical device to borrow from radio music, dance, and video and classical theater texts. Abdoh sampled from popular films such as 9 to 5 and the radio show The Bickersons and re-contextualized them with new meaning, focusing on issues of homosexuality. Abdoh’s Hip-hop Waltz delineates the 22 Haltreiter, Kim. Haltreiter, a friend of Keith Haring’s, remembers the artist’s involvement in the early Hip-hop scene in New York in the 1980s. “Funny How Things Turn Out” The Keith Haring Show (Milan, Italy: Skira), 2005. Pp. 81-85. 23 It should be noted that the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has been an integral part in developing the Hip-hop theater scene in Northern California and has developed several Hip-hop theater works including those of Will Power and Hanifah Walidah and Marc Bamuthi Joseph among others. 37 intersections of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality and uses sampling in Hip-hop as representative of how diverse groups borrow and exchange from one another and disrupt categories of difference. Hip-hop’s impact on the artistic practices of a wide range of artists of all races and ethnicities is most obviously read in the poetry and spoken word performance scenes that began to explode in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles in 1993. Artists began to create “spoken word” performance in all types of non-traditional performance spaces such as coffee houses, impromptu street theaters identifying themselves as the “Hip-hop Generation.” This spoken word performance scene began to attract a wide range of mainstream producers in theater, film and television who saw the commercial value in Hip-hop and its ability to attract a diverse racial and ethnic consumer group. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, representations of Hip-hop’s spoken word scene were reflected in various media. Hip-hop as a catchall for “diversity” was also seen in American television programs and films such Slam (1998) which explored Hip-hop slam poetry competitions in the United States and was an “audience favorite” at The Sundance Film Festival in 1998. The short-lived MTV’s The Lyricist’s Lounge Show (2000), was a Hip-hop inspired sketch comedy show that remixed Hip-hop narratives and theatrical sketches. In 2001, the popular HBO series, Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, produced by Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and his partner, television director and producer Stan Lathan, both African American, began to have great critical success and featured many Hip-hop Theater performers, such as Danny Hoch and 38 Sarah Jones, revealing the links between the spoken word scene and Hip-hop Theater. Def Poetry was adapted into a Broadway play entitled Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam in 2002. The play featured a series of spoken word vignettes performed by nine “slam poets” of diverse racial, ethnic and sexual orientations talking about their experiences using Hip-hop vernacular and rapping styles. The show premiered at the Longacre Theater and ran from November 14, 2002 to May 4, 2003. As Hip-hop began to influence performance art, theater and poetry, Hip-hop dance also began to make its shift from “street dance” to Concert dance. Hip-hop dance began to be introduced into the curriculum of dance studios around the world, earning respect as a “legitimate” dance practice. By 1994, Jonzi-D, an Afro-British London based choreographer and African American choreographer Rennie Harris, began to incorporate Hip-hop dance into large dance seminars, teaching it as an art form that is both improvised and has its own dance language. Dance studios around the United States and abroad began to feature Hip-hop dance classes. At the same time, Hip-hop inspired fine art began to move from the brick walls of urban centers to the galleries of major metropolitan cities. In the early 1990s many ex-graffiti artists shifted their skills from painting on public property exploring canvas and installation art. Contemporary art critics began to take notice. Conceptual artists such as Nikki S. Lee began to use her body to explore Hip-hop discourse in the late 1990s and was immediately signed by the Leslie Tokonow Gallery in New York and commissioned for a solo show. Lee’s work along with the works of her African American contemporaries, Sanford Biggers, Iona Rozeal 39 Brown, and Kehinde Wiley began to circulate in domestic and international galleries. 24 However, Lee’s work has had more international circulation. International artists also began to reflect Hip-hop’s impact on their artistic practices. In England, ex-graffiti artist, Banxsy, began to transition into conceptual street art and gain international attention as well as his black British contemporary Chris Ofili. Lee, Biggers, Brown, Wiley, Banxsy and Ofili all began to exhibit in major museums and galleries in the late 1990s, and early 2000s and are all influenced by Hip-hop in the United States. By the late 1990s, museum curators began to dedicate space to Hip-hop inspired art at such prestigious venues as The Bronx Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Smithsonian Museum. As Hip-Hop gained more mainstream popularity through the mid to late 1990s and began to influence theater practices, Hip-hop audiences reflected Hip- hop’s shift from “black” American music to “American” music. New marketing trends in television, film and theater focused on Hip-hop’s capacity to foster cross- racial and ethnic coalitions and began to circulate images of non-African Americans who could perform “Hip-hop” identities that sampled directly from African American culture yet were marketed, along with Hip-hop music, as “multicultural.” Meiling Cheng argues that multiculturalism “in its idealistic phase…aspires to institute fundamental changes in the directions and definitions of ‘national cultures’ through education, hiring practices and media advocacy” (2002, 1). This 24 It should be noted that though Biggers, Brown and Wiley have had international exposure, their CVs do not reflect the same level of critical exposure of Nikki S. Lee nor has their work been featured in as many permanent collections of major galleries and museums. 40 shift in the marketing of Hip-hop from being marketed as “black” music to “multicultural” music in mainstream media outlets such as MTV and VH-1 suggests a change in “national culture” and marks a systematic strategy by mainstream media to resignify Hip-hop. This moment coincides with a significant moment in American popular culture in the mid-1990s, when white youth from the suburbs became a dominant consumer base of Hip-hop and began to identify with “blackness” and “Hip-hop” as representative of notions of “hipness” and anti-establishment. By shifting Hip-hop from “black” and/or “African American” music to “multicultural”, mainstream media outlets were able to manipulate Hip-hop music and market it to a wider range of youth under an all encompassing multicultural rubric of “American” music. By the late 1990s was also a time that a wide range of Hip-hop inspired theater began to surface in mainstream American theater spaces. Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe’s collaboration, Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk, is a musical that deploys tap dance, documentary film and live music to present a chronology of African American music genres. Hip-hop figured prominently in the production. Bring in Da’ Noise premiered at the Joseph Papp Public Theater during the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1995 and later moved on to Broadway (Rose 1996). 25 Savion Glover, a renowned African American tap dancer, was heavily involved in developing the production with Wolfe. Wolfe and Glover wanted Hip-hop’s sampling of many earlier African American music forms and the capacity of the 25 Interview with George C. Wolfe and Savion Glover. Charlie Rose. PBS. New York. 11 April 1996. 41 language of tap dance to convey rhythmic translations of emotion, to be reflected in the show (Rose 1996). For many white Broadway theatergoers, Bring in Da’ Noise was their first encounter with Hip-hop. At the same historical moment that these shows were establishing a foundation for Hip-hop Theater and Performance practices, mainstream producers and playwrights questioned the need for Black Theater spaces. 26 However, this discussion often essentializes what counts as “black” theater to a specifically African American expression without consideration of its particularity within the larger global scope of “black” theater and other representations in Africa and the larger African Diaspora (Harrison 2002). 27 Other examples of early plays inspired by Hip-hop are Robert Alexander’s A Preface to the Alien Garden (1996) and Rickerby Hinds’ Blackballin’ (1996). Both Alexander and Hinds’ plays require a full cast of players and focus on issues of violence, poverty and gang life which all figure prevalently in Hip-hop narratives. From 2000-2006, Hip-hop Theater focused on multi-character driven solo performance or spoken word ensembles. Jonzi D and Benji Reid in London began to develop the Hip-hop Theater scene in England in the early 2000s focusing primarily on a synthesis of Hip-hop dance and spoken word. By 2000, Hip-Hop Theater 26 The August Wilson-Robert Brustein debate which took place in 1997 and was moderated by Anna Deavere Smith, engaged both Wilson and Brustein’s perspectives on the relevance and necessity of Black Theater. For more on this discussion see Wilson, August. The Ground on Which I Stand. New York: Theater Communications Group, 2000. 27 See Harrison, Paul Carter, Walker, Victor Leo and Edwards, Gus, Eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Harrison et al link Black American Theater practices to Africa and analyze African American Theater practices as part of a larger expression of Black Theater practices in Africa and other sites of the African Diaspora. For Harrison, black theater and performance are mutually constitutive and should incorporate both traditional conceptions of theater as well as more improvisational styles that include spoken word, Hip-hop music and African oral traditions. 42 became its own entity and no longer an extension of the spoken word scene. The year 2000 is also significant because Danny Hoch and his African American business partner, Kamilah Forbes, established the first Hip-hop Theater Festival in New York. This festival is based in the United States and is the only festival of its kind to feature Hip-hop theater and performance created by artists of diverse racial and ethnic groups. Incorporating many of the four elements of Hip-hop, Hip-hop Theater became a new type of “call and response” theater that could be recognized as the practice of performers “calling” to the audience for response and feedback by breaking the fourth wall between the performer and the audience. This “call and response” practice is most remarkable in African American theater aesthetics. Using live DJs, rappers, dancers and graffiti artists, the performers disrupted linear narratives, talked to the audience and relied heavily on improvisation to create its form. The Hip-hop Theater festival also included international interpretations of the genre featuring Afro-British performers Jonzi D and Benji Reid from London. Jonzi D’s Lyrical Fearta (2001), is a solo performance about a black British man who finds his identity in various spaces in the African Diaspora. Benji Reid’s 13 Mics (2005) is a solo performance incorporating dance, spoken word and theatrical monologues. Both Jonzi D and Reid are considered pioneers of European Hip-hop Theater. In 2007, Hip-hop Theater and Performance began to expand its scope to include more ensemble productions and to gestures towards artistic growth and the 43 desire to explore new types of expression. Hoch created a Hip-hop Theater play for a full cast entitled Till the Break of Dawn, which he describes as: A two-act play for a cast of 11 actors…it’s a Hip-Hop play. There is no rapping in it. No break dancing choreography, no graffiti and no DJ scoring it live. It is simply a play that is about a maturing Hip-Hop generation and how it is desperately struggling with contradictions, politics, identity, sense of responsibility and what community means (Hoch 2006). 28 Hoch’s description of his play begins to expand the growth of a Hip-hop Theater production and the way that production values are moving away from a “literal” engagement with Hip-hop’s four elements and more an interpretational articulation of them in Hip-hop performance. While Hoch’s production was well received, critically, it did not gain enough support to continue its run. Till the Break of Dawn signals a shift in Hip-hop Theater format to include full-scale plays (though Hinds and Alexander should be credited with writing full cast Hip-hop plays in the mid- 1990s) with ensemble casts. Hoch’s references the elements of Hip-hop, and their literal presence on the stage in Hip-hop Theater suggests his desire to see new interpretations of their use in Hip-hop inspired works. In the Heights, by Lin- Manuel Miranda uses performative codes of African Americanness in language and dance to articulate Latino perspectives. The musical was presented in workshop at the Hip-hop Theater Festival in 2006. After a successful Off-Broadway run, the show moved to Broadway in 2008. Hoch and Miranda translate the experiences of their multi-racial and ethnic characters through their engagement with Hip-hop’s 28 Hoch, Danny. Personal correspondence with Nicole Hodges Persley. 17 February 2006. 44 blackness because they identify with African American culture in Hip-hop as speaking directly to their experiences. As of 2009, the lack of Hip-hop Theater and Performance texts available in print may indicate its emergence as a genre and represent Hip-hop’s contentious relationship to African American culture and its perceived position as a multicultural art form. How should these texts be grouped? Hip-hop Theater and Performance texts have been included in African American Theater anthologies (Elam 2007) or anthologies on the Hip-hop Aesthetic (Chang 2007). Daniel Banks’ forthcoming anthology of Hip-Hop Theater plays, Across All Lines (2009) is the first critical anthology of Hip-hop Theater and Performance. Harry Elam’s The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the 21 st Century (2007) is an anthology that makes an important intervention by including Hip-Hop Theater texts by African American authors Robert Alexander, Stephen Sapp and Kamilah Forbes in an anthology of African American Theater showing the intersection of Hip-hop Theater and African American Theater. Overall, The Hip-hop Theater Festival may be one of the only venues to feature African American playwrights, performers and directors under the rubric of “Hip-hop Theater.” Many African American artists creating theater and performance work inspired by Hip-hop have found more opportunities in designated “African American” and or “Black” theater spaces than theater spaces seeking Hip-hop inspired works. Perhaps this is because many mainstream theater venues featuring Hip-hop plays and performance present works that have a “multicultural” message. I 45 talked to several African American actors who applied to the Hip-hop Theater Festival in New York in its early stages of development, and many argued that their works were rejected because they were not “Hip-hop” enough, even though they addressed Hip-hop themes. 29 However, it should be noted that the festival could easily be credited with launching the careers of several African American and African Diasporic theater and dance artists including many discussed in this dissertation. Sarah Jones’ Surface Transit was featured at the festival in 2000. Hoch and Forbes included Rickerby Hinds Keep Hedz Ringin in his festival in 2001 and 2002. Jonzi D’s Lyrical Fearta was featured at the festival in 2001. Many of the more grim tales of African American life told by Hip-hop playwrights such as Robert Alexander and Rickerby Hinds are revisited in other mediums such as Hip-hop dance. In 2001 Rennie Harris created an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, entitled Rome and Jewels, which addresses African American gang violence and is discussed in Chapter Four. The Hip-hop Theater festival featured Rennie Harris’s Puremovement dance ensemble in the 2002 festival. Hip-hop Theater: Black Theater, Multicultural Theater or both? Hip-hop’s relationship to blackness became a point of debate as scholars and performers debated Hip-hop Theater’s ‘origins’ in American Theatre in 2004. The editors of the magazine initiated a discussion on Hip-hop Theater and its relationship to blackness and the rights to its cultural property creating a dialogue between theater 29 These conversations were with several of my colleagues who applied to the festival and were rejected. All were African American men who argued the festival favored works with a “multicultural” theme versus those that speak directly to African American experiences with Hip-hop. 46 scholars and Hip-hop Theater artists. The core of the debate focused on issues of Hip-Hop Theater’s relationship to blackness, universality and multiculturalism. Because of Hip-hop Theater and Performance’s intersection with African American Theater, many African American theater artists choose to promote their works as African American Theater instead of Hip-hop Theater because they can gain more access to audiences who identify with their topics and more producers to fund their work. Hip-hop Theater and Performance samples from tenets of African American theater largely because many works borrow from African American aesthetic practices and use theater as a platform for social critique. However Hip-hop Theater can be classified as “black”/ “African American” theater and/or “multicultural” theater. On the one hand, Hip-hop Theater is indebted to the African American Theater continuum as its aesthetic is heavily influenced by African American cultural production. On the other hand, Hip-hop’s multiracial and ethnic consumer and producer base suggests a wide range of non-African American artists who create Hip-hop inspired theater and performance. Early meditations on African American Theater discussed by W.E.B. Dubois in the early 20 th century and later by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka during the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s, can easily be read in Danny Hoch’s manifesto “Towards a Hip-hop Aesthetic: A Manifesto of the Hip-hop Arts Movement,’ 30 ” which addresses the contradictions of defining a Hip-hop Theater aesthetic. American Theater published Hoch’s manifesto in 2004, giving him a platform to 30 Hoch, Danny. “Towards a Hip-hop Aesthetic: A Manifesto for a Hip-hop Arts Movement” American Theater, 2004. 47 outline his perspectives on Hip-hop generally and what Hip-hop inspired art should aspire to achieve in performance. Hoch was the first artist to position himself as the unofficial “porte-parole” of the genre. Art manifestos have been a large part of marginal art movements from Jean Moréas’ “Symbolist Manifesto” (1886) to Larry Neal’s manifesto for a Black Arts Movement (1965) 31 . According to Martin Puchner (2005), art manifestos “often make projective and presumptuous claims to authority” (25) and often present the desire of the writer to make social and political claims on behalf of a larger group. Stephen Petersen also asserts in “Looking at Artists Manifestos, 1945—1965” that art manifestos operate as “as public declarations of intention, printed manifestos offered a critical outlet for artists' ideas in the 20th century, serving as both rhetorical and visual statements of position in the art world and in society…” (28-29). In “Hip- hop Arts Manifesto,” Hoch presents a rhetorical presentation of his ideas about Hip- hop performance and indeed makes a public declaration of what Hip-hop Arts should look like to an audience and to the artist. He argues Hip-hop “issues from the following traditions, conditions and phenomena”: • An African and Caribbean continuum of storytelling and art • A polycultural community of both immigrants and migrants • Appropriation of European cultural traditions and Japanese technology • A legacy of political and gang organizing • The bumpy transition from post-Civil Rights and militarized nationalist organizing to the supply side of economics in the 1980s 31 Jean Moreas’ Symbolist Manifesto outlined the artist’s desire to communicate the essence of truth without focus on the use plain speech to describe everyday experiences, instead using colorful and symbolic meaning to create an experience of an idea. See "Le Symbolisme", Le Figaro, September 18, 1886. Larry Neal’s “The Black Arts Movement’ (1969) is an essay that outlines the desired aesthetic for black people to create art and theater. 48 • The devastating effect of post Reganomics on urban America • The age of accelerated technology (2004) Hoch outlines the social and political conditions that surround Hip-hop’s production. Yet does not make it clear how these “phenomena” also had significant impact on African American populations that ultimately were the dominant artistic contributors to Hip-hop. In presenting these criteria for Hip-hop Art, Hoch does not mention that as a white, Jewish man, he is a minority among a predominantly black production base in Hip-hop and may not represent the views of the majority of African Americans who create Hip-hop in its most popular form. Though white people may be the largest group of consumers of Hip-hop music and culture, they are obviously not the most popular group of cultural contributors. 32 African American Theater scholar Harry Elam was also asked to comment on Hip-hop Theater in American Theatre’s analysis of Hip-hop performance practices. Elam notes an overlap with Hip-hop Theater and African American cultural practices: While hip-hop theatre is a new form of cultural expression, it still retains, repeats, and revises the past as it pushes into the future. With its celebration of language, meter, poetic strictures, verbal play and display, it hearkens back to earlier traditions of oral expression in African-American culture, such as the spoken word of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, and even to classical theatrical conventions and the productive wordplay of William Shakespeare. Hip-hop theatre's inclusion of actual, live rap music and DJ scratching and sampling, its allowance for freestyle improvisation, its embrace of non- linearity and presentational direct address to the audience, breaks with conventional theatrical realism and reflects contemporary artistic directions (110). 32 I make this assertion based on the fact that African Americans have the largest amount of artistic production in Hip-hop. Their works are the most widely consumed Hip-hop music around the world based on record sales and mainstream media circulation of Hip-hop videos. See VH-1 “The Greatest 50 hip-hop Artists” www.vh-1.com accessed 12 September 2008. 49 Elam identifies Hip-hop Theater as one of several forms of oral expression in African American culture. Outlining many of the performative codes discussed in Sampling Blackness such as language, verbal play and display, Elam notes Hip-hop Theater’s use of sampling and improvisational practices reflects its diversity as a new form of cultural expression indebted to African American oral expression. Hip- hop improvises its aesthetic as a sampled creation that draws from several African, African Diasporic and European retentions. However, it is the re-articulation of these samples under the sign of Hip-hop by African Americans that links Hip-hop Theater and Performance to blackness. Later in his manifesto Hoch argues Hip-hop is indebted to African American culture but is not dependent on it to survive: The notion that hip-hop is solely an African-American art form is erroneous. It is part of the African continuum, and if it were not for African Americans there would be no hip-hop, but neither would hip-hop exist if not for the polycultural social construct of New York in the 1970s (2004). While Hoch credits African American aesthetic practices as the foundation of Hip-hop’s cultural production, he recognizes Hip-hop as a “polycultural” site of artistic expression that can be separated from the racial and ethnic identities of its creators. However, Hoch uses New York, as the birthplace of Hip-hop, to validate notions of Hip-hop “authenticity.” Hoch cites African American cultural production as the foundation upon which Hip-hop arts should be produced, yet his insistence that Hip-hop’s existence is dependent upon the multiple racial and ethnic groups that contributed to Hip-hop’s creation in New York in the 1970s situates Hip-hop Theater 50 and Performance at a matrix of cross-racial and ethnic interactions under the sign of blackness and Hip-hop. However, in citing Robin D.G. Kelley’s concept of ‘polyculturalism’ explained in his essay “People in Me: So, What are you?” (1999), Hoch misses the nuance of Kelley’s argument that black people, and all other racial and ethnic groups, borrow aesthetic practices and cultural identifications from one another. Kelley defines 'polyculturalism', as an alternative to notions of 'multiculturalism': …we were and are `polycultural.’ By `we,’ I'm not simply talking about my own family or even my `hood, but all peoples in the Western world. It is not our skin or hair or walks or talk that renders black people so incredibly diverse. Rather, it is the fact that most black people in the Americas are products of a variety of different `cultures’ -- living cultures, not dead ones …. I think the term `polycultural’ works a lot better than `multicultural,’ since the latter often implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side -- a kind of zoological approach to culture… . Such a view of multiculturalism not only obscures power relations, but often reifies race and gender differences … . To acknowledge our polycultural heritage and cultural dynamism is not to give up our black identity or our love and concern for black people. It does mean expanding our definition of blackness, taking our history more seriously, and looking at the rich diversity within us with new eyes. (2) Kelley is using the term polycultural to consider the multiplicity of racial and ethnic identities and the ways in which blackness is multicentric (Cheng 2002) having multiple articulations and ‘centers’ that cannot be limited to one particular definition. What is obvious in Hoch’s critique about Hip-hop being understood as uniquely “African American” is his ambivalence about Hip-hop’s association with a particular African American articulation of blackness. Polyculturalism is not a term that collapses race and ethnicity into a “race-free” zone of cultural exchange, yet it 51 opens new possibilities to imagine the multiplicity of racial and ethnic identifications and their inter-relationships. Additionally, other black artists who immigrated to the United States from Jamaica such as DJ Kool Herc, a Hip-hop pioneer, fused Jamaican aesthetic practices to Hip-hop’s aesthetic to create a remix of African Diasporic subjectivity rooted in the African American experience (Chang 2005). 33 Dominant immigrant populations of Asian and Latino communities in New York also contributed to Hip-hop’s aesthetic, yet these contributions are most often subsumed under the sign of blackness and Hip-hop. Sampling Blackness is in direct conversation with Hoch’s manifesto. I complicate Hoch’s assertion about Hip-hop and its relationship to African American cultural production, asking why African American particularity in Hip-hop persists as a representation of “authenticity” for African American and non- African American artists? While African Americans should be credited for their cultural contributions to American popular culture, do non-African Americans feel more comfortable exploring Hip-hop when they see it as a “multicultural” art form and not an African American one? If African American cultural production does not define Hip-hop’s aesthetic, why does Hip-hop continue to be positioned as part of the African continuum? Why are African American cultural retentions and contributions in Hip-hop often absorbed as “multicultural” representations of Hip- hop? 33 Chang, Jeff. , Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation New York: Picador Press, 2005. 52 Hip-hop Theater and Performance artists’ sampling of blackness is indicative of a ideological shift in a new generation of artists who choose to privilege art with a dominant African American aesthetic as a model of creativity and ingenuity that can incite social change. This privileging of “blackness” and de-centering of “whiteness” and its association with European culture and mainstream theater practices is reflected in Hip-hop Theater and Performance. African Americans and non-African Americans have the capacity to benefit materially and artistically from Hip-hop’s commodification by mainstream producers and foundations. The contradictions and indeterminacies that determine this attraction by non-African American artists animate my investigation of non-African American performance practices inspired by Hip-hop in Sampling Blackness. Hoch’s manifesto ultimately samples from W.E.B. Dubois’ definition of black theater. 34 Dubois’ original definition defined Black Theater as “about us, by us, for us, and near us” referencing African American people as the “us.” Hoch remixes his version of Dubois arguing Hip-hop Theater is “by, about, and for the Hip-hop generation, participant in Hip- hop culture, or both” (5). However, it is important to note the social and historical context of Dubois’ original statement from which Hoch samples. Dubois was responding to a historical moment in the American theater in 1926 when black artists were fighting against negative representations of blackness by whites. Many white actors sampled from performative codes of African American identity to create stereotypical caricatures of blacks in the minstrel image. 34 Dubois’ original definition for Black Theater has been appropriated by many artists including Amiri Baraka and Danny Hoch. See W. E. B. Du Bois, "Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre," Crisis 32.3 (1926): 134-136. 53 Even in cases when white playwrights and actors played “black” characters with the intention of presenting the injustices of slavery and the oppression of blacks, African American actors and playwrights had to address these performances of blackness as they grappled with their own representations of the social conditions of African Americans. 35 Moreover, Dubois was interested in developing the voices of black writers and performers who could disrupt black racial stereotypes circulated in the American theater that were created by both black and white artists. Dubois’ definition of black theater was a call to African American artists to develop a more complex depiction of black life than those presented in blackface minstrelsy and other demeaning depictions of black life in the United States 36 . Hoch samples from Dubois to create his definition of Hip-hop Theater as theater “by, about, for the Hip-hop generation” automatically creating a connection between Dubois’ representation of African American Theater to Hip-hop Theater and Performance. In sampling, Hoch is also entitled to re-articulate the language used by Dubois to help define Hip-hop Theater in his own way. This is the goal of sampling. Yet Hoch does not credit Dubois in his sampling of his ideas. He is entitled to make his own adaptations of Dubois’ ideas, as many have and will continue to do. However, the African American aesthetics that dominate Hip-hop 35 One example of attempts by white performers to present the social plight of African Americans in the 19 th century theater include George Aiken’s adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist text Uncle Tom’s Cabin which uses white actors to play slaves. Later as the show toured in the early 20 th century, several adaptations began to surface across the United States. In some productions, black actors where employed to portray the black roles, namely Uncle Tom and Topsy characters. 36 Dubois’ sentiments were later re-articulated by Amiri Baraka in the late 1960s during his development of BARTS (Black Arts Repertory Theater). 54 are important and should be considered as one of multiple possibilities of blackness. The European, Asian, Latino, Native American, African Diasporic and other ethnic contributions that contribute to Hip-hop’s aesthetic are absorbed under the sign of blackness. What I ask Hoch and others engaged in the Hip-hop Theater debate to consider is the intersection between blackness and notions of multiculturalism. The “us” defined in Hoch’s manifesto on Hip-hop theater shifts over time and is transformed from a black “us” as determined by Dubois, to a “multicultural” “us” determined by Hoch. Though Hoch contends Hip-hop is indeed polycultural and not “multicultural” however, his attempts to neatly reconcile Hip-hop’s relationship to blackness to its multi-racial and ethnic consumer and producer base often re- inscribes “multicultural” ideals that often negate to social, historic and economic significance of race and its impact on cultural production in order for diverse groups to “co-exist.” Diverse groups can engage predominantly black artistic practices, acknowledge the impact of African American culture on its production, and simultaneously maintain their racial, ethnic and cultural identities while making claims to Hip-hop. Because Hip-hop Theater is in the midst of defining itself, few critical analyses investigate the privilege accorded the work of artists labeled “multicultural” and/or “multi-racial.” Though there is a dominant group of African American performers who are Hip-hop Theater and Performance artists, mainstream venues rarely showcase the work of the African American artists such as Will Power, Zell 55 Miller, LeVan D. Hawkins and Hanifah Walidah. 37 These artists remain on the margins of Hip-hop Theater and performance perhaps because they present a strong critique of Hip-hop as well as Hip-hop Theater’s marginalization of African American performers. For example, performance artists Levan D. Hawkins and Hanifah Walidah address the “normative” heterosexuality of Hip-hop and critique performance art’s “normative” whiteness. I assert that that mainstream funders and producers who are attracted to the commercial appeal of Hip-hop’s “multicultural” audience are reluctant to represent the genre with African American performers because they want to capitalize on Hip-hop’s global appeal and use Hip-hop themed performance to attract a more diverse audience. Roberta Uno (2004) notes Hip-hop Theater offers an opportunity for mainstream theater producers to encapsulate it as a “catchall” in order to capitalize on this multicultural appeal. For Uno, the appropriation of Hip-hop is used to diversify the normative whiteness of mainstream theater spaces and reduces the genre to an essence which only sees Hip-hop’s four key elements of DJing, Breaking, Graffiti and Emceeing, as mere novelties. However, many producers miss the opportunity that Hip-hop offers to explore the normative whiteness of the mainstream theater. The social and cultural perspectives of mainstream theater artists and audiences are gravitating away from 37 All of these artists are African American. Will Power is from Northern California and is a colleague of Danny Hoch and Rhodessa Jones. Hoch has directed Will’s work and made efforts to help him receive more exposure. Zell Miller is a solo performer/spoken word artist from Austin, Texas whose works have appeared in Austin Fringe Festival. Both Hanifah Walidah and Levan D Hawkins are black queer performance artists who take Hip- hop to task for excluding black queer culture from the Hip-hop community. Hanifah Walidah was included in the first hip-hop Theater Festival in NYC in 2003 with her solo performance, Straight Black Folks Guide to Gay Black Folks. Hawkins’ Black Stuff was featured at The National Black Theater Festival in 2006 and at the New York Fringe Festival in 2007. 56 “whiteness” and towards blackness and its aesthetic foundations. Issues of agency, self-determination, social change, and anti-black racism have come to represent the best of Hip-hop. Other defining characteristics of Hip-hop music such as gratuitous violence, misogyny, homophobia, and capitalist agendas are often romanticized and negatively impact how Hip-hop is generally perceived. In both instances, all of these issues are shaped by Hip-hop’s relationship to blackness and are articulated in its narratives and performative codes. In some instances, non-African American Hip- hop Theater and Performance artists attempt to negotiate and create legitimate responses to these social dilemmas in their work. However, non-black artists do not have to live as a black subject and can leave their “blackness” behind once their Hip- hop performance is over. Meanwhile, the African American people whose life experiences are recounted in many mainstream Hip-hop narratives must bear the social responsibility of finding answers to these complex social problems that impact their lives, not just when they engage them in performance. It is the negotiation and responses to living as a black person in everyday life that produce the expressions of blackness sampled in Hip-hop. Many Hip-hop Theater and Performance artists see Hip-hop as a site to play with identity and to reveal the fluidity of the boundaries of racial and ethnic categories. By engaging in cross-racial and ethnic performance, they feel they can experience culture selectively, much like an à la carte menu without engaging the “political” aspects of racial and ethnic identities that produce cultural practices. As Stuart Hall argues, popular culture is not necessarily a place where we find truth, but 57 is a place where “we play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time” (1994, 474). The Performable Qualities of Blackness: Cross-Racial and Ethnic Performance Recent scholarship in African American Theater and Performance Studies addresses the performable qualities of blackness and intersections of race and gender. Important to my considerations of blackness and its possibility of being conceived as a multicentric construct is the work of Harry Elam and David Krasner (2001). Elam and Krasner ask how black theater scholarship is informed by the wide range of translations of blackness over time that have shaped theater history and are complicated by ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender. Hip-hop Theater and Performance and its engagement with particular articulations of blackness by African Americans in Hip-hop, are part of this process of defining how cross-racial performance shapes American and global theater history. E. Patrick Johnson (2003) theorizes how representations of blackness in the United States intersect performatively with understandings of race, gender and sexuality within the context of African American life as well as abroad. His discussion of the appropriation of African American gospel music styles by all white gospel choirs from Australia identifies particular performative codes of African American cultural identity that are sampled in sound. Additionally, Kimberly W. Benston (2000) examines the links between “systematic and improvisatory expression” (2000, 249) in black vernacular culture. Speaking specifically about African American cultural production, Benston 58 argues that “blackness” is a site of ongoing negotiation and is subject to “multiple and often conflicting implications of possibility” (2000, 51). Alexander Weheliye asks us to consider the “usefulness of identitarian thinking in conceptualizing black culture” (2006, 206). 38 Though Weheliye argues black culture cannot be reduced to African American particularities, this investigation of cultural and ethnic specificity of blackness circulated through Hip- hop attempts to locate how particular translations of blacknesses are produced and lived by black subjects within a historical set of social circumstances. While African Americans in Hip-hop often embrace optimistic views of cross-racial and ethnic exchanges, issues of cultural property, diminished social opportunity and racist institutional practices that occur when Hip-hop is separated from African American cultural production are often not considered. All of the performers in this dissertation engage in some form of cross-racial and/or ethnic performance. Because Hoch, Lee and Jonzi D engage black racial stereotypes either using language, styles of self-adornment or embodied gesture at some point in their performances, they evoke issues of blackface minstrelsy. Hip-hop inspires theater and other types of performance of whites, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Middle Easterners, and other ethnic groups who sample from performative codes of African Americanness in hopes of validating their Hip-hop characters, images, and/or dance moves. Scholarship on blackface minstrelsy most often focuses on whites performing blackness on stage (Rogin 1995; 38 See Weheliye, Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 59 Lott 1995; Ignatiev 1997) and addresses the physical representation of blackness as white performers “corked up” to appear racially black. Though the late 19 th and early 20 th century marks the purported “end” of blackface performance in the United States, residues of these performance practices persist in our current moment and can be identified as post-minstrel performance. I argue “post-minstrel” scholarship can be read as those works that continue discussions of blackface and make connections to its practices in the past to performance practices in our current moment. Historically, we have seen these samples of the performative codes of blackness in the performance black music genres such as jazz (Mailer 1957; Roediger 2000; Moten 2003) and Hip-hop (Kitwana 2005; Tate 2006) by non- African Americans. Other scholarship that addresses the cross-cultural appropriation of black American music and the performative codes of identity associated with African American musicians by white musicians in the work on rock n’ roll music (Lott 1995; Lipsitz 1997) and jazz music (Berliner 1998; Monson 2001; Lhamon 2002; De Shong 2005). Two works that engage possibilities of re-inscribing minstrel images in popular culture and gesture towards the possibilities of cross-racial performance to enable cross-racial and ethnic coalitions in performance are Eric Lott’s Love and Theft (1995) and David Roediger’s Colored White (2002). Lott focuses on the transgressive nature of 19th century blackface minstrelsy that has historically sampled from performative codes of African American blackness in a fashion that essentializes the black subject as inferior through racial mimicry. Roediger (2002) examines the persistence of these types of transgressive performances in our current 60 moment focusing on the resurgence of white performers who reinvigorate the memory of blackface through their borrowing of African American articulations of blackness without blackface. However, the artists often use familiar tropes of blackness that circulate in black music genres as a license to perform blackness. Roediger reads these types of performances between whites and blacks as “progressive minstrelsy,” however the latter terminology does not consider the ways other racial and ethnic groups also engage the same performative codes of Hip-hop discourse to perform blackness as Hip-hop. Post-minstrel performance 39 can be read as performances that revise past performance of blackface by using black racial stereotypes, language, styles of dress and/or new “politically correct” technologies such as self-tanning and/or “bronze” make-up to indicate a “tanned” version of blackness in order to appear more “black.” These artists may also use of other codes of self-adornment associated with African Americans in Hip-hop such as clothing, hairstyles and other physical embellishments such as the use of jewelry that indicate “blackness” in Hip-hop. These performers may choose not to indicate a “physical” blackness and instead use gestures, language and oral narratives of African American subjects to indicate “blackness.” By allowing some performers to engage blackness and sanctioning others, African 39 Post- minstrelsy allows for a revision of the terms of racial performance and can account for the performer’s intention to create revisionist histories of minstrelsy. My term Post-minstrelsy is sampled from Robert Christgau’s use of the term “postmodern minstrelsy” in the title of an essay on the history of Jim Crow. Christgau argues for need for scholars to further explore the contradictions of blackface performance. My investigation of non-African American performers’ performance of blackness engages these contradictions that include but are not limited to the ambivalence of whites to black oppression, class hierarchies between black and white working class, and desire of white men to “put on” blackface as a temporary form of pleasure. I complicate existing assertion in regards to blackface scholarship by exploring how whites, black of non-Africa American descent and Asians reinvest the minstrel images. 61 American consumers often present inconsistent definitions of who has the authority to perform codes of African American identity within Hip-hop culture. Conversely, what I define as cross-racial and ethnic coalitions in performance are those attempts by artists of one racial or ethnic group to use their art to identify with the social, political and cultural oppression of another racial and/or ethnic group. Cross-racial and ethnic coalitions are performances that may mobilize African American performative codes used in Hip-hop discourse. Yet the goal of the performer is to use these codes to present a more in-depth performance of a character working to create cross-racial and ethnic dialogues about oppression, racism and cultural appropriation across-racial and ethnic lines. Often, these artists attempt to use their artistic practice to suggest possibilities of coalitions building based on a shared struggle. Scholarship that expands the black-white binary and considers these potential coalitions in cross-racial and ethnic performance has been initiated by Dorinne Kondo (2000) and David Romàn (2005) who argue cross-racial and ethnic performances have the potential to be both transgressive and redemptive. Furthermore, the black-white binary is expanded in this dissertation by including the performances of black stereotypes by non-whites. The scholarship of David Krasner (2003) and Daphne Brooks (2007) is informative in that both scholars discuss the redemptive qualities of blackface performance and the ways that African Americans have also used blackface to subvert dominant narratives and stereotypes of African American life. Also important is that recent scholarship in Afro-Asian Studies, 62 address issues of Asian and Asian American performances of blackness as it is related to Hip-hop as well as African American appropriations of “Asian” culture (Wang 2002; Prashad 2002; Maira 2002; Steen and Hernandez 2004). Meditations on Latino engagements with blackness through Hip-hop (De Genova and Ramos- Zayas 2003) 40 address non-physical references to blackness such as the use of African American vernacular and styles of dress (Marez 2005; Muňoz 2006) appropriated by Latinos to appear more Hip-hop. Equally important is scholarship on the transgressive qualities of cross-racial performance in the 20th century (hooks 1995; Pellegrini 1995; Fuss 1885; Gubar 2000) that primarily focuses on whites performing blackness. In all of these instances, we can see both redemptive and essentializing potential. This dissertation considers the previous mediations on cross-racial performance between white and black subjects, yet adds to more recent considerations that complicate the black-white binary and address the possibilities of transgressive cross-racial performance between minority groups (Kondo 2000; Prashad 2002; Waegner 2006) and the possibilities for cross-racial and ethnic coalitions. The idea of transgression can have both positive and negative connotations. One the one hand, a minority artist has the capacity to reinscribe racial and ethnic stereotypes of another minoritized person. One the other hand, he or she can engage these stereotypes to enable a deeper understanding of social and political ways stereotypes are used to create tensions between minorities. The cross-racial and 40 Degenova, Nicolas and Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and the Politics of Race and Citizenship, New York; Routledge, 2003. 63 ethnic performances by artists in this study can be read within this binary of post- minstrel and cross-racial performance, however, these are two of several possibilities available to describe the complexity of their performances and their ability to transgress and transcend what blackness signifies. The case studies I use in Sampling Blackness intersect in both of these types of performance and are used to illustrate how sampling as a form of theatrical improvisation is used by these artists to identify and translate particular codes of African American identity to validate their engagement with Hip-hop music and culture. Sampling in Hip-hop My theorization of sampling as a form of theatrical improvisation incorporates practices in theater and music improvisation, but also considers more abstract forms that contribute to Hip-hop’s improvised aesthetic such as African Griot traditions of oral storytelling (Carter Harrison 1974) the sampling of music (Schloss 2005) and lyrical freestyle practice performed by Hip-hop MCs (Rose 1994; Miller 2003). Improvisation is most often associated with theater games (Spolin 1999; Boal 1993; Seham 2001) and music improvisation, primarily associated with jazz (Berliner 1994; Monson 1996). Emergent literatures that create an intersection between improvisation studies and cultural theory appear in Hip-hop Studies (Dyson 1998) African American Studies (Moten 2005; Benston 2005; Weheliye 2005) Cultural Studies (Hebdige 1995; Fishlin and Heble 2004) and the emergent field of Improvisation Studies (Smith and Dean 1997). Here I give a broad sketch of 64 sampling in Hip-hop music and culture and then consider sampling as a theatrical process of improvisation in performance. Tricia Rose’s analysis of sampling as in Black Noise (1994) argues musical sampling in Hip-hop is “a process of repetition and re-contextualization” (73). Sampling, not only in Hip-hop but also in other music traditions, is the act of borrowing a part of an existing song, instrumental or with lyrics, or sound bite from real life, film, television, etc. to form a new creation that, in most cases, has no direct dialectic relationship to the original. Yet even when these segments are borrowed and reconnected through sampling, there are seams between what is borrowed and its connection to another piece. Many African American Hip-hop artists make a point of “citing” their samples. In the case of music beats, they often re-work the refrain of a sampled song giving credit to the original artist. They may also make a disclaimer about why a particular beat was selected in interviews. In the case of visual culture, product and fashion samples, many African American Hip-hop artists make public disclaimers about why they sample particular sounds, images and or fashions. Rappers specifically cite the names of European fashion designers, exclusive car companies and jewelry designers and explain their influences on expressions of African American identity. 41 They often do this with hopes that they will be asked to 41 Examples of positive citation of European fashion designers occur in many Hip-hop narratives. Kanye West cites French design house Louis Vuitton in his raps and was asked to design a line of sneakers for the label in 2008. Lil; Kim has cited labels such as March Jacobs and Adrienne Vittadini in her raps. She is considered the muse for the white designer Marc Jacobs. Conversely, many rappers sample from expensive European and American labels and are admonished by the companies. For example, the rapper Jay-Z called for a boycott of the French champagne Cristal when an executive for the company stated that they were not associated in any way 65 represent the lines and profit from Hip-hop’s global popularity or to demonstrate that they have access to luxury items that give them prestige. In other cases, many rappers and other artists engaged with Hip-hop simply sample without any regard for the ways that particular codes are de-contextualized and may denigrate the groups and that produced the original cultural codes. Just as the academy sanctions scholars who “sample” from other’s scholar’s work without citing the source of their ideas, Hip-hop also sanctions artists that sample from blackness without an acknowledgement of African American culture. These sanctions may take place within the Hip-hop community and, for the most part, address internal conflicts between rappers. These battles often occur within the raps themselves and may address any number of issues from how a rapper stole the “flow” of an existing rapper to the way another rapper used the same beat of another presenting it as “original.” However, these sanctions are few, as many commercially successful African American Hip-hop artists do not want to critique African American or non-African American performers because they do not want to marginalize their audiences. In Cut and Mix, Dick Hebdige speaks of these spaces of suture in a Hip-hop sampling. Hebdige discusses how multiple influences united through the act of sampling to produce an original recording. He argues: A hip-hop record can contain recognizable snatches of hard rock, electro funk, salsa, soul, new wave, jazz and so on. In fact, a DJ can pull in any sound from a recording of a car screeching around the corner or television with Hip-hop despite the company’s product being cited in many Hip-hop songs. See “Jay-Z Boycotts Cristal Champagne” BBC News June 16, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5086482.stm. 66 news broadcast to Frank Sinatra singing My Way. It can be added to the mix. What we get at the end of all this cutting and mixing is a mosaic effect. Just as in a mosaic the overall pattern is made by placing little bits of colored stone together, so hip-hop is made by placing fragments of sound from quite different sources and traditions (1991, 129) Though many times the DJ is conscious of the pretext and context of the narratives and sounds from which s/he samples, s/he may also simply borrow them for effect with little consideration for their eventual de-contextualization. What is “black” and specifically African American about sampling in the context of Hip-hop is the fact that as Hip-hop began in the late 1970s, many African American DJs “made do” using previously recorded African American music (as well as the music of other racial and ethnic groups) in order to articulate their experiences in the present. DJs were improvisational composers creating relationships between the past and present of African American life as they also created performative connections between African American, other African Diasporic blacks as well as a wide range of racial, ethnic and national groups through sound. Using two turntables and two albums, African American DJ’s created performances that demonstrated originality and creativity and their ability to bring disparate works together in a form of sound pastiche to articulate their racial and ethnic experiences in sound. Moreover, many African American DJs sampled out of necessity because they did not have instruments to make music were forced to find innovative ways to borrow the sounds they were looking for in extant recordings to create sound collages. Joseph Schloss’ (2004) argues that sampling is a musical process based in improvisational practices that have African Diasporic roots: 67 Hip-hop developed in New York City in neighborhoods that were dominated by people of African descent from the continental United States, Puerto Rico and the West Indies. As a result, African derived aesthetics, social norms, standards and sensibilities are deeply embedded in the form, even when it is being performed by individuals who are not themselves of African descent (2005, 3) The performances in this study reflect the types of identity negotiations happening in sound when Hip-hop DJs make cross-cultural connections through music around the world. Schloss highlights the hybridity of Hip-hop, yet also gives an example of the ways that non-African American performers draw from African derived aesthetics to produce Hip-hop. By inhabiting the discourse of Hip-hop, people who are not of African descent can perform African Americanness, even though these performances may vary in degrees of cultural fluency. Schloss references the African Diasporic contributions of early Hip-Hop innovators in New York in the early eighties who developed Hip-Hop technologies such as scratching and mixing- the first techniques used to sample before the digital era. DJ Spooky, aka Paul Miller, speaks of DJ culture and the sampling process as one that enables a digital storytelling. Miller analyzes Hip-Hop as one of several black musical traditions that uses improvisation. In his chapter “The New Griots,”(2004) he argues “The best DJs are griots… and whether their stories are conscious or unconscious, narratives are implicit in the sampling idea….every story leads to another story …” (21). Miller also mentions the historical continuum of African American music forms based in improvisation, such as the blues and jazz. Blackness, performed through music, becomes a free flowing space where 68 … everyone could play the same song but flipped it every which way until it became ‘their own sound.’ In jazz…it’s the fluid process of ‘call and response’ between the players of an ensemble... these are the predecessors of the mixing board metaphor for how we live and think in this age of information (24). Russell Potter (1999) argues the creativity and artistry of sampling occurs when Hip-hop artists borrow from something that is completely disassociated with the music and culture. An example of how Hip-hop artists sample from diverse racial and ethnic groups to articulate blackness is evident in African American Hip- hop artist P.Diddy Combs hit song, “Missing You,” a Hip-hop memorial to the late Biggie Smalls. The song sold three million records and relied on a catchy sample from the hit 1980s song “Every Breath You Take” written and performed by the British rock group The Police. In fact, as Jeff Schloss continues, “…many of the most popular break beats in Hip-hop have been drawn from white rock artists…” (31). Schloss comment on the sampling of white artist is significant because of Hip- hop’s association with African Americans and African American music. Sampling in Hip-hop enables DJs to remix categories of difference such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. that are represented in sound and to produce their own remixed “originals” of identity under the sign of blackness and Hip-hop. However, Hip-hop’s focus on re-mixing various African American music genres with other cultural influences suggests and awareness of many African American DJs that African Americanness defines itself through similarity and difference in Hip-hop (Hall 1995). 69 Intersections of Improvisation and Identity Negotiation Improvisation in the theater has been practiced for thousands of years and is not a practice found exclusively in black theater and performance. However, improvisational practices have a historical continuum in African American theater in the United States and have been noted as early as the 1800s. 42 Studies on improvisation range from theater (Spolin 2001) to music theory (Monson 2003) to dance (Albright and Gere 2003). Improvisation has been used in many types of theatrical performance from ancient African Griot traditions (Carter Harrison 1991; Elam 2004) to Homeric traditions of oral storytelling through the use of formulaic improvisation (Ong 2002) to commedia dell’ arte (Rudlin 1994). Theatrical improvisations of African Americanness by actors and other performers is not just part of Hip-hop Theater and Performance. As African American cultural production circulates around the world, many parts of African American identity have been sampled by both black and non-black artists. In Ghana, Catherine Cole (2001) notes that Akan theater artists often borrowed from stereotypical representations of blacks that circulated in American film and used them to articulate their identities as Ghanaians. They used their creativity made of “performance skills, improvisation, repetition and revision to transform existing structure, idioms, narrative prejudices and tropes into fresh 42 In my paper “Improvisation as the Process of Re-articulation of Subjectivities in the Black Arts Theater: Locating the Ruptures in the Racial Ideology of the American Theater” I trace how improvisation was used not only over struggles for representation in American Theater since the late 1800s. For example, in the 1820s a black actress, S. Welsh, performed Lady Ann from Richard III adding “a popular song “into the text to render Lady Ann and into a “resilient heroine who discovers her redemptive possibilities” (McAllister 2003, 58). See Marvin Mc Allister’s White People Don’t Know How to Behave at Entertainment’s Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 70 material” (118). These non-African American theater artists incorporated familiar images of African Americans, including minstrel images, into new forms and contexts. Hazel Smith and Roger Dean (1997) contend that improvisation as a practice must not be relegated to “romantic notions of spontaneity, simplicity and lack of expertise; they are no more appropriate to improvisation that to any other creative process...” (1997, 25). Smith and Dean contend that theories of improvisation must consider “balances between using procedural formulae and pre- existent material, and creating new material, new combinations of material and new procedures”(29). Hoch, Lee and Jonzi D all play with these “balances” between using pre-existing material and developing new and spontaneous interpretations of blackness. The artists draw from a wide array of artistic training and life experiences that inform their engagements with blackness and Hip-hop. Also important in theater and improvisation studies is Viola Spolin’s work on improvisation and the ways it can be used to help actors develop characters in the theater (1983). Spolin locates spontaneity in improvisation as a site for potential agency. She contends that “through spontaneity, we are re-formed into ourselves...[it] frees us from handed-down frames of reference...and undigested theories and techniques of other people’s findings...it is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression”(4). Spolin highlights that improvisation is not simply “spontaneous,” but it can be used as a tool to disrupt “handed down” frames of reference that include representations of race, ethnicity and gender. The spontaneity within improvisation and its capacity to be used as a theatrical tool that 71 performers learn to use with varying levels of skill and precision are important to understanding my theorization of sampling as tool of theatrical improvisation. Thus, the artists in Sampling Blackness enact this “ongoing negotiation” of blackness through Hip-hop and offer new possibilities of blackness. Sampling as Theatrical Improvisation: Acting Hip-hop By using sampling in Hip-hop to understand the way that artists sample performative codes of identity in performance, I highlight improvisation’s capacity to be understood as both a spontaneous and learned practice. Often what appears to be spontaneous in Hip-hop Theater and Performance is the result of artists learning and translating other racial and ethnic codes that produce identity. The process of engaging these codes in performance are read as “sampling” parts of identity that the performers have observed in their environment, life experiences and/or created in their imaginations. Sampling as a form of theatrical improvisation and meaning making should not be understood as different from acting, but as a theatrical process that can be used in all types of performance. I contend all of these performances require the artists to engage in some type of improvisation where they use their voice and/or bodies to improvise Hip-hop identities in performance and thus create relationships to blackness. The artists sample codes of African Americanness in acts of improvisation that allow them to create theater and performance that is categorized and recognized as Hip-hop. In some cases, these cross-racial and ethnic performances create representations of Hip-hop that re-inscribe existing racial, ethnic and gender 72 stereotypes of African Americans. They present a “sketch” of black people as representative of Hip-hop that denigrate African American experiences and often re- inscribe minstrel images. This “sketch” quality of improvisational theater is important to this study and my use of sampling as a theatrical term. Many understand improvisational performance in music and theater to indicate “on the spot” performances that are not pre-mediated. However, even traditional sketch comedy that is improvised must sample from particular codes of identity that are learned in varying degrees of fluency and then recalled in performance. In my experiences working in improvisational theater, and my observations of the performers featured in this study, the degree to which performative codes are mastered by a performer are represented in the facility of the performer to demonstrate their fluency in particular codes of identity and as well as their capacity to convince an audience that the characters and/or scenarios performed represent the characteristic of a particular racial, ethnic, gender, of national group. For example, as an American actor who is called upon to perform a “British” accent, I must learn the performative codes of the voice that indicate “Britishness.”’ However, if I improvise a random set of codes that duplicates what I think “British people” sound like, most likely the audience will understand what I want to convey; however, my performance many not be convincing or specific enough (that is identifying how race, ethnicity and class complicate articulations of ‘Britishness’) to convince the audience that I am British. On the other hand, a performer may be so fluent in the aural codes of British speech that he or she may translate the codes so specifically 73 that his “British” character and his linguistic codes can be linked to Leeds. His vernacular may reveal that he is of Jamaican descent and is working class. These specific details learned by the performer enable him to create a more believable representation that moves beyond stereotype to more in depth explorations of the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality impact articulations of British identity. Improvisation is a major component of acting, conceptual art and dance that requires skill and is a tool that is used within these crafts, not separated from them. Actors, performance artists and dancers improvise by trying out different possibilities in order to achieve a particular voice, accent, gesture or movement that discursively indicate a particular “type” of person, look or gesture. Facets of identity are improvised, tried on for short or sustained moments, and then stored as knowledge that can be recalled instantly in performance. Depending on the success or failure of a translation of particular social and cultural codes by the performer, characters, looks or gestures may be recognized or misrecognized by the audience. Likewise, Hip-hop DJs sample music that has particular social and historical relevance to various groups and remix them live before an audience to create new pieces of music. What appears to be a seemingly ‘spontaneous’ connection between musical moments is often a carefully researched bit of storytelling. Sampling, as an act of theatrical improvisation, is both spontaneous and premeditated and allows the artist to tell a story. 74 In order for non-African American artists in Hip-hop Theater and Performance to construct a Hip-hop character or create a Hip-hop inspired performance, they must often draw from performative codes that indicate a specific racial, ethnic and/or cultural specificity associated with Hip-hop music and culture. In this study, all of the artists relate to Hip-hop culture through a specific connection to blackness articulated by African Americans in Hip-hop. I argue these codes are learned in varying degrees of fluency by the performer. Sampling as a theatrical form of improvisation can be identified in these performances because selected codes of African American identity associated with Hip-hop are used to construct a character, image or dance move in performance. In many cases, the artists attempt to separate the racial and ethnic component of African American identity from the codes sampled. These codes are intrinsic to Hip-hop music and work to form the culture of Hip-hop. Performers who are not African American must improvise their feelings and experiences as a “black” subject in order to play the codes in a convincing way so that they can be recognized by an audience as simultaneously “African American” and/or “Hip-hop.” Hip-hop Theater and Performance practices have been dominated by solo performances in which the actors, dancers and or performance artists play several characters of various racial, ethnic and national identities. He or she improvises from a wide range of performative codes to indicate the characters. Because these monologues or “sketches” of identity are usually brief, the performer must use recognizable characteristics of a subject in order for the audience to identify with the 75 character. Accordingly, a non-African American artist who wants to create the image of a Hip-hop “b-boy” may wear Hip-hop style clothes, make gestures or use speech associated with this “type.” However, in the case studies here, the artists do not draw from the wide range of racial and ethnic contributions to Hip-hop, but isolate African American representations of Hip-hop as the inspiration for their performances. As Hip-hop Theater and Performance practices have expanded, actors, performance artists and dancers may be trained in improvisational practices of the theater so that they can bring Hip-hop freestyle elements to the script of their performance (in theater, conceptual art and/or dance) to make it appear more “authentically” 43 ” Hip-hop and not just a “word-for-word” translation of Hip-hop to mainstream theater. In other instances, they are not trained at all in improvisation, yet the relationships to the codes they mobilize in performance are improvised. Because Hip-hop Theater and Performance departs from traditional theater formats and training requirements, many performers are self-taught and have improvised their performance styles from several strategies of performance including those gleaned from their instincts, spoken word artists, black stand-up comics and/or imitation of acting styles from their favorite actors and/or Hip-hop rappers. They create a sampled performance approach that reflects Hip-hop’s sampled and remixed aesthetic. Just as actors trained in Stanislavski may also sample from other training 43 In Hip-hop music, the freestyle process is an improvisational one which requires rappers to create spontaneous rhymes based on a given topic or stimuli. The more knowledge the rapper has the cleverer he or she can be with creating the freestyle. Similar to jazz improvisation, which has a call and response code embedded in the form, rappers who freestyle usually respond to a call of another MC who has challenged him to battle. Many MCs such as the late Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z boast that their freestyle skills are so excellent, that they never write their lyrics on paper and simply perform them on the spot in the studio. 76 approaches to acting to create a unique performance styles, these performers mimic many of the “auto-didactic” approaches of artists in Hip-hop who may not be formally trained in music, yet use their ability to observe and learn through processes of immersion to create their own approaches to performance. Conversely, many Hip-hop Theater and Performance artists are trained in more traditional methods of acting (such as Stanislavski, Meisner, etc.) performance art and/or dance traditions and use this knowledge as a foundation upon which they negotiate and develop their relationships within Hip-hop music and culture. In all of these cases of performance, both trained professionals and auto didactic performers must have an ability to recognize and translate the nuances of the discourse he or she inhabits to produce a particular African American blackness (versus a Jamaican or West African translation of blackness, for example,) in performance that can be recognized as Hip-hop. The “success” or “failure” of a performance of African Americanness as Hip-hop is based in the fluency of a performer in the performative codes he or she performs and the ability to the audience to recognize and acknowledge his or her representation of these codes. An actor, performance artist or dancer’s mobilization of the language, gesture, and other performative codes of a particular racial, ethnic or gender identity should be informed by the social and historical moment of their usage. For example, an actor playing the role of an African American sit-in participant in a period piece on the Civil Rights Movement in the United States must either study the speech patterns of African American English within the historical moment in order to 77 translate the script, or he or she can improvise and understanding of those speech patterns by recalling what she thinks they sound like from some repertoire of her lived or imagined experiences. The successful translation of these nuances by the actor is dependent upon his ability to convey a level of fluency in the particular linguistic cultural codes used by African Americans in the time period. If she unsuccessfully improvises the language, she will not convince her audience that she is “in” that historical moment. Acting is sustained improvisation that makes superficial and/or profound connections to subjectivity. Sampling as theatrical improvisation in Hip-hop Theater and Performance is similar to traditional acting in that the performer may or may not have a script, performance plan or choreography. However, I contend sampling as theatrical improvisation is a way to understand not only acting, but also other artistic practices such as performance and conceptual art as well as dance and the ways that performers identify, translate and perform performative codes of identity in performance that indicate racial and ethnic specificity. Additionally, it should be noted I offer sampling as a way to read acting and performance practices. Sampling as a practice of theatrical improvisation identifies the performers’ process and socio- historical relationship to the performative codes he or she mobilizes in performance to achieve a particular character, concept and/or embodied gesture. It is also a theoretical device used to understand how performers manipulate their bodies to reproduce the racial and ethnic identities of other groups in performance. Though I isolate the particular performative codes of African Americanness associated with 78 Hip-hop mobilized by non-African American Hip-hop Theater and performance artists, others regularly sample the performative codes of other racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identities and these samples should be explored further. Equally important is the idea that sampling from various translations of race and ethnicity that exist during particular time periods, suggests how perceptions of race and ethnicity shift over time and are impacted by particular social, political and economic histories. Actors, performers and dancers improvise particular cultural codes by trying them on, testing them out and playing them on the spot, with or without a script. The stronger grasp a performer has on how to improvise the performative codes s/he mobilizes in performance the more fluent the transition between the performers' lived identity and that of the character s/he portrays. Even in performances that have a pre-written text, improvisation is the act of building on trained or untrained skills to re-present an experience that the audience can identify with and recognize. The ability to convey these codes in performance in a recognizable fashion is the skill of the performer. Understanding the subversive qualities of Hip-hop’s sampling process and its links to practices of improvisation and self-fashioning embedded in black music genres in the United States are important facets of Hip-hop that are often disarticulated from blackness. As Joanna Demers argues in “Sampling as Lineage in Hip-hop,” Hip-hop has made a shift form “condemnation to adulation” (2002, 15-18) by audiences all over the world who identify with Hip-hop’s capacity to appropriate and transform pre- existing music and other public property into parts that can be re-articulated under 79 the sign of Hip-hop and blackness. Despite Hip-hop’s cross-racial and ethnic sampling, non-African American creators of Hip-hop music and art inspired by it, continue to rely on particular cultural codes of blackness linked to African American culture to produce representations of the music and culture. Over thirty years after Hip-hop’s creation in the late 1970s, blackness associated with Hip-hop music and culture is still associated with African American cultural production and is the source used by both African American and non-African American artists and consumers to construct and perform Hip-hop identities. As we will see in the chapters that follow, sampling as a form of theatrical improvisational is akin to both collage and pastiche whereby facets of identity replace music sound bites as parts that create a new whole. I use sampling in Hip- hop music as a way to understand how actors, performance artists and dancers in Hip-hop Theater and Performance use their bodies to sample parts of the social and cultural identities of African Americans and remix them in new embodied contexts. The actors, the performers and dancers in this study identify recognizable codes of identity associated with African Americanness in Hip-hop and use them to create a character, image and/or gesture that the audience can identify as Hip-hop. Like Hip- hop DJs, they use their bodies in a “cut and mix” process (Hebdige 1987) 44 to create theatrical performances that incorporate and disavow their relationship to blackness. 44 See Hebdige, Dick. Cut and Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. New York: Routledge, 1987, p 24- 26. Hebdige addresses the ways in which other articulations of black music in the Caribbean such as Ska and Reggae rely on the call and response tradition, an African retention that persists in most black music forms throughout the African Diaspora. Hebdige implies that peoples of African descent from around the globe use music as a platform of resistance to oppression. These retentions of call and response and re-articulation, 80 Chapter Descriptions Chapter Two, entitled “Actin’ and Talkin’ Black: Re-Articulating Blackness in Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, uses the work of Jewish American Hip-hop Theater artist Danny Hoch to explore sampling as a process of re- articulation of Hip-hop language and stereotype in Hip-hop Theater. Hoch’s solo performance Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop serves as an entrée into recent popular culture trends 45 of white males re-articulating Hip-hop discourse by identifying its ‘blackness’ through the use of Hip-hop English, oral narratives and Hip-hop stereotypes. I locate these spaces of recombination where white artists perform blackness in new ways that both re-inscribe and disrupt conceptions of the black- white binary in performance to create cross-racial and ethnic coalitions. I compare Hoch’s work with that of his African American colleague Sarah Jones to examine how both artists sample from Hip-hop to re-articulate imaginings of the American Dream. Chapter Three, “The Theatrical (Re) Production of African American Female Identities in Nikki S. Lee’s ‘The Hip-hop Project’” uses the conceptual art of Korean artist Nikki S. Lee to explore the sampling of performative codes of self-adornment. The Hip-hop Project is a series of photographs staged by Lee that captures her performance of the styles of African American women in Hip-hop. Lee changes her appearance, tanning herself to appear “black, “altering her hair, dress and make-up to Hebdige argues, often incorporate European sounds into their mix, just as Hip-hop incorporates other cultural sounds and narratives as it resists the status quo. 45 I use the term recent in relationship to popular culture obsessions with blackness and Hip-hop, however, I am aware that this trend is not new and continues from popular culture of the 19 th century as discussed in the opening of this chapter. 81 recreate images that sample from her favorite African American female Hip-hop artists and the African American women she observes in Hip-hop spaces. I argue that Lee’s photographs operate as theatrical stills which document her performances. Sampling from concepts of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” I imagine Lee’s body as a theatrical site of reproduction whereby she re-produces African American female identities in Hip-hop. I place Lee’s work in discussion with two of her favorite Hip-hop artists, Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill, to explore how her performances trouble seemingly “original” representations of blackness in Hip-hop by performing both “Eurocentric” and “Afrocentric” representations of African American female subjectivity. Chapter Four, “Re-Membering Hip-hop: Dancing African Americanness in Jonzi D’s Hip-hop Theater in London” discusses Black British choreographer Jonzi D and his sampling of embodied gestures associated with African American Hip-hop dance. Using dancers of diverse racial, ethnic and gender identities to create cross- racial and ethnic remixes of Hip-hop in his dance production “TAG…Me Versus the City,” the choreographer articulates the experiences of a white urban graffiti artist (i.e. “tagger” 46 ) from London. I compare Jonzi’s D’s production of “TAG” with African American Hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris’ dance production “Rome and Jewels, ” a dance adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 46 The term “tagger” is a Hip-hop term used within graffiti artist circles. The term refers to the action of graffiti artists placing their personal “tag” on public property such as city walls, subway cars, trains, etc. in acts of appropriating public property. Jonzi D’s title plays on this Hip-hop code in the title of his show ‘TAG…Me vs. the City.” 82 Chapter Five “Re-Imagining Hip-hop: Sampling African Americanness in Popular Culture” discusses the larger phenomenon of sampling from the performative codes of African Americanness in popular culture. I identify how Hip-hop’s capacity to be viewed as simultaneously “black” and “multicultural” has incited new re-imaginings of Hip-hop by diverse groups that are troubling the ways that we categorize and difference as well as various categories of artistic production that have been impacted by cross-racial and cultural sampling. All of the artists discussed in Sampling Blackness play with the boundaries of racial, ethnic and national difference using the body and voice to sample from blackness in Hip-hop Theater and performance. 83 Chapter Two: “Actin’ and Talkin’ Black”: Re-articulating Blackness as Hip-hop in Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop People be like shut the hell up when I talk Like I shouldn't be talkin’ “black,” even though I'm from New York. But what's that? A color, a race or a state of mind? A class of people? A culture, is it a rhyme? Prologue: “Message to the Bluntman” - Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop (1998). This chapter uses Hip-hop Theater artist Danny Hoch’s play, Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop (1998), as an entrée to examine the pop culture phenomenon of white performers performing blackness. In Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, Hoch portrays characters of diverse racial, ethnic and class positions whose seemingly disparate stories of self- identification are connected through their relationship to Hip-hop’s blackness. In his prologue, “Message to the Bluntman,” Hoch delivers a critique of Hip-hop and African Americans who perpetuate negative stereotypes and narratives of violence and materialism. He also works to separate his perspective as an artist from the perspectives of the characters he performs. Hoch demonstrates his fluency in the differences and similarities between Standard American English (SAE) and Hip-hop Nation English (HNE) that often distinguishes racial, ethnic and class groups in Hip-hop. Hoch’s ability to translate black and white discourses surrounding Hip-hop provide opportunities to examine what is at stake when white artists sample from blackness in acts of re-articulation that represent blackness in Hip-hop yet render black bodies invisible. 84 Section 1 defines and discusses recurring stereotypes, oral narratives and language that circulate in Hip-hop that are used by Hoch to animate his social critique of Hip-hop and its influence on American popular culture. I argue Hoch re- articulates Hip-hop discourse to allow his characters to “act and talk” black in attempts to validate identifications with the music and culture. Section 2 analyzes a performance from Hoch’s play performed at Grand Performances in Los Angeles, California in July 2006. I contend Hoch’s characterization of white rappers represents everyday performances of blackness by white youth who identify with Hip-hop. I discuss the American reality show produced by VH-1 entitled The White Rapper as representative of post-minstrel performances in popular culture. Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” provides a historical backdrop that foreshadows how white rappers engage Hip-hop’s blackness to identify and embody a language of “dissent” and to articulate their whiteness as different from dominant representations of white masculinity. I suggest Hip-hop music and culture, like jazz culture, is used by white male performers in Hip-hop to enact a “love and theft” (Lott 1995) of African American aesthetic practices. These identifications enable white performers to create alternative representations of whiteness and disrupt seemingly normative codes of whiteness, but are not quite black (Bhabha 1994, 85-92). 47 Section 3 continues my analysis of Hoch’s performance in Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, focusing on characters in his play that enable discussions on cross- racial and ethnic coalitions. I compare two of Hoch’s sketches in his performance 47 In this section Bhabha, Homi. “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse," in The Location of Culture, pp.85-92. 85 with those of his African American female colleague, Sarah Jones, who has been categorized as both a Hip-hop Theater performer and a “multicultural” theater artist. Using Hoch’s monologue “Danny’s Trip in LA” and his performance of the character “Emcee Enuff,” I reveal Hoch’s ability to establish Hip-hop as a site for Americans of many races and ethnicities to pursue the “American Dream.” In contrast, I explore Sarah Jones’ performance of her one woman show Bridge and Tunnel (2007) as an example of how Hip-hop music and culture represents possibilities of obtaining the American Dream for many immigrants in the United States. Hoch and Jones embody the possibilities and contradictions of narratives of the “multicultural” American Dream and the ways racial and ethnic difference complicates the possibilities of its realization. Key questions that animate this chapter include: how do white performers such as Hoch benefit from re-articulating blackness as Hip-hop? How do white representations of Hip-hop in the American theater diminish opportunities for African American artists who also create Hip-hop inspired theater and performance? Can “blackness” in Hip-hop be understood as a “multicultural” 48 space of identity negotiation? The incorporation and disavowal of blackness and its relationship to Hip-hop are important considerations that contribute to understanding the relationship between Hip-hop and African American culture. 48 The term “multicultural” is a contested term in that it implies that all Americans, despite racial, ethnic, gender and/or sexual difference can and will be treated the same and ignores how race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality shape relationships of power. “Multiculturalism” as recounted in narratives of the “American Dream” attempt to ignore institutional and systemic problems based in racial , ethnic, gender, sexual and even religious difference that limit the capacity of marginalized groups to realize the American Dream . 86 Section 1 -Hoch’s Re-Articulation of African Americanness as Hip-hop Culture Stuart Hall defines culture as "the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences" (59). 49 This definition allows us to address the “culture” of Hip-hop as more than a product of African American subjectivity. Hip-hop is a space that enables us to see how other groups may identify with blackness as a “social practice” (Hall 60) that allows them to negotiate their relationships with African American culture and Hip-hop. Hall contends culture is ultimately "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life" (60). Hip-hop allows white artists such as Hoch to transcend the racial and cultural particularity of whiteness and its historical relationship to blackness. Re-articulating their subjectivity by sampling from Hip-hop’s dominant African Americanness, white artists explore new understandings of self and thus find what Hall calls a “unity” within the differences of the Hip-hop community. This unity is an identification with African Americans as social “outsiders.” Because the cultural production of African Americans in Hip-hop dominates the music and culture, white performances of blackness, in their attempts to appear more “Hip- hop,” offer new ways to think through how cultural particularism shapes popular culture and how cultural products are exchanged through performance. 49 Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" in Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57-72. 87 Raymond Williams’ (1958; 1992) concept of culture 50 argues culture is produced through various discourses and practices that are exchanged by diverse groups. He states: A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. (6) These exchanges generate dominant and emergent forms of cultural practices. In Hip-hop culture, we see this process within the theatrical process of sampling. Remixing Hall and Williams’ concepts of culture with my theory of sampling as a form of theatrical improvisation allows me to situate Hip-hop as an emergent cultural form that allows non-African Americans to explore their social relationships to blackness that are often excluded from the ‘official’ narratives about Hip-hop culture. Moreover, sampling offers opportunities to re-imagine “known meanings and directions” to create “new observations and meanings” (Williams 1992).White performers offer their bodies as sites of cultural exchange and disrupt how we understand blackness and whiteness through their engagement with Hip-hop. The circulation and consumption of Hip-hop music and culture operates on two distinct levels that are important to understanding the processes of articulation and re-articulation of African Americanness by Hoch and other white artists. First, Hip-hop operates as a representation of diverse and often contradictory experiences 50 Raymond Williams, ‘Moving from High Culture to Ordinary Culture” Originally published in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions, 1958. 88 of black subjects in the United States. Hip-hop discourse contains perspectives on racial subjugation, white supremacy, quests for social and civil rights, as well as excess materialism, misogyny and violence. These various perspectives are put forth in Hip-hop discourse (language, music, oral narratives, dance, styles of self- adornment, etc.). As these concepts and ideas circulate through music exchanges and the marketing of African American Hip-hop to global audiences, the aesthetic practices of African American subjects are consumed en masse and have the capacity to connect with and shape other popular artistic forms around the world. Second, Hip-hop is representative of a multi-racial and ethnic site of cultural exchange whereby African American culture becomes the “dominant” representation of subjectivity against which all other racial and ethnic groups measure their relationship to Hip-hop. Marginalized groups that contribute to mainstream narratives of popular “culture” are often silenced and contributions often go unnoticed or are absorbed into the dominant narrative. By selecting codes of African American identity in performance as representative of Hip-hop culture, many white performers see blackness as a site to re-imagine their identities as white people. Hip- hop becomes a space to explore the shifting variables of blackness and where many whites engaged with Hip-hop make connections to experiences of African American life expressed in Hip-hop music and culture. 89 Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation "refers to the complex set of historical practices by which we struggle to produce identity out of, on top of, complexity, difference, and contradiction" (1996, 138). 51 Hall argues articulation is: … the form of connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what conditions can a connection be formed or made? The so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be re- articulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness.’ The ‘unity’ which matters is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain conditions, but not necessarily be connected. (1996, 141) 52 Articulation then describes the means by which particular cultural elements are linked together. Sampling in Hip-hop music reflects these processes of cultural borrowing and reconfiguration and works well as a lens to examine how bodies express the premeditated acts of connecting as well as the improvised “unity” of their connection. Because white artists can never “be” racially black, their sampling from performative codes of blackness requires that they improvise understandings of subjectivity. Cultural particularity becomes useful in discerning how cultural elements are always already fused to particular racial, ethnic and economic interests. White performers who translate and perform performative codes of blackness within particular ethnic and national contexts are creating a ‘unity’ within Hip-hop that connects their performances to those that also exist in various translations and 51 Hall, Stuart. "On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg." Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, New York: Routledge, 1996. 131-150. 52 Hall, Stuart. "On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg." Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, New York: Routledge, 1996. 141. 90 articulations by black people around the world. Michael Omi and Howard Winant contend that these acts can be identified as processes of re-articulation: [re-articulation is] a practice of discursive reorganization or reinterpretation of ideological themes already present in the subject’s consciousness such that these elements obtain new meanings and coherence. (1986, 173) Hoch and other white artists discussed in this chapter create these types of ‘discursive re-organizations’ and reinterpret how we understand ‘meaning and coherence’ of blackness. When we see a white performer performing codes that indicate black racial identity, our understanding of blackness and whiteness is changed because we start to question what we know and how we think we know it. Omi and Winant’s reading of Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation allows us to imagine sampling in theater and performance as a process of knowledge production that allows for new meanings of blackness to be improvised by whites who sample from Hip-hop discourse. White performers’ re-articulation of blackness using specific references to African American culture in Hip-hop indicates an important process of knowledge production and identity negotiation within Hip-hop culture. Just as 19 th century blackface performances by whites contributed to the aesthetic practices of African Americans in theater, film and television, white performances of blackness as Hip- hop are now part of this larger historical narrative of performing blackness in American and global popular culture. Hoch and the other white performers engage in this process of re-articulation by sampling from a recognizable set of codes of identity associated with African Americans in Hip-hop. Because African Americans 91 sample elements from other cultures and re-signify their meaning under the sign of blackness and Hip-hop, when whites mobilize these codes, they are effectively re- articulating language, gestures and narratives used by African Americans. Actin’ and Talkin’ “Black” Understanding Hip-hop Language, Oral Narratives and Stereotypes in Hip-hop Theater and Performance The terms “actin’” and “talkin”“black” are often associated with linguistic patterns of African Americans in the United States. Cultural anthropologists and linguists have identified sets of speech patterns, cadences and vocal tonalities which indicate a difference between Standard American English and what has been deemed African American English or (AAE) (Labov 1973; Smitherman 1977; Baugh 1983; Morgan 1995) 53 which is speech particular to African Americans. In Hip-hop music, these patterns and codes are often mastered by non-African American artists to construct a Hip-hop identity and are learned either through association with African Americans subjects who use these speech patterns and /or consumption of Hip-hop oral narratives in music and videos. What H. Samy Alim calls Hip-hop Nation English (HNE) (2006) is a set of speech patterns and vernacular that mobilizes African American English and cultural codes to create a speech community within Hip-hop culture. Many of the terms, sentence structure, idioms, etc, used in AAE and HNE overlap. As Hip-hop has gained global popularity, much of the vernacular of 53 See Labov, William. 1967. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973; Smitherman, Geneva. 1977. Talkin' and testifyin': The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Detroit: Wayne State U. Press; Baugh, John. 1983. Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin: University of Texas Press; Morgan, Marcyliena. 1993. “The Africanness of Counter Language among Afro-Americans.” In S. Mufwene, ed., Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties: 423-35. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. 92 African American English appears in Hip-hop Nation English and vice versa. Moreover, in American popular culture, so much of African American English has “crossed over” and circulates in mainstream popular culture because of Hip-hop, that many non-African Americans have developed a fluency in the linguistic codes of African American English through their engagement with Hip-hop music. Furthermore, “talkin’ black” is specifically tied to verbal speech, whereas “actin’ black” is often used to describe the ways that non-verbal language such as gesture, attitude and personal styles are used to indicate racial identity by both black and non-black people. The phrases “talkin’ and actin’ “black” are often used in the African American community to identify non-blacks, usually whites, who take on the language of African Americans and/or Hip-hop culture through the imitation of African American speech patterns, behaviors and physical gestures, fashion and styles of self- presentation. Some white speakers of AAE/HNE are so fluent in the African American vernacular that many people in the African American community will assume the white speaker is racially mixed and has some African ancestry. Alternatively, the terms “actin’ and talkin’” black are also used to reference white people who use African American English and/or Hip-hop Nation English. For example, white speakers of AAE/HNE are often perceived by African Americans as a white people trying to sound “black” in an attempt to temporarily identify with the “hipness” of Hip-hop. Many times whites demonstrate an awkward use of Hip-hop language or its styles of self-adornment, gesture. For example, a white suburban soccer mom who 93 uses the Hip-hop reference “bling-bling,” to describe her diamond necklace and then immediately returns to her white suburban speech patterns, reveals the process of “code switching” between black and white speech communities in the United States. In many cases, African Americans employ what linguists and cultural anthropologists call code switching (Weinreich 1953; Labov 1998; Morgan 1999) which is the ability to shift between AAE and SAE within particular social contexts and environments. When white artists and other racial and ethnic groups sample from the language of Hip-hop, they also code switch. The phrases “talkin’ and actin’ black” are most often used as terms to indicate “speech acts” (Austin 1978) that identify the black subject and their blackness through the use of language and behavior. Conversely, the phrases “actin’ and talkin” black are almost exclusively used in the African American community and are used to “call out” 54 non-African Americans who use “black speech.” Furthermore, many African Americans also use the term “acting and talkin’ white” to describe those African American who have abandoned “black” speech in favor of talking “white,” i.e. speaking Standard American English. For example, one might accuse a black person of not “talkin’ and actin” black to suggest that he or she is attempting to “be” white by speaking Standard American English. 54 To “call out” is to embarrass someone by pointing out something they have done wrong in a public manner. In reference to “calling out” black subjects who utilize “white speech” this practice is problematic because it assumes that all African American subjects have been exposed to speech patterns in African American communities and have “abandoned” the language in favor of SAE (Standard American English) which is often not the case for subjects who are racially black, but have no links to African American culture or speech patterns. 94 Danny Hoch demonstrates fluency he has in AAE, HNE and SAE as well as his ability to translate between their codes to create his characters in Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop. He also uses his knowledge of the performative codes of various racial and ethnic groups and their engagement with blackness to differentiate between his role as a cultural critic and the roles that his white characters play in his performance. In Hip-hop Theater and Performance, the manipulation of these linguistic and embodied codes of performance allow white artists to perform blackness using the specific codes of African Americans in Hip-hop in varying degrees of fluency. In another instance, one might use the terms ‘talkin’ and actin’ black to describe a white woman who speaks, dresses and carries herself like and African American woman and disrupts “normative” performative codes ascribed to white women. All of these language practices in the African American community are reflected in Hip-hop’s language and oral narratives. Additionally, much of Hip-hop’s language and oral history contains a set of Hip-hop “stock characters” that are based in black stereotypes that reoccur in Hip- hop music. "Actin’ and talkin'” black incorporates codes of verbal and written speech but also includes other forms of discourse such as physical gestures, attitudes and forms of self-adornment that may be used as the foundation of a Hip-hop identification and are often associated with these stock characters/stereotypes. Besides the use of popular Hip-hop slang and general speech styles associated with African American English and Hip-hop Nation English, other oral practices such as 95 (s)ignifyin,’ boasting, toasting and dozens playing 55 (Gates 1991) are also important factors that contribute to the improvisation of African Americanness as Hip-hop in Hip-hop Theater and performance. In Hip-hop, rappers must prove that they have knowledge of the skills and narratives of other Emcees as well as the larger oral history of Hip-hop in the United States. Because of the implied social critique in Hip-hop, rappers and other Hip-hop artists who create work without making it clear what has been sampled and what is new, are often met with embarrassing peer critiques which challenge the validity of their narratives as well as their skills. Outside the context of Hip-hop, these oral social practices are also used in exchanges within the African American community which further demonstrates Hip-hop music’s tie to African American cultural practices. Practices of oral storytelling are embedded in rapping and in Hip-hop’s privileging of orality versus literacy (Ong 1988). Moreover, many oral narrative practices such as signifyin’ and boasting have been linked to West African Griot storytelling practices and well as American slave narratives (Farris Thompson 1984; 55 I offer broad definitions of these terms identifying oral practice here as an interrelated component of a larger system of African Diasporic discourse. 1) Signifyin’(g) is, to show reverence or irreverence toward previously stated statements and values" Schloss (141- 2) boasting is a processes of verbal battling where by players work to trump the other using clever word play, social and cultural references to discuss personal, cultural or political topics. 3) toasting is a oral art form that is rooted in Caribbean oral practices and involves rhyming a story over a piece of background music—many Hip-hop DJs from Jamaica imported this style of “rapping” into the local African American Hip-hop scene in the late 1970s, however, toasting can also be traced to West African Griot traditions. 4) playing the dozens is a verbal debate that usually involves “yo mama” jokes whereby one opponent makes a derogatory statement about the other’s mother and his opponent responds in kind with a statement that is more clever and degrading. This tête à tête continues until an audience determines a winner or one opponent gives up. See Caponi, Gena Dagel .Signifyin (G), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 1988; Schloss, Joseph G. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. 2004. 96 Norwood 2002; Harrison 2003) 56 further establishing Hip-hop’s dependence on African American and African Diasporic ties. Hip-hop “Stock Characters”: Identifying Hip-hop Stereotypes Hip-hop stereotypes are an important component of Hip-hop Theater and Performance and are used by artists of all races and ethnicities to reference familiar Hip-hop characters and scenarios. Hoch uses several stereotypes that are a part of what I call Hip-hop “stock characters.” These characters are similar to those in other improvisational forms such as commedia dell’arte 57 and are recurring characters in Hip-hop narratives, visual culture and oral history that are used by many artists involved with Hip-hop music and culture. While the scenarios and physical representation of these stereotypes may change over time, Hip-hop audiences have come to recognize these characters and their oral narratives which work together to create a mythology of Hip-hop, and operate as the basis for both superficial and complex characterizations in performance. One of the most popular stereotypes in Hip-hop Theater and performance 58 is the thug. The thug usually recounts existing, past or fake gang affiliations and a 56 Norwood, Quincy. “Plantation Rhymes: Hip-hop as writing against the empire of Neo-Slavery.” Proud Flesh: a New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics and Consciousness. Vol.1, 2002. 57 Commedia dell’ arte is an improvised theatrical form that began in the 17 th century and consists of a set of stock characters and scenarios upon which improvised sketches are performed by actors. In early commedia performances, many of the performers wore recognizable masks that indicated the stereotypes of the characters so that the audience could recognize them quickly and anticipate the narrative very easily. I imagine the following Hip-hop stereotypes as a set of Hip-hop “stock characters” and scenarios that have become so much a part of the American popular cultural imaginary due to the circulation of Hip-hop music, videos and iconography that they have become easy to recognize in the American Theatrical repertoire. 58 Hip-hop Theater and Performance, as outlined in Chapter One, should be read as any performance using the four elements of Hip-hop including Emceeing, DJing, Break dancing and Graffiti, and those inspired by the elements that include theater, film, television, fine art, performance art, conceptual art inspired by Hip-hop. 97 preoccupation with violence and misogyny. He is usually engaged in some drug use and/or selling. He has been in jail and survived police brutality and/or gang violence. The gangsta character is equally popular and embodies attributes such as loyalty, respect and extended family networks. 59 The gangsta character is also important because it demonstrates the ways that Hip-hop artists sample from other cultures. Italian and Cuban American gangster films 60 are a popular source of sampling in Hip-hop. The pimp stereotype is actually a recycled character made famous by African American actors in 1970s Blaxploitation films. 61 The pimp is usually a male character who favors ostentatious, brightly colored clothing and expensive diamond jewelry and who mistreats women as property. The player stereotype is a handsome and stylish man who is usually physically fit. He is most often depicted as having an elaborate and expensive lifestyle which he uses to attract women. Important positive stereotypes exist in Hip-hop yet these are not circulated often in mainstream media depictions of Hip-hop because of the popularity of negative images of African American rappers. The backpacker is committed to promoting “conscious” perspectives of black men. He respects black women and Unlike Hoch, I do not believe that Hip-hop art has to be made “for” the Hip-hop generation. Artists should have the capacity to make art at large and let it affect all communities across generational lines. 59 In Hip-hop, the concept of extended family is prominent. Many Hip-hop “families” are not related biologically, but create social and political alliance based on specific embodied representations of place, e.g. East Coast or West Coast as examples of regional space and “The Bronx” of “Long Beach” as specific local spaces that indicate the social conditions in which an Emcee lived before he or she made it in the rap “game”. Also, Hip-hop groups associated with one another through production “families” that is a set of networks in which a prominent Hip-hop artist produces new talent that is assumed under his or her family network. 60 Popular American films about Italian American gangster activities in Hip-hop include but are not limited to The Godfather series directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Casino, Goodfellas, Scarface and others. 61 Examples in popular culture include Rudy Ray Moore in his depiction of the character “Dolemite” in the film Dolemite (1975) 98 supports the acquisition of knowledge through education. He also shows an awareness of African American culture and its links to the African Diaspora. The b- boy (often referred to as a break-dancer) is a Hip-hop dancer who pays homage to “old school” Hip-hop and is deeply engaged with underground Hip-hop music, dance battles and “alternative” Hip-hop scenes. The down brother character has an eclectic neo-soul eclectic style and is more associated with the avant-garde in fashion and culture. He is interested in world music and usually creates representations of Hip- hop that are considered cutting edge and depart from mainstream Hip-hop styles. The baller character is one who may incorporate any of the above stereotypes. He is extremely wealthy, or prefers to be, and is openly conversant about his wealth. Both men and women can be referred to as ballers. Female Hip-hop stereotypes are also prevalent in Hip-hop oral narratives and iconography. The most popular female character is the gold-digger character. She is most often portrayed as a beautiful, calculating woman who chases men for financial security. Often the gold-digger and ho 62 characters are used interchangeably in Hip- hop theater and performance references. Many female rappers such as Queen Latifah and Lauryn Hill have contested these roles, while other female artists such as Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown have exploited them. Many African American women feel that embracing and manipulating their sexuality for money and chances at 62 In many cases, the gold-digger and ho characters are light-skinned black women. Their representation incorporates and continues historical black stereotypes of the Jezebel and Tragic Mulatto stereotypes in American theater and film. Recent representations of the ho character in Hip-hop videos include a multi-racial and ethnic representation of women who may sample from styles of self-adornment of African American women in Hip- hop, yet are not racially black, See Boggle, Donald. Mammies, Coons, Bucks, Jezebels’ and Mulattos, New York: Hyperion Press, 1997. 99 success through self-objectification in Hip-hop is a choice (Stefans 2007). Others suggest that African American women should protest rappers who continue to degrade African American women in their narratives and videos (Morgan 2000). Recently, many African American women who perform in Hip-hop videos have subverted the gold-digger and ho characters referring to themselves as “video vixens.” Positive female characters in Hip-hop are very few. Most popular is the down sistah stereotype which is an Afro-centric black woman committed to positive Hip-hop and subverting negative images of black women in Hip-hop. She is often presented as a skilled Emcee or dancer and that places more attention on her skill than her sexuality. Female dancers with skill in a male Hip-hop dance world subvert images of women as sexual objects. Stereotypes of whites who engage with Hip-hop are also prominent in Hip- hop oral narratives, even though white artists often sample and remix black stereotypes to create their Hip-hop identities. Common stereotypes and scenarios in Hip-hop about whites include white wannabe rappers often referred to as wiggas. These characters may be male or female who “talk and act black.” This stereotype is represented in Hoch’s work in his performance of the character “Flip”. Many white Hip-hoppers are labeled “wannabes” and “white negroes” for taking on blackness in Hip-hop for profit without any true commitment to the social and cultural significance of the music genre’s connection to African American life. Other white stereotypes in Hip-hop include down white boy who has a high fluency in African American culture and Hip-hop vernacular and is embraced by African Americans in 100 the Hip-hop community as an “honorary black.” Danny Hoch is an artist who is often given this title in the African American Hip-hop community. Lastly, white b- boy and b-girl characters are especially popular in Hip-hop today. Many white dancers have mastered Hip-hop dance vocabulary. Hoch’s sampling of these various stereotypes and narratives in his performances establishes his fluency in Hip-hop discourse and exercises his knowledge of how particular performative codes of African Americanness are translated in Hip-hop. My explanation of the language, stereotypes and their surrounding narrative in Hip-hop allow us to identify the language and characters used by Danny Hoch and other performers to create Hip-hop characters in performance. In Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop Hoch uses many of these stereotypes and Hip-hop Nation English to create his characters as he questions who has the capacity to “be” Hip-hop and whether blackness can be “a state of mind” (Hoch 1998) for whites that allows them to live Hip-hop inspired identities. Sampling Hip-hop Language, Oral Narratives and Stereotypes Hip-hop in Danny Hoch’s Prologue “Message to the Bluntman” When I first met Danny Hoch, I had seen his show several times in various performance spaces in New York and Los Angeles. Hoch’s fluency in the language of Hip-hop linked to African American culture is based on his experiences growing up in Lefrack City, Queens during the early stages of Hip-hop’s development in the late 1970s. Many African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups learned the dominant codes of African American language, stereotypes and oral narratives associated with Hip-hop because they were marginally involved with Hip-hop's 101 cultural production. Hoch grew up with Hip-hop in New York in the diverse racial and ethnic community of Queens where all kids “talked and acted” black, despite their non-black or non-African American racial or ethnic backgrounds, because their “unity” within Hip-hop was their shared low-to-moderate income class status. Hoch was immersed in the performative codes of a wide range of racial and ethnic groups. He is fluent in Spanish and has been actively involved in theater and performance from adolescence to the present. He is a formally trained actor, yet chooses to improvise his style of performance sampling from classic and auto-didactic techniques. As a performer, Hoch has made links to Hip-hop in all of his solo performances including his Obie award winning solo performance, Some People (1992) which was also made into a HBO Special. Hoch has toured Some People and Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop in public schools, prisons and universities in efforts to use theater to effect social change. Hoch is an activist for social change and uses his work to comment on social inequality. When I met Hoch in July 2004, he was participating in a Los Angeles initiative for the arts entitled “Grand Performances.” The performance took place in the evening in downtown Los Angeles in an open air theater at the California Plaza. According to its website, the “Grand Performances” performance series is: … created as part of [a] redevelopment initiative in Downtown Los Angeles to insure that artists and other citizens of Los Angeles who had not been able to participate fully in the cultural life of the community would have access to a ‘world class’ venue and program’.” 63 63 See the full narrative of the mission of California Grand Performances initiative at http://www.grandperformances.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/about.mission. December 2008. Accessed 15 November 2008. 102 The downtown Los Angeles location of the performance and its free admission price was created to attract all communities across racial, ethnic, gender and class lines who may not normally feel they have access to the predominantly white mainstream Los Angeles theater community. The mission statement of the Grand Performances series states “close to two-thirds of the artists are based in the greater Los Angeles area. Over half of the artists presented reflect the non- Eurocentric roots of much of Los Angeles” (Grand Performances 2008). However, though Hoch’s work certainly appeals to a cross-racial and ethnic audience of various class levels, he is not one of the locally based artists the series promises to promote nor does he represent the “non-Eurocentric” roots the series website states it wishes to represent. Nonetheless, because Hoch’s topic is Hip-hop, his work is included in a performance series that addresses many of the social issues minorities face in an urban metropolis. 64 The audience at this performance was comprised of people of various races, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations with ages ranging from 12-60 years old. Because the stage was outdoors, the informal atmosphere contributed to the overall “multicultural” feel as the audience gathered together to witness a theater piece about Hip-hop. This “unity” in Hip-hop underlines how the culture of Hip-hop works to foster an imagined community (Anderson 1993) based on shared social and political perspectives informed by African American experiences. As audience members bustled about to any available seat in the standing room only show, Hoch entered the scene casually making his 64 It should be noted that Grand Performances also featured Sarah Jones in her solo performance Surface Transit in 2000. 103 way center stage with a water bottle. He was dressed in loose fitting jeans, sneakers, a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt, demonstrating a Hip-hop style of self- adornment. The stage was set with a single chair on the stage along with an old metal filing cabinet. As Hoch found his mark center stage, the audience buzz subsided, save for a few cries from children. A single spotlight hit Hoch as he began his prologue “Message to the Bluntman:” Forties, Blunts, Ho's. Glocks and Tecs You got your 'X' cap but I got you powerless Forties, Blunts, Ho's. Glocks and Tecs You got your Tommy Hil but I got you powerless People be like shut the hell up when I talk Like I shouldn't be talkin “black,” even though I'm from New York But what's that? A color, a race or a state of mind? A class of people? A culture, is it a rhyme? If so, then what the hell am I you might be sayin'? Well see if you could follow this flow, cause I ain't playin' Ya' see I ain't ya' average 20-something grunge type of slacker I'm not your herb flavor-of-the-month, I ain't no cracker An actor? Come on now, you know you wanna ask me I'll use my skin privileges to flag you down a taxi… (1998, 3-4) Hoch automatically addresses his position of power as a white male and makes claims to Hip-hop as a New Yorker. Because Hoch is white he is automatically linked to a legacy of white hegemony and cultural imperialism. Recognizing this fact, he quickly establishes himself as a Hip-hopper fluent in the codes of African American blackness that articulate as the “original” source of Hip-hop discourse. Hoch troubles normative categories of behavior associated with “whiteness,” claiming his “origins” as a native Hip-hopper and New Yorker who should be afforded the rights and privileges of being part of the Hip-hop community despite 104 Hip-hop’s association with African Americans and blackness. In case the audience had any preconceived notions about a white boy engaged with Hip-hop, Hoch quickly disarms his potential critics by critiquing himself. Hoch suggests that blackness can be separated from black bodies (“people be like shut the hell up when I talk, like I shouldn’t be talkin black”) and is thus a discursive formation that can be entered into and learned as “knowledge.” Hoch questions what blackness is and its connection to Hip-hop culture. Hoch is concerned with issues of authenticity, not in the sense of racial origins but of establishing criteria of authentication in Hip-hop music and culture. For Hoch and many other white Hip-hop artists, 65 “real” identities in Hip-hop have more to do with a social and political perspective and a “state of mind” than a black racial identity. These social and political perspectives are represented in the concept of “keepin’ it real” in Hip-hop which suggests that “real” identities are based in the artist’s representation of where they are from and what they represent in Hip-hop. Hoch’s naming of New York as a site that authenticates his Hip-hop subjectivity speaks to this identification of place and purpose. However, Hoch attempts to separate how space and claims to place are racialized. Hoch has little interest in associating himself with any “normative” performative codes of white liberal stereotypes. Hoch questions the “realities” depicted by African Americans in Hip- hop narratives and visual culture. The Hip-hop stereotypes that are associated with 65 I use “artist” to indicate not simple Hip-hop Emcees and dancers, but the wide range of performance practices such as theater, performance art, sculpture, poetry and other forms of conceptual art informed by Hip-hop discourse. 105 black “authenticity” uniquely because they are performed by black people for Hoch are just as erroneous as stereotypes of whites as “inauthentic” Hip-hop subjects. Hoch’s fluency in the performative codes of Hip-hop Nation English (HNE) and its intersection with African American culture are manifest in the prologue in his use of verbal language, oral narratives and stereotypes. Hoch’s ability to speak to both black and white Hip-hoppers without offending African American audiences is based in this fluency. Hoch is considered by many African American Hip-hoppers as a “down white guy,” who has the approval of the Hip-hop community because of his long-standing involvement in Hip-hop. Hoch’s prologue cites familiar scenarios that circulated in Hip-hop narratives and African American culture in the mid to late-1990s. These scenarios were recounted in narratives of famous rappers and are also part of his personal experiences. Moreover, they are scenarios and narratives that are recognizable to larger Hip-hop audiences who can recognize the codes and use them to validate Hoch’s performance. Hoch speaks in Hip-hop Nation English 66 (Alim 2001) using Hip-hop’s vernacular to name malt liquor (“Forties”), marijuana (“Blunts”) black women, (“Ho’s”) pistols and automatic weapons (“Glocks and Tecs”) as popular Hip-hop commodities. His reference to “X” caps mark a particular moment in the mid 1990s when “X” baseball caps were used to market Spike Lee’s 1995 film Malcolm X. In his performance of the monologue, many audience members who 66 Here I note particularity to denote that Hip-hop Nation English, like African American English varies in form from region to region. For example, slang within Hip-hop Nation English may be very different in Oakland that it is in Los Angles, yet these are regional specificities and do not limit speakers from understanding one another. 106 recognized these codes and their relationship to Hip-hop validate Hoch by cheering and talking back to him as he performs. They see him as a Hip-hopper who speaks their language and not as a white guy trying to “act” black. Hoch’s reference to a “bluntman” indicates marijuana inside of a cigar paper referred to in Hip-hop vernacular as a “blunt. 67 ” However, the term “bluntman” is used by Hoch to indicate an impaired state of mind for many African American men who deceive themselves into believing that they have any real power in the rap game. Hoch draws his audience’s attention to images and destructive behaviors in Hip-hop culture that are manipulated by the larger capitalist system that markets negative images of black men in Hip-hop as drug and alcohol dependent. For African American Hip-hoppers, the false sense of empowerment derived from drug and alcohol abuse can be seen as visceral responses to their lack of opportunity in impoverished communities. Hoch brings our attention to the ways that misogyny and violence are a large part of Hip-hop’s commercial appeal. Hoch’s reference to women as “Hos” and to “Glocks and Tecs” suggests the ways African Americans further marginalize themselves when they glamorize and promote negative and violent perspectives of African American life in Hip-hop. Moreover, Hoch’s reference to women in Hip- hop as “hos” speaks to the ways that African American women are stereotyped as promiscuous sexual objects. Though many African American women participate in their subjugation, the love-hate relationship between African American men and 67 Marijuana usage is prevalent in Hip-hop culture and is often credited by many rappers as providing them with an elevated consciousness that allows them to rap and improvise in freestyle battles with more prolific ability. 107 women in Hip-hop is reflected in contradictory narratives that both laud and vilify the African American woman (Pough 2005). Hoch does not try to act out any of the references or parts, but delivers the prologue in a rap style. In the next part of the prologue, Hoch samples a reference to white American clothing designer, Tommy Hilfiger, (Tommy Hil’) who is a popular designer among African American male consumers. Here, Hoch addresses the African American Hip-hop artist’s obsession with designer goods and excess materialism in Hip-hop culture. Narratives of excess materialism in Hip-hop became popular in the late 1990s. Many African American Hip-hop artists boast about their abilities to buy clothing from the world’s most exclusive European designers. Hip- hop artists are known for re-signifying designer labels by changing their styles of presentation from haute couture to everyday casual wear. By wearing expensive luxury goods in casual ways, many African American Hip-hoppers subvert ideas that equate African American lifestyles with urban poverty. For example, many Hip-hop artists wear five hundred dollar silk scarves by French designers such as Louis Vuitton and Hèrmes to wrap their hair or wear them in the back pockets of blue-jeans to flaunt them as status symbols. This re-articulation of European fashions as Hip- hop style, remixing the goods in new ways outside of their intended use, highlights how Hip-hop culture samples from other cultural practices and remixes them under the sign of African Americanness and Hip-hop. Hoch illustrates how Hip-hop discourse both includes and excludes whites based on their level of fluency in Hip-hop vernacular, social and cultural codes. He 108 suggests white designers profit from black Hip-hop artists who wear their clothing, even when the designers often state that they do not market their clothing to “urban” (i.e. African American) audiences. He also demonstrates his knowledge of the urban legends surrounding Tommy Hilfiger in the African American community, which point to Hilfiger’s alleged discouragement of black people from wearing his products so as not to associate his line as a “black”. 68 Hoch’s knowledge of the intra-racial dynamic within the African American Hip-hop community gives Hoch tremendous street credibility. The multiracial audience at the Grand Performances venue all applauded Hoch and showed no hostility towards his use of African American English/Hip-hop Nation English. The polycultural “us” of Hoch’s Hip-hop generation that he addressed in his Hip-hop Arts Manifesto was represented in the audience. Hoch makes it clear to his audience that he is not invested in a whiteness that aligns itself with Generation X (“slacker’”) or white conservatives (“crackers”) in the South. Hoch ends his critique of Hip-hop stating that all of these goods used to create seemingly “authentic” Hip-hop representations are ultimately sampled from white controlled corporations that reject the idea of their products being associated with African Americans. Hoch draws our attention to the ways that Hip-hop is often reduced to set of cultural signifiers that perpetuate stereotypes of African Americans 68 It should be noted that there is a famous urban legend in the United States that argues Tommy Hilfiger made a statement that he did not want African Americans to buy his clothing even though they were a large part of his consumer base in the late 1990s. Hilfiger has denied this claim, yet the myth persists. In Spike Lees’ 2005 film Bamboozled, Lee comments on the contradiction of black Hip-hoppers making white designer good famous to with out consideration for the ways in which their images are in turn commodified to sell the products. Lee cast Danny Hoch as the character “Tommy Hilnigger”, a clothing designer who markets his clothes to African Americans and profits from their cultural images to sell his clothing. 109 and do not reveal the empowering possibilities that Hip-hop music and culture have to offer. Hoch embodies the contradictions of Hip-hop, revealing how many African American Hip-hoppers choose to portray black stereotypes and participate in the commodification of Hip-hop in their quests for fame, money and a shot at the American Dream. Talkin’ and actin’ black for Hoch has more to do with self- representation and place than ontological notions of being and becoming (Hall 1993). For Hoch, his “skin privilege” as a white man gives him the opportunity to critique the hegemonic tactics of the white establishment and to distance himself from stereotypes of white wannabes in Hip-hop: An actor? Come on now, you know you wanna ask me I'll use my skin privileges to flag you down a taxi ‘Cause that's my mission, profit in my pocket, I clock it I got billions invested in jails, you can't stop it … And I laugh at all these rap videos with these guns and ho's While you strike the roughneck pose, I pick my nose And flick it on ya, ya gonner, no need to warn ya Got mad seats in government from Bronx to California (1998, p. 3) Hip-hop, its blackness, is more than a site of music production associated with African Americans. It is an “imagined community” (Anderson 1993) that people of various racial and ethnic groups see as a culture that represents resistance to the status quo. Many whites identify with Hip-hop as a site to engage with larger struggles for collective and individual equality that many African American rappers discuss in their raps. Many whites want to be part of the solution to end social inequality based on race; they do not want to be part of the problem. By joining in 110 fights against anti-black racism chronicled in many Hip-hop narratives, Hoch and many other whites engaged with Hip-hop, set themselves apart from the white men and women who are assumed to be cultural appropriators. Hoch makes it clear that his intention as an artist and social critic is to distance himself from whites who exploit Hip-hop; instead, he chooses to critique these stereotypes. His awareness of his “skin privilege” and his subsequent acknowledgment of white social and political investment in the prison industrial complex (“billions invested in jails”) and the lack of black representation in the government at the state level (“mad seats in government from Bronx to California”) all work together to demonstrate the lack of social and political agency many black artists in Hip-hop actually have. Hoch critiques African American rappers who see financial success as a vehicle that will allow them to escape the relationships of power between the larger social and institutional disparities imposed by white hegemony based on racial difference. Hoch’s critique continues to address the status quo’s investment in keeping African Americans oppressed by rewarding only the negative representations of their experiences in the mainstream music: And I got the National Guard and plus the Navy, Army, Air Force, son, I got niggers paid to save me If it ever really gets to that but I doubt it ‘Cause these dollars that I print got your mind clouded A kid steps on your sneakers and you beef with no hesitation But you never got beef with my legislation or my TV station (1998, 4) Hoch lists the military (National Guard, Navy, Army, Air Force) and the state (legislation) as historically racist institutions. Though African Americans play a part 111 in the military and government, Hoch argues that by choosing money as a short-term solution for more systemic problems that plague the African American communities, many blacks miss opportunities to effect social change by organizing collectively to address the institutionalized racism that exists. Hoch understands that his whiteness affords him the privilege to make this critique. Yet, his use of the word “nigger” marks a slippage (Bhabha 1989) in his fluency in African American’s interracial use of Hip-hop Nation English and the ways that African Americans sanction whites who use the term. Here sanction is meant to underline how African Americans take whites to task for using the word “nigger.” At Grand Performances in Los Angeles, his audience could not disassociate his white body from its historical relationship to the utterance of “nigger,” even though Hoch used the word as a “character;” this utterance ruptured the audience’s suspended disbelief. Many audience members (white, black and Latino) looked at one another and sat in silence. 69 However, because the word “nigger” has been incorporated into Hip-hop Nation English as exclusive to Hip-hop and not tied specifically to the African American community, many non-African Americans feel they can use the word because they have translated and resignified the word “nigger” to mean “social outsider” or “poor” person. The association of the word “nigger” with the history of slavery in the United States is separated from its use in Hip-hop Nation English. Not all of the audience members at Grand Performances in Los 69 In the film version of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop(2005), Hoch adapts the play remixing live theater versions with other taped versions of his performance performed in New York prisons. In one scene in the film Hoch performs “Message to the Bluntman” to a predominately black and Latino prison audience. When he utters the word “nigger,” there is an audible silence and deadpan expression on all of the inmates faces. 112 Angeles were “native” Hip-hoppers and perhaps were not fluent in Hip-hop language. Additionally, Hoch’s use of the term “nigger” with a pronounced “r” made it clear that he was presenting the perspective of a white person who is “down” with Hip-hop, yet who could also translate how the white establishment mocks African American rappers. African American Hip-hoppers would truncate the hard “r” sound replacing it with a soft “a” sound. Hoch’s acknowledgement of the dangerous space of translation between his white body and the body of his white characters is easily recognized. However, even with this in mind, Hoch’s white body could not escape its historical relationship to the word nigger and his white association with the subjugation and denigration of black people. Though Hoch is providing a critique of whites who use the term “nigger” without regard for its social significance, he cannot escape the impact of his body’s relationship to the utterance. Hoch is identified in the Hip-hop community as a white person who is a part of Hip- hop’s cultural legacy and who is not committed to denigrating blacks. Hoch’s “ghetto pass 70 ” issued by African American Hip-hop audiences allows him to code switch between Hip-hop discourse and “white” speech, i.e. SAE, without black people penalizing him. For many African American rappers, white artists automatically lose their entrée into the African American community when they utter 70 “Ghetto pass” is a problematic term because it conflates the use of the term with the social and cultural lives of African Americans. The term circulates in Hip-hop and African American vernaculars and is used to denote a figurative or literal approval from African Americans and/or the hip-hop music community to give permission to non- blacks who use African American cultural codes including speech, dance, style, etc. According to Double Tongued Dictionary.org, a dictionary dedicated to “fringe language and slang,” the term “ghetto pass” can be traced etymologically to the rapper Ice Cube. Grant Barrett, editor of the on-line dictionary argues “This term was popularized by, if not coined in, the song “True to the Game” from the 1991 album Death Certificate by the Hip-hop performer Ice Cube.” Doubletoungeddictionary.org 12 June 2007accessed 3 March 2008. 113 the word nigger. Highly acclaimed white rapper Eminem 71 was interrogated by the African American Hip-hop community for his use of the term in the early demo stages of his career. Eminem came to his own defense, blaming his ignorance and youth. However, he lost many African American Hip-hop fans as a result. Similarly, many of the multi-racial and ethnic audience at the Los Angeles performance ranging in age from 12 to 60 also responded in silence to this usage by Hoch. 72 However, they continued to watch the performance and applaud it. In the film version of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, Hoch edits a live theater version with a staged version he performed at a prison of the same monologue. In the film the mostly black and Latino audience members at the prison also sit speechless after Hoch uses the “n” word. However, because the film version is not a live event and is edited, we cannot see if any of the men sanctioned Hoch for using the term by questioning his usage in any way. Many African American men and women have a problem with any non-black person using the term “nigger” and usually will publically admonish anyone who uses it in and outside of its circulation in Hip- hop.Hoch ends his critique addressing African Americans who continue to perpetuate the superficiality and materialism of Hip-hop: So keep buyin' this fly revolution that I'm sellin' How much Gee's I'll make off you herbs, yo ain't no tellin Keep buyin my Philly Blunt Shirts and my Hats Keep buyin my Forties, and keep buyin them Gats 71 Eminem is also clear about the social limitations of his position as a white male rapper, that he often refuse to use black vernacular at all instead creatively using the vernacular of horror, white trailer park communities and his personal trials and tribulations to prove that rapping is a skill that can be learned a part from its cultural affiliation to African Americans, yet regards African Americans as the most proficient in the art form of Hip-hop 114 And I'll keep buyin time with the cash that you spend We could hang out, I'll even call you my friend And we can watch this televised revolution that you're missin On the commercials that's between Rush Limbaugh and the Simpsons what’s the moral of this limerick that I kicked? If you missed it, well maybe your head is thick or maybe your ass is too high from the Blunts that’s too bad, because revolution only happens once. Forties, Blunts, Ho's. Glocks and Tecs, You got your 'X' cap But I got you power ...less Forties, Blunts, Ho's. Glocks and Tecs, You got your Tommy Hil and your Lex... but what's next? Hoch’s savvy critique addresses many issues in Hip-hop culture as well as what Stuart Hall calls the “inter-related” qualities that constitute its articulation and re- articulation. Many of the products associated with “being” Hip-hop that Hoch addresses are ultimately white owned and produced. Hoch warns many African American youth that the so called “revolution” that many Hip-hoppers think they are creating is often contradicted by their engagement with preoccupations with materialism and violence. For Hoch, African Americans in mainstream Hip-hop have to take responsibility for the ways they denigrate black women as sexual object(“Hos”), glamorize drug and alcohol abuse and boasting about deadly weapons (“Glocks and Tecs”) in their raps. He reveals how destructive these images are and the way that the white establishment capitalizes on marketing these products to African Americans in order to capitalize on the ways that Hip-hop artists glamorize drugs, weapons and the mistreatment of women. 115 Hoch tells African American Hip-hoppers who identify with the thug and gangsta roles that whites in power ridicule them (“We could hang out…I'll even call you my friend”). Additionally, the end of Hoch’s monologue addresses how stories of excess materialism (“Lex”-i.e. Lexus cars) and the purchasing of designer clothing figure heavily in Hip-hop oral narratives. Hoch’s specific warning to black youth, and all racial and ethnic groups who embrace Hip-hop’s violence and excess materialism for that matter, reveal that Hip-hop is just as much indebted to the status quo as it is resistant to it. Hoch’s use of Hip-hop English, the use of the “n” word and oral narratives that referenced African Americanness in Hip-hop establishes him as a Hip-hopper who “talks and acts” black in order to establish a connection to African American experiences in Hip-hop and how they shape Hip-hop. His characterization of “the man” who speaks to African Americans in Hip-hop communities addresses the larger social and political systems of inequality and economic disparity that produce Hip-hop. However, what Hoch does not do is give African Americans credit for being aware of the social and racial hierarchies that produce their experience. However, many of the issues of appropriation and commodification of Hip-hop that Hoch addresses depict African Americans as not being smart enough to recognize how their communities and cultural products are being appropriated. Perhaps in some cases, Hoch is right and his “Message to the Bluntman” will illuminate something new to African American Hip-hop audiences, however, many African Americans in Hip-hop already grapple with the social contradictions of wanting to “resist” “the 116 man,” as they remain tied to the dominant institutions and commodity culture that circulate Hip-hop. After the show at Grand Performances, I made my way through the line to meet speak with him. Audience members trickled down the stairs of the outdoor theater and waited to meet Hoch. I had recently published an essay about Hoch challenging his polycultural agenda. I expressed in the article that Hip-hop is indebted to African American cultural practices that are always already polycultural. The article appeared in a column I wrote for an on-line newsletter at the Hip-hop Archive 73 at Harvard University in 2003. Hoch read the piece and recognized me by my name when I introduced myself. He said that he did not feel I fairly represented his work in Hip-hop Theater, because I critiqued his efforts to render Hip-hop uniquely a “polycultural” art form. I explained to him that Hip-hop Theater, like any other art inspired by Hip-hop, needed to be open to critique, especially in respect to issues of race and representation. Hoch agreed with me about the need to critique perspectives of Hip-hop Theater and performance. He also agreed to be interviewed for my analysis of his work in Sampling Blackness. Hoch’s insistence that Hip-hop is polycultural, or a “polycultural construct” (2001), as he discusses in his manifesto, does not address the fact that blackness and African American cultural production in Hip-hop are always already polycultural. As discussed in Chapter One, Hip-hop samples from other cultures and incorporates their performative codes under the sign of blackness and Hip-hop. Because African 73 For more information see the Hip-hop Archive at the W.E.B. Dubois Institute of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. www.hiphoparchive.org 117 American cultural production dominates Hip-hop, it makes sense that non-African American artists identify with African Americanness to construct notions of “authentic” Hip-hop performance. I agree with Hoch that Hip-hop contains contributions from a wide range of racial, ethnic and national groups of various class backgrounds. However, what most of these groups identify with is a particular articulation of African Americanness as representative of Hip-hop’s “realness.” In my interview with Hoch, he stated his position on Hip-hop’s aesthetic: … because Hip-Hop’s forms screamed of their Caribbean-African Diaspora based roots, they always got associated with Black & Puerto Rican (sic). More so, it served the ruling class structure (and the underclass structure too) to put Hip-Hop in the Black/Latino box. It served the ruling class because Hip-Hop had created forms of cultural resistance to urban poverty, and it served the underclass (or so they thought) because when urban poverty became chic in the early 80’s, authenticity or “down-ness” became synonymous with race/class, thereby creating a sense of power by self- determination. No one ever even made the distinction between Jamaican, Dominican, Puerto Rican (sic), Cuban, and Ecuadorian. Nor did they make the distinction between Black class structures, White class structure, Latino class structure. Class was virtually illegal to discuss in the 80’s. You were either Black or Latino (poor and cool), or you were White (rich and uncool). You had better not be white and poor or Black/Latino and middle class or you were “unauthentic” and therefore useless to either side’s struggle (Hoch 2006) 74 Hoch’s statement supports my argument that what is “black” in the context of the United States and Hip-hop is most often conflated with African American racial and cultural identity. Despite the fact that many other African Diasporic black and Latino groups contribute to Hip-hop’s aesthetic, the black-white binary in the United States is the scale against which other minority groups are racialized in relationship to “blackness” and “whiteness.” Hoch’s assertion that “urban poverty” became chic 74 Hoch, Danny. Personal Communication with Nicole Hodges Persley. February 17, 2006. 118 in the early1980s ignores previous historical instances of whites identifying with “urban poor” (Julius Wilson 1978). Glamorizing urban poverty has and continues to be a hegemonic tactic of the mainstream media. From slavery to the present, whites have been attracted to African American cultural forms from music to dance. Whites, from Thomas Daddy Rice and his minstrel show to Elvis Presley have sampled performative codes from African American cultural production and associated notions of the “authentic’ with ideas of the “primitive.” Similarly, in Hip-hop, African American articulations of the music and culture are conflated with notions of the “authentic.” If, as Hoch notes, Hip-hop began to privilege a “Jamaican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, [or] Ecuadorian…” expression as the most popular form of the music, then it can be assumed that performative codes associated with African American identity in Hip-hop would be replaced with other dominant cultural codes. My focus on African Americanness in Hip-hop and its re-articulation by Hoch and other white performers is not to argue that these are the only codes used to create Hip-hop but that the performative codes of African American racial and cultural identity associated with the music and culture are the dominant source of cultural production against which non-African American performers measure the validity of their Hip-hop performances. Hoch’s reliance upon the “local” yet his references to the “global” contributions to Hip-hop suggest his world view is not just limited to American Hip-hop. He noted that Hip-hop inspired arts thrive all over the world including in places such as South Africa and Cuba. Though Hoch critiques blacks 119 and whites in his prologue, his goal is to establish a critical distance between his personal position as an artist and the characters he portrays. Despite Hoch’s attempts to establish his knowledge about Hip-hop, its “culture, community and generation,” (Morgan 2002) he simultaneously critiques and re-inscribes negative stereotypes of African American Hip-hoppers as unintelligent consumers who are interested only in material satisfaction. What is often problematic in Hoch’s work is that many of his critiques imply that “he knows Hip-hop culture better than African Americans” which in turn underline his position of authority and make him attractive to white producers who don’t know Hip-hop and do not associate with many black people. By making specific connections between language, stereotypes and oral narratives and their ability to indicate black racial identities Hoch demonstrates how performative codes of racial identities can be sampled in performance to create improvised representations of blackness. Section 2- Hoch’s Post- Minstrel Performance of ‘Flip’ in Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop Hoch’s performance of the character “Flip” in Jails, Hospitals in Hip-hop is an example of a post-minstrel performance within a performance. Hoch’s performance addresses notions of what I call post-minstrel characters that circulate in Hip-hop. I define post-minstrels as whites and other non-blacks who use language, gesture and stereotype to indicate “blackness” without necessarily using old blackface styles of applying “burnt-cork” to the skin to indicate blackness. There are instances where post-minstrel performers change their skin, using “politically 120 correct” skin darkening systems such as tanning beds and tanning crèmes to darken their skin to blur the boundaries of whiteness. They also may change their hairstyles wearing cropped hair cuts, dreads, braids, weaves and/or other hairstyles marked as “black” in the United States to unsettle the normative codes of self-adornment associated with whites. Hoch reveals how African American racial and cultural identity is conflated with notions of Hip-hop authenticity. Hoch simultaneously performs the post-minstrel images as he critiques them to establish a cross-racial and ethnic coalition between blacks and whites in Hip-hop. Similar to the ways many white males sampled from the language and styles of jazz culture in the 1960s as Norman Mailer recounts in “The White Negro” (1957) in order to identify with black resistance to the status quo and notions of “hipness,” many whites have engaged with Hip-hop’s blackness as a site to play with their identities as white males and to distance themselves from “normative” whiteness, in an attempt to present alternative representations of white masculinity. Post-minstrel performance is not limited to whites performing blackness and also addresses the ways other racial and ethnic groups manipulate their bodies. Hoch’s critique of white boys and Hip-hop foreshadows recent explorations of African Americanness and its relationship to Hip-hop in the VH-1 reality series The White Rapper. These samples of blackness by whites have the capacity to perpetuate negative stereotypes as much as they have the potential to create cross-racial and ethnic coalitions. These post-minstrel and cross- racial and ethnic coalition categories are intended to provide brackets to understand 121 the scope of my observations and not to limit potential interpretations nor suggest that other possible readings cannot exist simultaneously. Hoch’s monologue of ‘Flip’ from Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop and the VH-1 reality show The White Rapper are representations of white artists engaged with Hip- hop who focus on superficial representations of blackness in Hip-hop by sampling from the language, oral narratives and stereotypes of African American rappers in quests for Hip-hop “authenticity.” In the fall of 2007, I began to watch the television reality program on VH-1 entitled The White Rapper. The show’s content intersected with my research on white performers in Hip-hop Theater and Performance and provided a larger pop culture context for my interrogation of Hoch’s portrayal of “Flip.” Flip embodied the white wannabe stereotype and is an exaggeration of many white rappers who sample from performative codes of blackness. Examples of popular circulation of the white wannabe rapper stereotype have existed in Hip-hop since its inception. However, this stereotype of the white rapper who “talks and acts” black has also been subverted by the popular and critical success of white rappers such as The Beastie Boys, 3 rd Bass and Eminem. The artists have demonstrated exceptional skills as Emcees and engage blackness in Hip-hop as a cultural space that allows them to discuss their personal relationships to Hip-hop recounting their own experiences within blackness; not necessarily demonstrating a desire to “be” black. The White Rapper was hosted by Jewish American rapper Emcee Serch, formerly of the Hip-hop group 3 rd Bass. The show followed the experiences of 122 twelve white rappers from various socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds competing for the title of “The White Rapper.” The show’s disclaimer stated that most rappers in the history of Hip-hop have been African American. However, the recent success of rappers such as Eminem, who the VH-1 website named “the king of rap,” made room for other white rappers to succeed in the genre: 75 The show’s premise focuses on the contestants’ abilities to demonstrate their knowledge of how socio-economics, class and race shape Hip-hop culture: It won't be easy. The run-down South Bronx tenement that they'll be bunking in - a.k.a. "Tha White House" - is far from a bed of roses. But Hip hop is about survival; about economics and class and race (sic). Our 12 contestants will be faced with a variety of tasks that will reflect each of these facets of the culture. From spitting fresh rhymes in Harlem's Rucker Park to breaking bread with some of hip hop's hottest icons, our Caucasian contestants will be immersed in the culture they claim to love (2007). 76 The producers at VH-1 found commercial appeal in creating a show where white contestants could display their abilities to “talk and act black” in attempts to authenticate their Hip-hop performances. Different contests took place on the show that directly addressed the ability of the ten contestants to demonstrate their Hip-hop “authenticity.” In Episode One, a female contestant named Persia was admonished for her excessive use of the word “nigga” and was forced to wear a gold medallion that read “N-Word” on it, to mark her shame and her transgressive behavior. The 75 While Eminem is not the first white male to succeed in Hip-hop, he is one of the most successful rappers in Hip-hop history. This naming of him as “the king of rap” is problematic because it summons previous titles given to white artists such as Elvis Presley as the “king of rock” who appropriated and imitated African American music styles. Eminem makes no attempt to appropriate “Blackness” but professes his appreciation and mastery of Hip-hop as a predominately African American music form. See Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 76 VH-1 and Ego Trippin’s “About the Series” The White Rapper website accessed 28 February 2008. 123 use of the word “nigga” in Hip-hop is pervasive and is often sampled by whites to demonstrate how “down” they are with Hip-hop. In another elimination challenge, in Episode 3, rappers selected for elimination were asked to select a slice of bread from the "white loaf," each with a somewhat different topic. Topics included "white power"; "white trash"; "whitewash," and "white guilt." The contestants were given 30 minutes to write and perform a rap based on the topic. Other contests demonstrated the white contestant’s ability to successfully sample from the performative codes of blackness associated with African Americans in Hip-hop. The contestants engaged in rap battles, dance challenges, directing a music video and freestyle contests. In each challenge, all of the rappers relied on Hip-hop Stock characters such as the thug and pimp stereotypes, Hip-hop Nation English (Alim 2001) and styles of self-adornment that imitated African American rappers. Though ethnic and class differences differentiated the experiences of the white contestants, they shared the assumption that by appearing more black they could become famous rappers. Most of the contestants created caricatures of African Americans in Hip-hop and based many of their performances of the thug, gangsta and wannabe characters in their performances. One exception was a colleague from my PhD program at The University of Southern California named Jeb Middlebrook, who was one of the contestants on the show. His Emcee name was “Jus Rhyme.” Middlebrook is a scholar of American Studies and studies Hip-hop music created in American prisons. Middlebrook identifies Hip-hop as site for whites to explore social inequality and the ways that 124 whites can identify with the positive social agendas in Hip-hop that speak to anti- black racism, sexism and misogyny. When he addressed issues of racial essentialism with his fellow contestants on the show, drawing their attention to their reliance upon stereotypical depictions of African American life such as particular narratives of the “ghetto,” “gangsta” and “thug” life, he was not accepted by his colleagues. Middlebrook’s strategy of avoiding direct confrontation with his colleagues in any type of altercation may have contributed to him staying on the show until Episode seven. His ability to win challenges that did not require Emcee skill also contributed to his stay. However, his “off- beat” rap style and refusal to “talk and act” black were constantly addressed by his white colleagues as well as the host, MC Serch. I translated Jus Rhyme’s rejection by his colleagues as more to do with his inability to translate complicated themes such as racial essentialism, white hegemony and institutional racism to his colleagues in a way that they could understand. Jus Rhyme often came off as a quirky Hip-hopper who had not defined his voice. However, his colleague, John Brown, identified the novelty of being a white kid from the suburbs who only had claims to the “ghetto” through Hip-hop and was able to translate his self-proclaimed position as “King of the ‘burbs” (i.e. “King of the suburbs”) to a larger white audience who could relate to him. John Brown was able to sample Hip-hop language “talking and actin” black enough to show he was down, yet translated many Hip-hop stereotypes through his experiences as a white suburban kid. John Browns’ use of Hip-hop language was to articulate his personal experiences of growing up in suburbia much in the same way that Eminem’s fluency 125 in Hip-hop Nation English allows him to narrate his experiences of growing up in a trailer park. Ultimately, the more the white contestants acted and talked black, the more air time the producers gave them. In Episode 7, Jus Rhyme, John Brown, Shamrock go to Detroit, which is known in Hip-hop as the “white rap capital” because the white rapper Eminem and Kid Rock 77 are from Detroit. Many of these white artist had to use performative codes such as language, styles of self-adornment and embodied gestures associated with African Americans in Hip-hop. Jus Rhyme was the rapper that refused to do this and acted on his own terms using Hip-hop in his own interpretation. Perhaps this is why he stayed on the show for so long. Shamrock wore diamond encrusted “grills. 78 ” John Brown never stopped superimposing his translation of a fantastical “ghetto” over his life in the suburbs. Brown even cut his hair to mimic styles of African American men in Hip-hop. Jus Rhyme was an anomaly because he chose to talk about his personal experiences as a white man in American and what he wanted to do to subvert stereotypes of whites in Hip-hop as cultural tourists creating cross-racial and ethnic coalitions through Hip- hop. Accordingly, Jus Rhyme was ultimately dismissed by his colleagues as being unskilled as a rapper. However, he lost the respect of his colleagues and was deemed “inauthentic” because he refused to perform stereotypes of African Americans to 77 Eminem and Kid Rock represent successful white rappers who have mastered the art of Emceeing and talk about their experiences as white kids growing up in Detroit. Though Eminem’s rap focus issues such as poverty, domestic violence, rage, etc., Kid Rock focuses on party raps that have their roots in early 1980s Hip-hop. Neither Eminem nor Kid Rock makes claims to “ghetto” or “thug” life. 78 “Grills” are artificial braces made to fit over the surface of teeth to make them look shiny. They are encrusted with diamonds and other jewels. Grills are used in Hip-hop as a marker of status and are usually custom made from fine metals such as platinum and gold, with platinum being the most luxurious. 126 prove his relationship to Hip-hop. The 100,000 dollars awarded the winner of The White Rapper represents the ways that non-African American’s reliance upon African Americanness and its performative codes in Hip-hop is rewarded by the mainstream media and reduces opportunities for African American artists. To date, VH-1 nor any other media outlet has featured a competition where African American rappers can compete for recording contracts and/or monetary rewards. In Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop 79 Hoch’s white character “Flip” wishes he were black in order to become a better rapper just like the white rappers previously discussed. Hoch critiques white “wannabe” rappers such as those featured on The White Rapper in his performance. “Flip” is a white suburban kid from Montana who locates his Hip-hop identity in the re-articulation of oral narratives of the thug and gangsta stereotypes to construct his persona. In his monologue, we see him engage in a racial fantasy of becoming a thug rapper in the midst of the suburbs. “Flip” dreams of leaving the luxuries of the suburbs to move into “some straight up thug- ass ghetto projects type shit…” (Hoch 1998, 18). Like the rappers on the VH-1 reality show who mimicked the conditions of poor blacks by living in a recreated “tenement” as representative of “authentic” blackness and Hip-hop authenticity, “Flip” also wants to leave his suburban home to live in the a fantastical ghetto that will link him to African Americans and Hip-hop music. This fantasy of the ghetto 79 The play Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop premiered at Performance Space 122, New York City. 28 March 1998, though Hoch had performed the piece in various forms around New York and other sites. The film version was released in 2000 and was directed by Marc Levin, who also directed the film version entitled Whiteboyz (often spelled Whiteboys), released in 1999. The character “Flip” (also referred to as “Flip Dog”, is from Montana in the play version and from Iowa in the film version). Hoch and Levin use the exact monologue from Jails in the film Whiteboyz. The film version further explores Flip’s life as a wannabe rapper. 127 also underlines the ways that the mainstream media glamorizes urban space and poverty in Hip-hop. Flip imagines himself as a guest on The Tonight Show: I know what you’re thinking Jay. You’re thinkin’ like ‘how is it that this white dude could be such a dope rapper’? Well the truth of the matter is Jay, is that I ain’t white man, I’m really black. See, I went to the doctor Jay. This is between me and you Jay. And he told me that I got this rare skin disorder where I look white, but I’m really black. It’s called like eosinophilic ionic…dermatitis (18). Hoch uses Flip to demonstrate how many white consumers of Hip-hop believe that if they were racially black that they would have more abilities to “become” Hip-hop. Flip also identifies “blackness” as skin color and the ways his white body limits him within the frame of Hip-hop. By disavowing his whiteness by claiming a “rare skin disorder” and claiming blackness through all associations with Hip-hop that constitute “cultural life” as Hall reminds us, Flip disrupts the normative codes of whiteness to reconfigure these cultural elements of Hip-hop as his own. Yet, Flip’s performance of blackness as Hip-hop on The Tonight Show is jarred by his use of Hip-hop Nation English and Hip-hop gestures that are so exaggerated that his white body produces a disconnect between his improvised performance of African Americanness and his lived reality as a suburban white kid. His self-penned rap reveals his desire to “be” black in order to convince his audience that he is “Hip- hop” but his inability to translate between black and white worlds remains: My niggas in the front, while you be in the back Fuck bein’ white, word up dude I’m black I’m only seventeen but my shit still thump And by the time I’m eighteen, I’ll be chillin’ with Donald Trump (19) 128 Here, Flip’s “double articulation” of self as both white and “black” is a sign of what Homi Bhabha calls “the slippages” of mimicry that rupture the discourse and fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial presence’… ‘incomplete’ and ‘virtual’” (Bhabha, 86). Flip’s agency as a white male allows him to metaphorically negate his whiteness, “fuck being white, word up dude, I’m black” (19) in order to re-articulate his imagined “black/Hip-hop” and white selves into one corporeal reality. His ambivalence in this transgression is marked as he uses the word “nigga.” This form of the word “nigger” pronounced without a hard “r” sound is in Hip-hop English by many African American Hip-hoppers as a term of endearment and community. His subsequent code switching and clarification to the audiences that he is aware that he has transgressed the boundaries of his body indicate his awareness that he will be viewed as a white boy trying to act and talk black. Conscious of his own gaffe, ‘Flip’ explains to the imagined Jay Leno: “not nigger – but like ‘you punk ass nigga’” (4) to acknowledge his self-reflexivity and his ‘rupture’ in the discourse of Hip-hop which positions him as a white outsider and one who should not be able to use this particular word without social penalty. Hoch demonstrates his knowledge of both uses of the word “nigger” in and outside the Hip-hop community and the subtle ways its usage indicates the race of the user. Blacks don’t use the “r” in nigger, and whites do. Hoch uses ‘Flip’ to show that white performers who are inspired by Hip-hop mistakenly think that they can sample from all of the language of Hip-hop even when many of the cultural references used by African American are intra-racial and can be misconstrued when used by non-black people. 129 Hoch uses Hip-hop Nation English to reveal its multiple possibilities of mistranslation by white youth who “cut and mix” various narratives of Hip-hop without always knowing the pretext and context of the sound bytes they then use in their everyday conversations. Hoch implies the danger of implicit authorization by black subjects who use specific intra-racial and ethnic discourse, such as “nigga” in Hip-hop narratives. Though these performances may be serious, they are not intended by the performer to offend black subjects, even though these re- articulations often subsequently ridicules and mocks the black subject (Lott 1997, 25-29). ‘Flip’ becomes a remixed version of the white wannabe, thug and gangsta stereotypes. Hoch’s uses ‘Flip’ as a critique of the desire and ambivalence of white kids to “negate” the normative codes of their white identities to authenticate their performances as Hip-hop. The duality of ‘Flip’s’ identity is revealed when his performance is interrupted by his nagging white mother who reminds him that he has chores to finish. ‘Flip’ returns to Standard American English (All right, I’m comin’) to respond to his mother then quickly returns to his fantasy on The Tonight Show: All right, I’m comin’! I gotta go help my moms start her truck. I’m sorry for bustin’ on you Jay. It’s all love, man. You know you my main nigga. But I’ma be back, man. You watch out. And look out for my new album, Montana Gangsta Blood Thugs, Ghetto Rollin’: Comin’ Fo’ That Ass in the Two Gee (10). 130 While many scholars have accused Hoch of blackface minstrelsy (Strand 1998; Lhamon, Jr. 2005), 80 these accusations have come with little consideration for Hoch’s mobilization of Hip-hop English, stereotypes and oral narratives of Hip-hop as a way to critique whites and other racial and ethnic groups who appropriate Hip- hop and blackness. Hoch acknowledges his position as a white male of privilege and uses it to create a contrast with his own personal relationship to Hip-hop. The performers discussed as examples of post-minstrelsy on The White Rapper and Hoch’s performance of “Flip” character all believe that they are challenging the status quo and normative performative codes associated with whiteness by performing African Americanness. However, simply isolating language and stereotypes of Hip-hop and re-articulating them in performance ultimately re- inscribes existing relationships of power between whites and blacks. Unfortunately, the pleasure in watching white kids attempt to perform Hip-hop as “blackness” and ultimately failing, is a source of comedy that becomes an attractive commodity for producers in theater, film and television. Though their performances often provide comic relief, they are also rewarded materially, as performers are offered reality shows, theater performances and recording contracts to perform Hip-hop by identifying performative codes of African Americanness. David Roediger argues that Hoch and other white performers who engage performative codes of blackness operate as “progressive minstrels” (2002, 250), yet Roediger does not consider the 80 For more on accusations of Danny Hoch being a modern day minstrel, see Strand, Ginger Gail Performance Review: Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop Theatre Journal - Volume 50, Number 4, December 1998, pp. 523-525. Lhamon, Jr., W.T. “Optic Black: Naturalizing the Refusal to Fit” 11-125.Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture., Eds. Elam, Harry Justin and Jackson, Kennell. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. 131 performance by Hoch as a performance within a performance. Hoch is able distance himself from labels of “White Negro”, “wigga” and “minstrel” because he makes certain to isolate his position as a white artist as separate from the characters he creates by exaggerating what Dorinne Kondo identifies as “intonation, gesture, movement and accent” (2000, 83) when he plays white characters who engage in cross-racial performance. Yet, this mistranslation between Hip-hop discourse and the white discourse of ‘Flip’ as a suburban white teenager, is underlined by Hoch as a performance of post- minstrelsy because Hoch’s makes it clear that ‘Flip’ must “code switch” between his fantasy “black”/’Hip-hop” life and his white suburban “real” life. In discussing Hoch’s artistic practices as a performer, it is important to consider how his ethnicity as a Jewish American links him to larger historical attempts by Jewish American artists to foster cross-racial and ethnic coalitions with African Americans. Hoch works to distance himself from particular narratives of white liberalism that would depict him as a benevolent supporter of “minority” issues without necessarily engaging black people directly in everyday interactions. In the 1957 essay “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer, like Hoch, searches for social phenomena that can justify and/or support the relationship between the histories of persecution of Jewish people with his personal identification with African American culture articulated in music. Mailer demonstrates how seemingly particular experiences in jazz music have the capacity to shape the collective consciousness of diverse racial and ethnic groups. Mailer implies that our silent persecution of 132 particular groups of people implicitly renders us all powerless. He remarks that the lack of courage to resist social atrocities coupled with white hegemonic threats of violence to those who dissent has material and psychical ramifications. In his essay, Mailer contends that blacks have little to lose, and, therefore they find the capacity to risk the present moment for the possibility of a future life without the threat of violence: Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk. The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger (1957, 279). For many critics, Mailer’s “The White Negro” has come to signify the white male “hipster” who attempts to inhabit the discourse of African Americanness through jazz culture by negating his relationship to the dominant ideology of the ruling class. Much like the identification with Hip-hop music and culture by white male and female artists today, Mailer’s identification with blackness and jazz is directly linked to translations of many black experiences as cultural texts that can be separated from racial subjectivity. Mailer’s linguistic and social identifications with jazz culture allow him to sample particular narratives of black subjectivity that support his quests for self-identification apart from his relationship to the casualties of the holocaust and the atom bomb. These identifications with blackness represent Mailer’s negation of particular narratives of whiteness and the construction of an alternative white “hipster” identification that resists the social norms of the status 133 quo. However, his re-articulation of the discourse of African American jazz culture to fashion alternative representations of whiteness often results in re-inscribing stereotypes of black masculinity with notions of “primitivism” and “savagery,” even when his intention was to enable cross-racial and ethnic coalitions. Though Mailer intends to laud the courage of the black male subject in jazz culture for developing a language and culture to speak to power, he ultimately creates a relationship between jazz culture, black identity and notions of the “primitive.” Hoch and Mailer have similar intentions of creating cross-racial and ethnic coalitions and have both been accused of appropriating African American culture. However, for Hoch, superficial samplings of blackness by voyeuristic white artists can be read as an attempt to try on “revolution” without the threat of violence and social degradation that black people suffer. Hoch is forthcoming about his limitations as an artist. He argues that because he is white he always already represents a more palpable and accessible Hip-hop than does an African American Hip-hop Theater performer. Hoch wants to critique voyeuristic explorations of African American culture as “fake” and representative of everything that is wrong about Hip-hop. Mailer’s identification with jazz culture is similar to Danny Hoch’s identification with Hip-hop in “Message to the Bluntman.” Hoch critiques whites who appropriate African American culture represented in the character ‘Flip,” as he also suggests the impact of African American culture on white suburban youth. This intersection of the intention of the artist and the material results of performance 134 creates an intersection between post-minstrelsy and cross-racial and ethnic coalitions. In Racechanges: White Skin. Blackface in America (1997), Susan Gubar argues "even the most high-minded, idealistic motivations will not save white impersonators of blackness from violating, appropriating, or compromising black subjectivity in a way that will inevitably rebound against the ethical integrity of whites" (36). Mailer connects sentiments of loss that black people experience as a result of the embodied and psychic memories suffered through acts of racism. Mailer ultimately attempts to find common points of oppression between racial and ethnic differences. However, he ultimately reduces the gravity to a set of linguistic signifiers and stereotypes that are void of their original embodied quests for social and political agency when re-articulated by white people. Thus, concepts of “The White Negro,” do lend themselves to understanding recent performances by white rappers who inhabit the discourse of Hip-hop without consideration for the ways in which particular re-articulations of blackness reify stereotypes and revisit past historical relationship between black and white subjects in the United States. Complicating this black-white binary in Hip-hop is my next section which explores the close proximity of post-minstrel performance and cross-racial and ethnic coalitions enabled through performance. I explore how Hoch creates conversations between racial and ethnic groups in performance. I also explore Hoch’s use of various performative codes of African Americanness with his African American female colleague Sarah Jones. 135 Section 3 - Danny Hoch and Sarah Jones: Embodying the Contradictions of Hip-hop and the American Dream Artists Danny Hoch and Sarah Jones are colleagues who create theater that addresses issues of race, gender, ethnicity and Hip-hop. They are celebrated solo performers who have access to prestigious theatre venues, funding from major foundations and support from established artists, directors and producers. Both have developed theatrical works that initiate conversation about race and ethnicity. Their performance and are favored by critics around the world who praise their ability to play the “Other.” Hoch and Jones are familiar with the performative codes of various racial and ethnic groups. Both are critics and lovers of Hip-hop and use it to inspire their artistic practices. Lastly, both artists have presented diverse perceptions and critiques of the “American Dream” in their theatrical works using cross-racial and ethnic performances to reveal how race, ethnicity and gender infringe on opportunities for experiencing more fully what it means to be “American.” Generally, the term “American” in the United States is reserved for whites and other racial and ethnic minorities of non-European descent are “marked” as hyphenated Americans. Hoch and Jones have very different experiences with Hip- hop because of their racial and gender identities. As a white male, Hoch has profited greatly from his association with Hip-hop music and culture. Jones, an African American woman, has been categorized by the media as a Hip-hop poet and “multicultural” theater artist. However, unlike Hoch, Jones’ success as a performer is not achieved through creating Hip-hop themed works, rather her relationship to Hip- 136 hop has informed her ability to demonstrate how she can embody notions of the “multicultural.” Danny Hoch’s critique of the “American Dream” As we have seen, in Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, Hoch creates several important monologues that speak to his capacity to initiate cross-racial and ethnic coalitions through his embodiment of difference in Hip-hop Theater. These performances are not created to show how skilled Hoch is as a performer, though his virtuosity as a performer is most often cited than his clever writing or scathing critiques of social inequality based on race and class. In addition to his personification of the white establishment in his prologue and the portrayal of Flip, Hoch also includes the voices of several racially and ethnically diverse characters from Cuba (performed in fluent Spanish), the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico who live in New York and are part of Hip-hop’s polycultural black aesthetic. Hoch also performs several white New Yorkers who have been shaped by Hip-hop or have contributed to Hip-hop in one way or another. For Hoch, Hip-hop’s impact on the social identities of diverse racial and ethnic groups reveals its capacity to attract a diverse group of consumers and practioners. For Hoch, Hip-hop is a polycultural art form; however, I argue that the polycultural stands in for notions of “multicultural” in many instances and does not address how diverse groups are creating art that derives from a black aesthetic. Hoch’s simplistic view of polyculturalism does not consider the ways that African American cultural production dominates Hip-hop. Here, I discuss two other 137 significant characters in Hoch’s performance of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop. One is Hoch’s performance as himself in the show in the monologue entitled “Danny’s Trip to LA,” and the other is the only African American character in Hoch’s performance, a character named “Emcee Enuff.” Both characters reveal Hoch’s intention as an artist to foster cross-racial relationships through Hip-hop. While characters such as the “white establishment” in “Message to the Blunt man” and “Flip” solicit the most laughs from the audience, it is Hoch’s monologue “Danny’s Trip to LA,” positioned as the central monologue of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop that allows the audience to see Hoch as himself. Hoch used this commentary in performance as a disclaimer. It operates as transition between characters and allows the audience to see that Hoch’s intention is not to create a series of post-minstrel images but to create cross-racial understanding about the ways that Hip-hop culture is exchanged in performance between whites and blacks and other racial and ethnic groups. Additionally, Hoch complicates the black-white binary by remarking on the ways that Latinos are read within this frame and are thus shaped by their relationship to blackness and whiteness. What is significant about Hoch is his desire to distance himself from any relationship to whiteness that would implicate him in the marginalization of African Americans and other minorities. For Hoch, a minority status is achieved by racial, ethnic, gender and/or class categorization. Thus, Hoch’s performance of the monologue “Danny’s Trip to LA” allows him to speak to the audience about representations of Latinos in television, to speak to the racism in the entertainment industry and to use the larger context of his play to complicate Hip-hop’s 138 relationship to blackness. By using a monologue to speak about his personal experiences as an actor and his empathy for misrepresentation of minorities, he also lets his audience know that he does not want to be viewed as another white guy profiting from stereotypes of minorities. Both of these monologues, “Danny’s Trip to LA” and “Emcee Enuff,” were part of Hoch’s Grand Performances event in Los Angeles. When Hoch shifts to perform this character, he stands stage right at a music stand with a script on it and begins to read to the audience. The script serves as the break between the fictional characters Hoch has portrayed and his “real” experiences read from the page. The audience has the opportunity to see Hoch as an actor who steps out of his role to present us a part of his real life experience as a performer. As he turns the pages, he shares a personal story recounting his experiences of racism in the television industry. Hoch tells the audience a story about a time he was offered the part of “Ramon—Pool Guy” on the American sit-com Seinfeld in the late 1990s. He reads from the pages, though his fluid storytelling style indicates that the pages are memorized. He tells the audience that he was flown out to Los Angeles from New York, first class, to read the script with the cast, without an audition. The privilege of being “offered” a part in television is reserved for seasoned and/or immensely popular actors. Hoch’s proud demeanor in delivering this part of the story is met with excitement by the audience because they acknowledge the significance of his opportunity. After reading the script with the cast, Hoch tells us that he was asked to perform the role of “Ramon,” described as a ‘pool guy’, with a ‘Spanish’ accent. 139 Hoch avoids a confrontation with the producers, but gently lets them know that their conflation of Spanish accents and pool labor with Latinos is racist. In the rehearsal Hoch performs the role with an ambiguous accent, yet refuses to play Ramon with a “Spanish accent” arguing that the choice would be derogatory. Seinfeld scolds Hoch and tells him: But I don’t get it. Is it derogatory? Is it derogatory? Aren’t you an actor, isn’t that your craft, isn’t that what you do, you know…little accents? Hoch responds: Look, if you wanted a funny Spanish accent, you should have gotten a funny Spanish actor from Spain ‘cause that’s where Spanish people are from… (39) Hoch’s refusal to do the role with the generic “Spanish” accent lost him the role. Also, Jerry Seinfeld questions Hoch as an actor and his choice to perform the other only in particular contexts. Hoch was not willing to demean Latinos in exchange for a fantastic opportunity any actor would most likely have taken willingly. To make matters worse, the producers never paid Hoch for his time. He tells the audience “If they had paid me, I might not be telling this story right now.” (40). Hoch performed this monologue in downtown Los Angeles as himself and created a dialogue with the audience about his personal experiences as an actor and not a performance of a character. However, Hoch uses this experience in the same way as he uses the prologue, to establish his world-view from those of the characters he portrays. Hoch’s ability to identify with the struggles of Latinos in the United States and the conflation of all “Spanish” speakers with stereotypes of Latino identity is an attempt to create cross-racial and ethnic coalitions. The monologue was 140 particularly salient because the performance space in downtown Los Angeles was a short distance from where the sitcom was filmed. The city of Los Angeles also has a large Latino population, and many television shows continue to portray Latino characters as manual laborers with heavy accents in racist and demeaning ways. Hip- hop’s call and response aesthetic allows Hoch to “call out” the wrongs that were committed against him as an artist as well as those against the Latino community in everyday life as well as in the entertainment industry. Hoch demonstrates that conversations about racial and ethnic difference can move beyond the black-white binary and can be enabled through engagements with Hip-hop. We are also able to see how whites in power in mainstream media, such as the producers of Seinfeld, identify and translate performative codes that indicate “Latino/aness.” Hoch uses the monologue as a confessional of sorts, used to demonstrate how he must struggle with his position as a white performer who has access to opportunity because of his ability to play the “Other.” His dilemma is how to use his power effectively to effect social change. Hoch’s choice to take the “high” road can be read as embodying the role of the “benevolent white guy “who wants to make a point by speaking on behalf of Latinos who cannot speak for themselves because network executives prefer to cast whites acting “Latino.” Hoch’s choice to turn down his role is a statement that speaks to these hegemonic tactics in Hollywood where executives see the life experiences of minorities as comedic punch lines used to advance the storylines of seemingly “edgy” an/or “progressive” television shows. Hoch locates the ‘unity’ other racial and ethnic groups have to 141 the blackness of Hip-hop and the social forces that shape it, as a site to explore how Latinos are marginalized because of race and class differences. The ‘unity’ which matters to Hoch “ is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain conditions, but not necessarily be connected” ( Hall 141). Hoch also distances himself from other whites, specifically Jewish American artists such as Jerry Seinfeld, who find it funny and profitable to mimic minorities. Hoch did not take the role on Seinfeld; however his experiences enabled him to create a monologue that documented another “insider” experience that speaks to the ways that mainstream television sitcoms identify some level of comedy with the social and economic disadvantages experienced by marginalized groups. Moreover, because Hoch samples from the discourse of other Latino groups in Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, such as Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans and their relationship to Hip-hop, he must think about how this has potential to further marginalize Latino people. However, Hoch’s willingness to “do good” often blinds him from the moments when his sampling of performative codes of identity of Latinos and African Americans borders on the post-minstrel. Yet one wonders if Hoch might have made a stronger statement by never showing up to read for the role at all seeing that the role “Ramon-the pool guy” already summons racial stereotypes of Latinos extant in the American theatrical imaginary. When Hoch presents the only African American character, “Emcee Enuff” at the end of his performance, he has already created the social disclaimer regarding his intentions so that he will not be categorized as a post-minstrel profiting from 142 blackness. “Emcee Enuff “is a rapper who profits from his performance of the gangsta stereotype. The play script describes Emcee Enuff as “ a famous and successful rapper in a baseball cap, gold teeth 81 and Versace shades [who] makes his first appearance on the David Letterman show” (65). Hoch uses minimal props; a baseball cap and sunglasses that he takes from the file cabinet on the stage. He sits in a chair on stage as “Emcee Enuff,” slouching and making large hand gestures and smiling to show his “gold” teeth. “Emcee Enuff” is promoting his fourteenth album entitled “Emcee Enuff: Where is the Joy?” Hoch’s critique of ostentatious African American rappers begins immediately, as he lampoons the rise of gangsta rap in the mid-to-late 1990s and the promotion and commercialization of violence by record labels. “Emcee Enuff” is loud and over-the-top. His exaggerated behavior is indicative of many African American gangsta rappers who feel that by “misbehaving” in public forums that they appear more anti-establishment. However “Emcee Enuff” code switches between Standard American English and Hip-hop Nation English demonstrating that he, too, is playing a character by embodying this gangsta persona. Hoch makes a choice to separate the way the character speaks in the interview from the character he performs for his fans. We see that “Emcee Enuff” plays the gangsta stereotype for his fans so that he can make money and appeal to his audience base. When David Letterman asks him about the misogyny and violence in his music, “Emcee Enuff” responds: 81 Gold teeth were artificial dentures worn by African American rappers over their real teeth in the 1990s as a sign of prestige. Today, these gold teeth are also created in platinum with diamonds and other expensive jewels and are called “grills”. 143 You know I started rappin’ about” Stay off crack, stay in school, don’t do drugs, organize, etcetera…but to be honest Dave, the shit wasn’t sellin’. And I had to pay my rent, man. I had house payments. I had people in my studio on salary. I mean what? I’m supposed to just fire fifteen people? That’s un- American. (69) In this part of Hoch’s performance he uses “Emcee Enuff” to make a commentary about the ways many African American rappers create characters in performance in order to pay the bills and to move closer to the American Dream. Everyone wants the ability to have a home, pay for food, clothing, vacations, etc. Many African Americans rappers intend to change their communities however, they cannot be held accountable for helping everyone as role models. As For “Emcee Enuff” what is “American” about his rapping is the amount of money he makes from the violence and misogyny in his lyrics. He then uses this money to pay the bills for fifteen employees. By profiting from the popularity of gangsta rap, he is able to afford a lifestyle that he would never afford otherwise and is able to help his employees better their lives. The rapper later suggests the themes in his work change based on what is popular in Hip-hop: That’s’ it, I had shifted in my art. I shifted. I just started rappin’ bout big booty bitches and runnin’ up in niggas’ cribs and puttin’ fifty bullets in they head, I got graphic… .(69) Hoch shows us that though the rapper tried to make a change, he had achieved his fame and fortune through the perpetuation of violence, misogyny and stereotypes, so what financial incentive would he have to stop? The world-view for rappers like “Emcee Enuff” expanded through the global circulation of their work and the ways that fans around the world identified with the personas they created. Perhaps Hoch is 144 stating that you cannot judge a rapper by the music he creates because in many cases, the narratives are improvised samples of “gangsta” life, much in the same way that his character “Flip” borrows from stereotypes of African Americanness to create a Montana thug fantasy. Hoch also comments on the ways that African Americans sample from Latino culture in Hip-hop by borrowing tracks of Latino vernacular such as mama and la la which are words often used to address Latina women. Hoch ends his performance with Emcee Enuff as a counter character, both racially and culturally, to “Flip” the white wannabe rapper. He creates a post-minstrel binary using Flip at the opening of the show and Emcee Enuff at the end of the show to take us back to the opening epigraph from "Message to the Bluntman." Circling back to the beginning, Hoch ends his performance asking who has the authority to “talk and act” black? The internal conflict that many African American rappers face is the same contradiction explored by Hoch n the prologue “Message to the Bluntman.” Many rappers want to help incite social change and create positive role models for their community. However, Hip-hop that “teaches” is less popular than Hip-hop that entertains. Consequently, African American often attempt to “split the difference” between reinscribing Hip-hop stereotypes and creating music that speaks to social inequalities. However, due to the global popularity of Hip-hop stock characters such as the thug, gangsta and baller stereotypes, the most popular rappers continue to circulate negative narratives. Hoch works to show that many consumers of Hip-hop think that the oral narrative, language and images rappers use when they perform are actually “real” and not 145 carefully constructed personas used to make money. Hoch allows “Emcee Enuff” to discuss his desire to help change distorted images of black people in the media. ”Emcee Enuff” can be read as a post-minstrel character referencing black-on-black minstrelsy in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. Hoch’s ability to create a critical analysis of Hip-hop from a white perspective that empathizes with African Americans can also be read as an attempt to exempt him from the power disparities and the potential of his performance of a black character as racist. As Stuart Hall (1997) 82 has noted, the representation of the black subject engages both processes that challenge racist stereotypes and also the inter-exchange of cultures. Though Hall speaks to the multiple ways that ethnicity and nation shape perceptions of black identity, we must consider the ways white perceptions and performances of blackness are also a part of black representation. “Emcee Enuff” demonstrates the struggles of many African American men who are presented with choices to exploit and profit from negative images of African Americans or to survive on low-paying jobs because of diminished opportunities for black men in the United States. “Emcee Enuff,” as a character, underlines for Hoch and white men like David Letterman that the conflicting choices that many African American rappers make between choosing survival and success at the expense of being a negative role model in their communities is often the price they pay. Many African American men can do more for their communities in the long term as millionaires than being struggling artists who rap about social change. Though many African 82 Hall, S. (1977). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, 1997. 146 American men and women would like to rap about positive images, the most popular images of African Americans that circulate in Hip-hop are negative. Hoch’s “Emcee Enuff” represents the internal conflicts many African American rappers face in struggling with the contradictions of Hip-hop. Another example of contradictions in Hip-hop that complicate how African American men and women are labeled because of their association with the music and culture are easily found in the work of Hip- hop poet, actress and “multicultural” theater artist, Sarah Jones, who is a contemporary of Danny Hoch’s and also creates Hip-hop inspired works. Sarah Jones: A “Multicultural” American Dreamer Sarah Jones is read by theater critics as a “multicultural” artist who embodies quests for the American Dream and is a ‘bridge’ between racial and ethnic groups. In 2002, Jones provided a critique of Hip-hop in a spoken-word/rap performance entitled “Your Revolution,” that took black Hip-hop artists to task for marginalizing black women as sexual objects. She received international attention as a performer when her poem was banned from being played on the radio by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). 83 Ironically, Jones’ critique of Hip-hop from an African American woman’s perspective helped further her career. In her Broadway play Bridge and Tunnel, directed by Tony Taccone, 84 the actress focuses 83 Sarah Jones’ rap song “Your Revolution,”(2002) the Federal Communications Commission (FFC) issued that the radio station, that played Jones’ song a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture (NAL) for broadcast of an allegedly obscene song. Jones made an administrative appeal and also sued the FCC in federal district court stating that the FCC had violated her First Amendment rights. Her claim was dismissed. See Jones v. FCC (The Sarah Jones Case No. 1 Civ 693. DLC, 2002, WL 2018521(S.D.N.Y. Sept 4, 2002). 84 It should be noted that Tony Taccone is a critically acclaimed director and has been the Artistic Director of Berkeley Repertory Theater for the past 12 years, He also directed Jones in her Off-Broadway show Surface Transit. He is also the director of Danny Hoch’s new solo show Taking Over (2008). 147 on immigrants of New York City and the ways that race and ethnicity have shaped their struggles to identify as “Americans.” Using a spoken word poetry night as the link between characters, Jones uses her body and voice to sample from a wide range of performative codes of identity in order to illustrate how race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class have shaped their journeys toward American citizenship. When I saw the show at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway in August 2006, the audience was a cross-racial and ethnic mix of people of all ages. I sat next to ‘seventy-something’ white women who kept asking one another “So she is going to play all of the people? Amazing…” Most every billboard in front of the theater also attested to Jones’ “amazing” ability to transcend her blackness in order to represent the “multicultural” qualities of New York. The preshow offers an eclectic mix of Hip-hop and techno music. The two- level stage is set with a microphone stand down center stage, a multi-pronged coat- rack with various garments upstage left and a staircase leading upstairs to a door with an opaque window that indicates an office door. The lighting is dim, creating an ambiance of a 1960s poetry reading. A few tables and chairs stand stage right. Jones enters the scene from behind the audience making her way down the aisle from the entrance of the theater to the stage. Dressed as homeless woman, burdened with bags and extra clothing, Jones’ prologue announces to the audience that they are about to witness a poetry jam. Instead of the usher who makes announcements about cell phones, pagers and candy wrappers which usually precedes most Broadway shows, Jones makes all of the announcements to the audience. As she saunters to the 148 stage, she takes off the sweaters and bags worn as the “homeless woman,” places them on stage and grabs a dark blazer to become a “Pakistani” poet/accountant named “Mohammed Ali.” The audience now understands that the coat stand holds all of the costume changes Jones will use to portray her characters. The poetry night takes place in a coffee shop in Queens, which hosts a weekly poetry jam for immigrants entitled ''I .Am. A. Poet. Too.” this is an acronym that is used to describe the group as ‘‘Immigrant and Multiculturalist American Poets or Enthusiasts Traveling toward Optimistic Openness.’’ Mirroring Jones’ own experiences as a former “Hip-hop poet,” the actress uses poetry as a platform for new immigrants who want to learn English. The spoken word venue imagines poetry as a site that facilitates new imaginings, translations and interpretations of the American Dream. As Hip-hop music blares from the speakers, “Mohammed Ali” tells the audience to “make some noise,” using Hip-hop Nation English to excite the crowd. The Hip-hop, poetry “jam” provides a space where poets of all racial, ethnic, gender identities can imagine themselves as American. Jones creates fourteen characters, each with a distinct voice. Yet some are caricatures of various racial and ethnic groups. Many characters evoke post-minstrel performances because of the way Jones exaggerates the speech and gesture of particular groups and does not allow the characters’ narratives to move away from stereotypes. Most historical performances of blackface minstrelsy in the United States focus on whites playing blacks. However, there is little discussion about the ways that African Americans have marginalized other racial and ethnic groups in the 149 American Theater. Jones performance of black characters from throughout the African Diaspora reveals the multicentricity of blackness re-articulating a wide array of “blacknesses” experienced by black women from the United States, Jamaica, Haiti, London and the Dominican Republic. Jones appears to strongly identify with these characters perhaps because their experiences have something in common with her own experiences as a black woman. I make this assertion simply because these characters are very strong in her performance, however, connections to Jones’ position as a black woman can also be identified in other characters in the show. When Jones samples from other performative codes of identity including a Chinese mother of a lesbian daughter, a young Russian Jewish grandmother or a smart-mouthed Latina, she offers a way for the audience to connect to immigrant experiences. Yet she largely bases these samples in racial and ethnic stereotypes. Her performances work to incite a larger understanding of how particular immigrant groups are marginalized in the United States. Jones asks, “Who has the right to claim the “American” dream when it is always already a “white” dream? However, Hip-hop’s discourse allows Jones to create a most complex critique of the American Dream and the impact of diverse immigrant populations of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds on black and white Americans who must share resources with new potential American citizens. American Dream rhetoric promises equal opportunities to all with no mention of institutional and systemic racism that limits opportunities for minorities to achieve these promises. The characters in Jones show uses Hip-hop style “spoken word,” translated in varying degrees of fluency, to demonstrate how 150 discrimination based on race and/or ethnicity have reconfigured their understanding of equal opportunity in the United States. “Mohammed Ali,” the Pakistani host of the poetry event, uses Hip-hop style poetry to recount his experiences as a Pakistani who is often mistaken for a terrorist in the United States because of his style of dress and his physical appearance. Ali is dressed in a tight fitting blazer and introduces each immigrant poet to the microphone. He uses newly learned Hip-hop language to show his “hipness” in English, mirroring immigrants’ attempts to forge an “American” identity by adapting popular American vernacular. Mocking himself and his heavily accented use of Hip-hop terms such as “hype” and “dope,” Ali manipulates American stereotypes and misunderstandings of Pakistani and Arab identity. He reminds the audiences that he is “not a terrorist” and that he “pays his taxes” and has heard all of the jokes about the “other” Mohammed Ali. He has learned about American identity and the descriptions with which he must he must comply to be regarded as an American citizen. The first is paying his taxes and the second is distancing himself from “terrorists” (i.e. those people who may “look” of Middle Eastern or North African descent). Jones’ performance of “Mohammed Ali” creates a cross-racial and ethnic collaboration between her experiences as African American woman and those of other immigrants,(including African Americans who are forced immigrants) who are striving for the American Dream against incredible odds of institutional racism, language and cultural barriers. 151 Another Hip-hop inspired character in Bridge and Tunnel is “Rashid,” a male African American rapper from Brooklyn. Like Hoch’s “Flip” and “Emcee Enuff” characters, Jones’ ‘Rashid” uses Hip-hop language and gesture to embody the b-boy stereotype. He wears a baseball cap and parka jacket, looks worn by many African American rappers in New York. “Rashid” has his own analysis of immigrants in New York and comes to the poetry slam presenting his perspective as an African American “immigrant.” He argues:” 'Cause no what tam sayin, like, aiight, black people, we got imported, y'all get deported, you feel me?'' Here, Jones uses “Rashid” to connect to the experiences of African Americans to those of several immigrant communities explored in the show. By analyzing the experiences of African Americans as forced immigrants in the United States, “Rashid” underscores the importance of the transatlantic slave trade on the social identities of African Americans. He initiates discussions about the representation of African Americans as part of the African Diaspora. He critiques the American government and generic promises of the American Dream that are sold to youth as accessible possibilities for all Americans. ‘Rashid’ pleads his case before the microphone as an African American male that has been denied access to the rights, compensation and social liberty as the descendant of an African American slave. He wants to know why so many other racial and ethnic immigrant groups have received help in realizing their potential as American citizens because of their elective choice to come to the United States. “Rashid” cannot understand why the influx of immigrants in New York leaves him with fewer opportunities. He identifies with the immigrant experience in 152 the United States and wants his voice to be heard. He wants to create cross-racial and ethnic collaborations with his audience and shows them how his experiences relate to their own. Hip-hop also enters into Jones’ show through the life of a Russian Jewish immigrant character “Lorraine Levine.” “Lorraine” is a new poet from Long Island who learned poetry at a senior center workshop. Jones peppers Lorraine’s speech with several Yiddish words, wears gaudy clothing and sports large 1970s eyeglasses reminiscent of parodies of Jewish women performed by the late improv comedienne Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Life in the 1980s 85 . Lorraine’s link to Hip-hop is through her grandson, a young kid who worships African American Hip-hop mogul, “P-Diddy.” Lorraine writes and performs a protest poem entitled “Please, Don’t’ Get Up” that narrates her experiences with young people who have no respect for the elderly. Through her encounter with Hip-hop and blackness, Lorraine finds community and “unity” within the difference of Hip-hop. Her experiences now become relevant to her grandson, because she samples from Hip-hop in order to communicate with him in a way that he understands. Here Jones also addresses how Hip-hop serves as a bridge between racial and ethnic groups. The fact that a young Jewish kid can have an African American role model speaks to Hip-hop’s ability to inspire cross-racial and ethnic coalitions. Jones’ ability to use Hip-hop to link racial and ethnic groups demonstrates the impact of Hip-hop music and culture on her 85 Here I make reference to Gilda Radner’s portrayal of female Jewish characters such as “Rosanna, Rosanna Danna” in which she used gaudy styles of self-adornment associated with Jewish women in New York to create a composite character of Jadishness. 153 artistic practices as well as its influence on popular culture across racial and ethnic lines. Additionally, in Bridge and Tunnel, Jones attempts to disrupt conflations of blackness with African American identity. She plays several black characters from throughout the African Diaspora, yet only two are African American. Despite the fact the majority of Jones’ characters are of African descent most of the media attention Jones receives is about her ability to play characters who are not black. In fact, most critics focus on her ability to embody notions of the “multicultural,” perhaps because of her bi-racial identity as an African American woman of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds (her mother is European-Caribbean, and her father is African American). Jones’ attempt to use Hip-hop to “universalize” experiences across categories of difference often diminishes the economic and material disparities that limit life possibilities for minority subjects. Hoch’s whiteness often forecloses opportunities for audiences to see his performances of other racial and ethnic groups as positive efforts to incite dialogue about racial inequality. Jones’ blackness and her ability to seemingly transcend it in performance is most often the focus of critics who often forget that Jones is not exempt from creating characterizations that may also reinforce existing racial and ethnic stereotypes. In my correspondence with Jones, the actress offered her perspectives as an artist. She considers her personal racial and gender identifications as part of her artistic practice: 154 As an African American woman who came of age in “post-post Civil Rights”, “post-feminist” America in a multicultural family and community, I have long been acutely, sometimes painfully aware of the complex layers of discrimination and injustice endured by women of African descent worldwide. I am interested in how we cope and create space for our own self-determination, self-expression, self-love, no matter what economic, health, social, sexual, and other issues we face. I know this resistance, in both overt and subtle forms, is taking place in London flats, on the streets of Kingston, on unpaved roads from Port-au-Prince to Panama to Pretoria, and that regardless of our nationality or world view our struggles – while very specific because of the dual impact of race and gender – represent the universality of all people’s struggles for human rights (Jones 2007, 10). Jones’ perspectives as a black woman who also perceives herself as “multicultural” draws out attention to the ways that conceptions of multiculturalism often disavow racial and ethnic difference in favor of a fabricated notions of a generic “cultural” identity that is not impacted by racial, ethnic, class and gender difference. Though Jones’ performances, like Hoch’s, offer opportunities to create cross-racial and ethnic collaborations in performance by presenting seemingly “universal” experiences, these experiences often become “universal” because they are presented by a black or white person playing other racial and ethnic groups. By embodying and voicing the experiences of other racial and ethnic groups, Jones and Hoch can often absorb the ways that race and ethnicity specifically shape the painful parts of their experiences and present them as “universal” experiences that happen to everyone. Jones offers both superficial and complex perspectives on immigrant identity, specifically in her engagement of blackness as a multicentric possibility which can be experienced by non-black people. However, like Hoch, she is also guilty of 155 creating characters that remain based in stereotype and evoke post-minstrel imagery. Both Hoch and Jones evoke Stuart Hall’s question “under what conditions can a connection be formed or made in processes of articulation and re-articulation?” With this in mind, I discuss the ways that Hoch and Jones use performance to reconstitute conceptions of the American Dream. Hoch and Jones: Embodying Quests for the American Dream In my discussions with Hoch, I asked him if he thought it was easier for audiences to accept performances by black performers such as Sarah Jones, Anna Deavere Smith or even Eddie Murphy to engage in cross-racial performance. Hoch posits: Yes, I think it is. Again, this is simply because of American history. However, it is a projection of liberal racism to infer that people of color (actually just black folks) have the “right”, the “ability”, the “sole talent” to play others, because it is assumed that they have suffered the worst and therefore are the biggest victims and the biggest victims get to play everybody. This liberalist victimization only bolsters racism and misunderstanding (Hoch 2006, 1). 86 Hoch’s correction of his use of the “people of color” and replacing it with “black folk” reinforces the importance of the black-white binary in understanding who has access to play the “other” in performance. “People of color” is a politically correct term that is used to refer to African Americans as well as other racial and ethnic minorities and is most often read strictly in terms of how particular groups are racialized in relationship to blackness and whiteness in the United States. Hoch’s problematic reference to slavery as the norm of African Americans being understood 86 Hoch, Danny. Personal Correspondence with Nicole Hodges Persley 31 January 2006. 156 as the “biggest victims” reifies existing polemical discussions between African American and Jewish Americans about suffering. Hoch implies that if African Americans are the only group who can play other racial and ethnic groups, then they are participating in “liberalist victimization.” Perhaps blacks and other racially marginalized groups in the United States are more open to watching minorities perform other minorities, because there is an implied empathy or shared struggle that is often missing when white performers take on the performative codes of non-white racial identity (i.e. blackness, Latinoness, etc.). Also, because Hoch is marked as “white” his Jewish identity is often absorbed by his white privilege. Though Hoch attempts to be clever and sarcastic in his response, these sensitive issues between African Americans and Jewish Americans should not be taken lightly and might be used to illustrate the coalitions between these groups because of similar histories of struggle and persecution. Thus Jones’ attempt to foster cross-racial and ethnic coalitions have the same potential to reify racial stereotypes and intersect “post-minstrel’ performance practices as Hoch’s. Jones’ representations are not necessarily rendered more “black” or “authentic” than Hoch’s because she is racially black. Nor does Jones blackness make her more “authentically” Hip-hop. Jones’ blackness does provide a text to the audience that imparts larger social histories of oppression of black women specifically, and black people generally, that may serve as a point of perceived empathy with the experiences of the other racial and ethnic groups. 157 Jones remains a racial minority whose image is always already compared against existing racial and gender stereotypes of black women in and outside Hip- hop culture’s intersection with African American life. Hoch’s ability to perform blackness through Hip-hop does not threaten his white privilege; in fact, it often gives him more access because he maintains his whiteness and white privilege. Jones can never escape her black racial identity just as Hoch cannot escape his white identity. However, when Jones, as an African American woman, uses the same codes as Hoch to perform representations of blackness outside her experiences, she is also performing blackness; even when it is in her experience. The three characters discussed in Bridge in Tunnel who directly engage Hip- hop music, the Pakistani immigrant named “Mohammed Ali,” the African American rapper named “Rashid” and the Jewish female character, “Lorraine” are characters created through Jones’ use of Hip-hop language and stereotype. Though Jones does not believe that her other characters engage “blackness,” some of her other characters, including a young Vietnamese immigrant who creates a spoken word piece about being perceived as a “model minority,” all use the spoken word platform and Hip-hop vernacular to speak to how race, ethnicity, class and gender shape citizenship in the United States. Though Jones may not want to focus on “blackness” and “Hip-hop” because she wants to be perceived as an actress and not an “African American” actress, the Hip-hop platform in her show cannot be denied and is used by all of her characters in some way to underline that race and ethnicity have enabled 158 and foreclosed their opportunities for social and economic success in the United States. Ironically, when I asked Jones about performing blackness in her show, the only character she identified as “black” was the African American rapper. Despite the fact that her characters Mohammed, Rashid and Lorraine engage Hip-hop, and despite Jones’ performance of black Dominican, British and Jamaican characters in the show, only “Rashid” was identified as “black”: For me, the label “blackness” is more about a set of progressive political ideas than it is about particular kinds of behavior, speech, style of dress or cultural sensibility. That said, I perform one character who is a rapper and whose identity is rooted in a hip-hop style, so since hip-hop is certainly an art form and culture with origins in blackness, it’s fair to say I perform blackness in that way (2008, 1) 87 Jones conflates blackness with African Americans and Hip-hop, without consideration of the multiple engagements with African Diasporic representations of blackness she has presented in her total performance. Jones linked her discussion of blackness to her translation of blackness in the context of the United States. She disregards the multicentric possibilities of blackness as articulated by the other black people portrayed in her show who are not originally from the United States. Jones also misses opportunities to see how using Hip-hop in her show, from the spoken word platform, preshow music (fragments of Hip-hop and techno music designed by Chris Meade and DJ Rekha) and graffiti inspired set (created by Blake Lethem) offered opportunities to see how other racial, ethnic and national groups identify with Hip-hop’s blackness as a space to negotiate their subjectivity. Jones conflation of 87 Jones, Sarah. Personal Correspondence. 15 January 2008. 159 blackness with a ‘set of progressive political ideas” underscores my analysis of why non-African American artists may be attracted to Hip-hop. Jones’s attempt to represent the pursuit of the American Dream as conforming to American rhetoric of multiculturalism often disavows the ways that race, ethnicity, gender and class shape possibilities of being perceived as “American.” Conclusion Bridge and Tunnel was a phenomenal success and attracted a wide array of racial and ethnic groups. However, in my collection of photographs of outdoor placards, newspaper reviews and photographs, Jones was represented by the media as embodying a multicultural caricature of New York. She was not represented as an African American woman who had one of the most successful one person shows in Broadway history. Jones is one of a few African American women who have received a Tony award, which she won for her performance in the show in 2006. Bridge and Tunnel was produced by mostly white producers of The Culture Project in New York, 88 a non-profit theater production company dedicated to developing new voices in the American Theatre. Indeed, Bridge and Tunnel helped Jones achieve part of her American Dream. However, she is admittedly still striving for other opportunities in theater, film and television. The marketing of Bridge and Tunnel clearly attempted to disarticulate Jones’ “blackness” from her ability to embody racially and ethnically diverse characters. Her play was marketed as a 88 Key players in the group include Meryl Streep who lent her voice of support for Jones as "one of the best performances I have ever seen in my life.” This endorsement by Streep also gave critics and potential audience members the confidence to see a show performed by a black woman that many outside of New York Theater scene had never heard of and to embrace the media descriptions of her embodied multiculturalism. 160 “multicultural” play that described the diversity of New York. Her plays have not been published, so she has not even reaped the material reward of selling them for profit and possible reproduction. Jones, however, is a keen businesswoman and realizes that she must show her ability to relate across racial and ethnic lines in order to disrupt dominant narratives associated with her black female body, which is always already associated with black racial stereotypes. The more “multicultural” Jones can seem to audiences the more she appears to work in the entertainment industry. Despite Jones’ tremendous success as an African American actress, she joins the ranks of thousands of unemployed black performers. For Jones to stay relevant in the American Theater, she has created three solo-shows, Surface Transit (2000), Women Can’t Wait (2000) and Bridge and Tunnel (2007). She must constantly generate product to maintain her position as a working black actress. Jones has not created another solo show since Bridge and Tunnel. In 2009, quality roles for African American female actresses in theater, film and television reached an all time low (Barrois 2009). 89 The roles for African American women in progressive roles that speak to the social advances African American women have achieved in the United States are minimal. In fact, most of the most celebrated performances by African American women in theater, film and television are based in roles that reinvest stereotypes of the Mammy, Jezebel and Tragic Mulatto stereotypes that were prominent in the late 19 th and 20 th century. 89 Barrios, Janine Sherman “Tyler Perry's Madea May Lead to the Black Little Miss Sunshine.” Rushmore Drive http://www.rushmoredrive.com 19 March 2009. Accessed 12 April 2009. 161 Today, even the most celebrated African American female performers are out of work. Danny Hoch’s Off-Broadway engagements, world tours, university appearances, arts foundation support and television and film appearances greatly outweigh Jones’. The material disparities between Hoch and Jones’ theater experiences are notable. In fact, Hoch has profited greatly from the success of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop for over ten years. The play was made into a feature film entitled Whiteboyz (2000) and chronicles the life of the white wannabe rapper “Flip.” Hoch’s has toured Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop around the world since 1998. His latest solo-play, Taking Over (2009), a story told through the eyes of several characters about gentrification in New York, is his first solo show in ten years. It was produced by The Public Theater in New York in 2008 as well as The Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles in 2009. Hoch is also scheduled to appear in three feature films in 2009. 90 Hoch is endorsed in the Hip-hop community as a “down white guy” by the most “street credible” rappers such as Talib Kweli and Mos Def. He is ultimately more relevant in the Hip-hop community than Jones, because of his relationship to known rappers and his visibility in television, film and theater. Conversely, while Jones is acknowledged by street credible rappers, because her works appear in seemingly “high” art places such as Broadway, she is often associated with “multicultural” and/or white mainstream media. In the African American community, Jones’ is only marginally mentioned within the context of 90 Hoch’s film and television credits are available at IMDB.com. 162 “Black”/and or African American Theater. While Hoch can be “radical” and critique the status quo as a white male, Jones’ attempt to show any confrontational critique that is not couched in comedy puts her in the stereotypical category of the “angry black woman.” Though Jones’ diverse depictions of blackness are complex and reveal the multi-centricity of blackness throughout the African Diaspora,, these critiques are never the focus of her critics (or Jones for that matter) who see her as embodying multicultural rhetoric of the American Dream. Hoch was able to turn down a role on one of the biggest sitcoms in television history, Seinfeld, not only because of his talent as an actor, but also because his ability to perform the other using their language, stereotypes and social codes had situated him as an “edgy” white actor. Jones, on the other hand, may not receive the same levels of opportunities for roles as Hoch because she is black and because she defies stereotypes of African American women in the entertainment industry. She has the same level of skill as Hoch and has mastered the improvisation of performative codes that indicate racial, ethnic and gender difference. Yet, if she is not hired as “an actor who performs the Other,” she becomes one of several thousand African American female actresses who compete for roles in theater, film and television. Hoch’s association with Hip-hop makes him an anomaly and attractive to casting directors and producers. Jones’ association with Hip-hop is something she dismisses as she wants to be seen as an American actress; not a “black” and/or Hip-hop performer. Jones states: 163 As for “hip-hop theater”, this was a descriptor which was affixed by others to my work and which I resisted at first. At the time (summer of 2000) it felt like a marketing strategy that I didn’t think I needed, and even though I certainly count myself a member of the hip-hop generation, I was concerned about my work being categorized too narrowly—I believe I said something like “nobody calls Eric Bogosian’s work ‘rock and roll theater’!” One of my aims was not to be labeled or have my work prejudged one way or another because of assumptions about my race, gender, or one of the various styles of music and culture that influenced my sensibility. However, I greatly respect the hip-hop theater movement and its goal of reaching people of color, young people, and other underserved communities and reflecting all our stories using the four elements and their now multi-generational, international influence (Jones 2007) 91 Jones’ black body can perform that labor within the context of the theater, but when it comes to HBO specials, television sitcoms and films, she is just another black actress standing in line waiting for a role to come along. Jones does not want to be labeled “Hip-hop” because ultimately it is conflated with African Americanness and, as she notes, will ultimately limit Jones’ opportunities to be read as simply an “actress.” Her desire to be recognized for her talent and not her race, ethnicity or gender is the desire of all Americans whose life chances have been diminished because of their racial, ethnic, gender or sexuality. Though Jones has had bit parts in films, she has yet to land any bigger role than her work on Bridge and Tunnel. This is not to imply that Jones is waiting for a television sit-com deal or film role to define the success of her career, but in a moment when actors of all races and ethnicities, especially African American actors are out of work, these opportunities would most likely be welcomed. In fact, Jones has had two television pilots in development that were not picked up by a major network. One of her pilots, The Sarah Jones Show 91 Hodges-Persley, Nicole “Personal Correspondence with Sarah Jones, "June 14, 2007. 164 (2005), promised to be a “Tracey Ulman meets Carol Burnett Show” type format. As of 2008, Jones was on hiatus developing new work. Ultimately as Hip-hop inspired performances around the world seeks more white performers who have mastered the performative codes of blackness through Hip-hop, what is evident is that African American artists are no longer needed to perform representations of their cultural experiences. Sadly, Hoch’s ability to be read as more “black” and ‘Hip-hop” than Sarah Jones is indicative of how narratives of multiculturalism in the United States absorb the cultural histories of African Americans and other minorities who fight to create representations about their American experiences created by, about and for them. In the case of Hip-hop Theater and Performance in the United States, now, white artists are often afforded more opportunities to tell Hip-hop inspired stories than black people. 165 Chapter Three: The Theatrical (Re) Production of African American Female Identities in Nikki S. Lee’s “The Hip-hop Project.” This chapter uses a series of photographs entitled The Hip-hop Project (2001), created by Korean born conceptual artist Nikki S. Lee, to explore the circulation of styles of self-adornment and stereotypes of African American women in Hip-hop that are impacting the artistic practices of non-African American artists. Lee mobilizes various styles of self-adornment of African American women associated with the “ho” and “gold-digger” figures as well as the “b-girl” and “down sistah” characters in Hip-hop discussed in Chapter Two. Sampling hairstyles, clothing, make-up, as well as changing her skin color, Lee creates characters that blur the performative codes of her Asian body to construct and perform embodied translations of blackness and Hip-hop. In “The Hip-hop Project,” Lee enters into African American Hip-hop communities dressed as a “black” woman engaged with Hip-hop culture. The African American people that Lee’s meets in various Hip-hop spaces have no idea that she is performing a character. They accept her as a part of their group because she is able to temporarily “pass” as a member. Lee’s performances of African American female identities enable a wide array of discussions about contradictions within Hip-hop and the performable qualities of blackness. Lee focuses on physical codes that indicate African American subjectivity in Hip-hop that constitute post-minstrel representations of blackness that both revisit and revise blackface imagery. Her performance of these codes performatively addresses the marginalization and objectification of black women in 166 Hip-hop. As a conceptual artist, Lee’s identification with performative codes of self- adornment used by African American women can be read as an example of how racial identities are reproduced in performance and how the performer’s body can be read as a site of theatrical reproduction. Section 1 situates The Hip-hop Project within the larger context of Lee’s process as an artist. Presenting Lee’s perspectives on her performance process, I analyze several of Lee’s photographs in “The Hip-hop Project.” I identify many of the codes that she uses to achieve her Hip-hop “looks” linked to African American women. Lee’s exploration of Hip-hop is focused on her ability to be perceived by American Americans as both “black” and “Hip-hop.” Lee plays with lines of demarcation that exist between her lived reality as a Korean woman and the ability to perform blackness. African American women have to fight against mainstream stereotypes created by whites as well as those incorporated by African Americans and minorities. Hip-hop performance provides a site for many African American women to affirm their sexuality and to redefine representations of beauty in contradictory and liberating ways. I argue Lee’s photographed performances can be understood as theatrical stills that document the conflicting ways that African American women are represented and represent themselves. Section 2 addresses Lee’s performance of Hip-hop as reflective of larger Asian identifications with Hip-hop music and culture in the United States. Hip-hop has always had a dialectical relationship to Asian and Asian American culture. For example, early Kung Fu references in Hip-hop narratives and popular African 167 American Hip-hop groups such as Wu Tang Klan and Dead Prez sample from a wide range of Asian cultural references that pay tribute to ethnic Asian influences in Hip- hop. Equally important are Hip-hop narratives that address Asian-Black conflicts in the United States such, as Ice Cube’s ‘Black Korea’ (1991). Lee’s unique position as a Korean artist creating conceptual art in the United States allows us to follow the circulation of African Americanness in Hip-hop in Lee’s translations of Hip-hop and American culture in “The Hip-hop Project.” Lee identifies strongly as a Korean national and professes a limited understanding of the ways that race, ethnicity and gender impact the possibilities of experiencing full American citizenship and concepts of “culture” in the United States. I argue that Lee samples the styles of self-adornment of African American women as a theatrical form of improvisation that allows her to create and perform her Hip-hop characters. I contend Lee’s use of new socially accepted forms of blackface, such as self-tanning creams and dark make-up, allows her to reinscribe historical images of blackface imagery. Lee’s performances of blackness as Hip-hop contribute to existing conversations about the ways that Hip-hop is read outside the United States as not only American, but also African American (Gilroy 2003; Raphael-Hernandez 2005). Section 3 further explores the capacity of Lee’s artistic works to reinscribe highly problematic reproductions of power. As a Korean immigrant who creates work in the United States, Lee is racialized within a wide range of Asian and Asian American stereotypes that are situated within a black-white binary. As an Asian woman, Lee leaves a homogeneous racial and ethnic environment in Korea to live in 168 a heterogeneous United States that limits the opportunities of both immigrants and American minorities. Focusing on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of commodity consumption (1958) and the reproduction of art originals, I suggest Lee uses her body as a site to theatrically “reproduce” the identities of African American women in Hip-hop. I consider the discursive relationships that are produced between Lee’s Asian body and African American female “looks” she creates through processes of theatrical sampling. Comparing “original” performances of African Americanness by Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill, with those performed by Lee, I argue Lee’s performance of African American female identity further marginalizes African American women as art “objects.” At the same time, Lee’s “reproductions” also help identify many contradictions that exist between African American productions and Lee’s Asian re- productions of blackness. Lee’s depictions of African American women present an array of contradictions that include Lee’s status as a minority and her capacity to re- inscribe the marginalized as a colonized subject. Conversely, as a Korean immigrant working in the fine arts, Lee’s ability to transgress the performative codes that indicate her “Asianness” in performance becomes an attractive commodity for white museum and gallery owners who see Lee as an artist who transcends “race” in her exploration of American “subcultures.” Key questions that animate my investigation of Lee’s photographed performances are: 1) How does Lee’s performance of African American female stereotypes in Hip-hop limit opportunities for African American women to create representations of their experiences as “originals?” 2) How does Lee’s attempt to 169 identify with African American women and their styles of self-adornment re- inscribe existing stereotypes of black women in Hip-hop ? 3) How do Lee’s photographed performances offer new ways to imagine how bodies can be understood as sites of cross-racial and ethnic exchange through performance? Section 1- Identifying Lee’s Process as a Conceptual Artist The first time I saw Nikki S. Lee’s work, I was at the Bronx Museum of Art’s 2002 exhibit entitled “One Planet under a Groove: Hip-hop and Contemporary Art.” This exhibit was one of the first in U.S. History to organize contemporary artists whose works were informed by one of the four elements of Hip-hop music and culture—Djing, Emceeing, Breaking (often referred to as Breakdancing) and Graffiti. The exhibit was curated by Franklin Sirmans and Lydia Yee and was also one of the first exhibits to examine the circulation of Hip-hop culture and its impact on contemporary art. Artists whose work has been influenced by Hip-hop music and culture from The United States, Latin America, Europe, and Japan were exhibited under the sign of Hip-hop. Before I attended this exhibit, I knew nothing of Lee’s career, nor did I know her racial, ethnic or national origin. Walking through the exhibit, I arrived at a series of photographs entitled The Hip-hop Project, which consisted of amateur snapshots of an African American woman in various Hip-hop spaces. The time codes in the corner of each photograph indicate that the photos were taken with a disposable camera. In one of the photos, the woman posed with successful African American rappers Mobb Deep. She wore heavy make-up, a honey-blond weave; a popular 170 style worn by many African American women and tied her hair in a bandanna to indicate her identification with the thug character in Hip-hop. The woman wore a tight-fitting tank top and was the only female in the photograph. Figure 1: The Hip-Hop Project. Nikki S. Lee, pictured left, with Mobb Deep. Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. In most of the photographs, this woman dressed in stereotypical Hip-hop video “ho” or “golddigger” styles whose “looks” are achieved by, but are not limited to, the use of long glamorous hair weaves, 92 skimpy clothing and heavy make-up. As I 92 In the African American community, hair weaves are artificial hair extensions that are woven into the hair using glue, sewing or fusion techniques that graft long, straight or curly hair into the natural hair of the woman’s 171 continued to observe the photographs, I noticed the same woman change her look dramatically in different photographs in the exhibit. The change in appearance was not strange, because many African American women in Hip-hop change their hairstyles and clothing to project a particular “look” based on current Hip-hop trends. However, it was the shift in style from sexy and glamorous to conservative and “earthy” that was remarkable. Figure 2: The Hip-hop Project. Nikki S. Lee, pictured center, is wearing "natural" hair posing with African American girlfriends. Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. head changing the texture and or length of the original hair. In many cases, these hair extensions are actually marked “European” or “Asian” hair and do not reflect the natural hair textures of many African America women. 172 In Figure 2, Lee is pictured wearing more conservative clothing, “nerdy” eyeglasses and naturally curly hair, representing the more Afro-centric styles worn by African American women in Hip-hop. I made assumptions that the African American woman posing in them must be an “up and coming” Hip-hop artist or was involved in the Hip-hop scene in some fashion. Though many of Lee’s Asian features could be read through her performance of blackness, I read her body as an African American woman of mixed racial and ethnic ancestry. After reading Lee’s bio, I discovered she was a Korean immigrant who came to the United States to pursue a degree in photography at New York University in 1994. Born Lee Seung-Hee in Korea in 1970, Nikki S. Lee chose her American name after popular 1990s super model Niki Taylor when she came to New York in 1994 to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Lee worked with the international fashion photographer David LaChapelle and later went on to earn her master’s degree from New York University in 1998. The bio also revealed that Lee was the photographer of the images as well as the woman I observed in all of her photographs. When I realized that Lee was actually Korean, had tanned her skin to appear black, changed her hair texture and styled her clothing to mimic African American women, I could not escape the immediate reference to blackface performance. 173 Figure 3: Nikki S. Lee as herself. Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. In Figure 3, we see an image of Lee. She had transformed herself from a Korean woman into an “African American” woman in various Hip-hop spaces. As artist and subject of her work, Lee tanned herself to appear “black,” changed her hair color and texture and appropriated the dress and make-up styles of many African American women featured in Hip-hop videos as well as the styles of famous female rappers such as Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill. Once I was aware of Lee’s nationality, racial and ethnic background, I was interested in the multiple ways the images could be read. 174 While I was focused on the ways Lee mobilized particular African American female identities to create these images, the work also spoke to the larger circulation of African American translations of blackness associated with “authenticity” in Hip- hop. Lee’s unique position as a Korean-born conceptual artist who lives and works in the United States complicates the existing discourse on Afro-Asian coalitions (Mullen 2003; Okihiro 2003: Steen and Hernandez 2005) as well as discussions in Hip-hop studies that address the tensions and cross-racial coalitions that exist between African American and Asian Americans in Hip-hop (Wang 2005; Yarrow 2005; Chang 2006). Conceptual Art As early as 1917, Marcel Duchamp decided that anything could be named “art” if someone decided it was art. Challenging elitist ideologies that suggested a false dichotomy between notions of “high” and “low” art, Duchamp decided to take an ordinary urinal and turn it upside down and signed the bottom of it “R.Mutt.” He named this new creation “Fountain.” In re-conceptualizing what the urinal was, placing it in a new context, giving it a new name, Duchamp is credited with building the foundations of the conceptual art movement (Stiles 1996, 804). Conceptual art is broadly defined as art that derives from an idea or concept of an artist and his or her process in achieving a particular goal or disseminating a message using those concepts or ideas (Godfrey 1998; Corris 2003). The message of the artist may be a socio-political one however; in many instances the artist may be interrogating a personal dilemma that may have larger social or political 175 implications. Many conceptual artists focus on using a particular concept to guide (or that in some cases become) their artistic process. Aesthetic and material concerns are considerations in conceptual art despite the larger idea that many conceptual artists challenge conventional criteria of what counts as art to suggest that certain inclusions and exclusions in the predominantly white and wealthy “art world” do not consider how social and political agency, or the lack of it, impact the creative possibilities of artistic production. The major preoccupation in conceptual art is the artist’s idea. For example, conceptual artist Judy Chicago uses the concept of a dinner party to address how women’s histories have been excluded from Western civilization. While Lee focuses on the manipulation of her body as a conceptual frame, Chicago manipulates our conception of a “dinner party” and uses it to serve her conceptual project. "The Dinner Party” (1974-1979) mobilizes aesthetic concerns of design, line, texture, and color to present an elaborately decorated table filled with decorative plates, decorative fabrics and engravings that honor mythic and historical women that have shaped history. Chicago’s presentation is set in a triangle and suggests an “altar” of sorts. Chicago creates table settings featuring the contributions of various women and uses each part of the triangle-shaped table to identify a place setting that marks various women’s histories that have been occluded from dominant narratives in various parts of global society from history to religion (Chicago 2007). The desire of Chicago, as a conceptual artist, is less focused on technique, proficiency, line, composition, style, taste or other so called universals of 176 aesthetics (Kant 1914). 93 Conceptual art disrupts how we understand, create and/or manipulate the consumption and creation of art. In some cases, conceptual art may also challenge the very idea of “art.” By subverting mainstream understandings of what counts as “legitimate” art, many conceptual artists are able to address social and political inequalities. Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt attempted to identify conceptual art’s main facets: In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art (1967). LeWitt suggests conceptual art is both premeditated and improvisational. Though ideas and concepts are planned by the artist, the execution of the final piece of “art” may be superficial. Lee’s photographs take a great deal of time to research and develop. However, their execution is completely improvised, in that Lee has to identify a moment in her performance and then surrender to the perspective of a friend to capture her performance in a photograph. Additionally, Rosalee Goldberg argues conceptual art can be linked to early 20 th century European art movements such as Dada, Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College (1998). These movements have been associated with the avant-garde and rejected dominant ideals of what constitutes “art” and how art in museums and galleries often reflected the experiences of the privileged. Conceptual art is also akin to performance art. However, performance art is almost always live, and conceptual art can be both live and/or “still,” or contained 93 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, full text of J.H. Bernard translation (1914) 177 within the concept and idea itself. Lee’s photographs intersect both performance art and conceptual art practices. As Conceptual art continued to take shape in the 1970s and 1980s, its intersection with performance art became more pronounced. Artists such as Adrian Piper and Henry Flynt paved the way for many artists such as Nikki S. Lee. Piper used all types of media including performance, film, photography and sound. Piper and Flynt worked to create synergies between philosophical investigations with art, often interrogating theoretical ideas through their conceptual art. Creating links between sound, music philosophy and mathematics, Flynt coined the term “concept art” in 1962. However, the goal of conceptual art is to be true to a particular concept that the artist is attempting to experiment with and work through using artistic methods. While artistic skill and mastery of craft is a preoccupation in other aesthetically driven art forms, conceptual art can lend itself to any form of art form poetry to installation or performance. Since the 1980s, “neo-conceptual” art continues many of the foundational concerns of conceptual art addressing the intersection of the commodification of art and capitalism with new preoccupations such as globalization, cyberspace, identity and the dichotomy between “high” and “low” art. Lee considers herself a conceptual artist, though many art critics and curators label her a performance artist and/or photographer (Ferguson 2001; Goldberg 2006). Lee’s Process as a Conceptual Artist Lee’s The Hip-hop Project is one part of a larger a series of photographs entitled “Projects” (1997-2001) that address the artist’s preoccupations with the 178 changing self and her ability to infiltrate American subcultures. Lee conceived the concept for “Projects” as a photography student at NYU. Students were asked to present a final project. Lee contends that she did not have much money for materials and had to think of a project that would allow her to satisfy the requirements of the course she was taking. She decided that instead of paying models, she would use a disposable camera and photograph herself dressed up in costumes in different communities. From this idea, Lee began to develop the concept of how she could manipulate how her body was read and began to explore what she calls different American “subcultures.” Lee claims she was always interested in acting, so her ability to manipulate her identity as Korean women came easily to her. Lee spends approximately three months in each of the communities she infiltrates, studying the habits, behaviors, styles of dress and other forms of self-adornment for each group. After she feels she has successfully translated a group’s performative codes, she improvises a character based on her observations and interactions in a community. After hanging out with her new friends, she asks someone to take a photograph with a disposable camera that captures her performance. Lee’s performance of an identity in a given community is captured in the photograph. It is important to contextualize The Hip-hop Project as one of several parts of Lee’s three year exploration of diverse American identities across racial, ethnic and sexual orientations. Lee’s projects include: The Punk Project (1997), The Lesbian Project (1997), Young Japanese (East Village) Project (1997), The Tourist Project (1997), The Hispanic 179 Project (1998), The Yuppie Project (1998), The Ohio Project (1999), The Swingers Project (1999), The Seniors Project (1999), The Exotic Dancers Project (2000), The Schoolgirls Project (2000), The Skateboarders Project (2000), The Hip Hop Project (2001). Two more recent conceptual arts projects Parts (2003) and a film entitled A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee (2006) contribute to explore Lee’s exploration of the possibilities of her identity. A summary of a few of the projects provide a context for Lee’s process as an artist and the larger concept for her work in this series. In The Ohio Project (1999), Lee explores how white American women in trailer parks relate to their environments. She performs the looks of Korean school girls in The Schoolgirls Project (2000) donning Catholic school uniforms and high knee socks to portray youthful innocence. Lee focuses on changing her Asian body to appear African American in The Hip-hop Project and Puerto Rican in The Hispanic Project (see Figure 4) darkening her skin and changing her hair color and texture. Probing issues of sexuality and normative heterosexuality, Lee investigates her heterosexuality and her ability to adopt the sexual identifications of lesbian women in The Lesbian Project (1997). In The Exotic Dancer Project (2000) Lee examines the self-objectification of strippers and the body as object of sexual pleasure in Adult Entertainment clubs. 180 Figure 4: Nikki S. Lee in The Lesbian Project, 1997 (left) and The Hispanic Project, 1998 (right). Leslie Tonkonow Gallery. In The Hip-hop Project (2001) Lee takes great pains to reproduce aesthetic and cultural details of Hip-hop. Lee used self-tanner and tanning beds to darken her skin and hired black hairdressers to style her hair and mimicked the clothing styles of African American women. Lee identifies both positive and negative stereotypes of African American women that circulate in Hip-hop discussed in Chapter two such as the video ho, gold-digger and down sistah characters. For each “look,” Lee changes her hair and dress to convey a particular image. Because Lee categorizes her projects using broad rubrics that can be interpreted in various ways, the artist’s photographs can be read as reinscribing white hegemonic tactics that confine these so called “subcultures” to the margins of American society. However, her engagement with these “subcultures” and her improvisation of their performative 181 codes indicates Lee’s interest in provocation and subversion. Lee’s process of naming her projects enacts what Judith Butler calls the process of reiteration whereby familiar acts of identity are repeated that are linked to how individuals perform and present themselves as part of a group (1997). By naming her photographs, Lee informs her audience of the codes she wants them to identify and recognize when interpreting her work. Reading The Hip-hop Project within the context of these other components of Lee’s conceptual art stresses her focus on the possibility of achieving particular “looks” and performing a character in a way that will allow her to be accepted as “one” of the group’s members. The concept of “changing” her Korean identity or being able to “blend” into these various communities is the unifying idea in all of these photographs. However, Lee’s focus on the physical appearance of women in these various groups relies on recognizable images that circulate in the American imaginary. 94 For all of her performances, Lee shops in local stores frequented by the members of the group she is studying buying clothing, jewelry, hair supplies, etc. to improvise a wide range of “looks” until she has developed the characters that she wants to repeat in performance. Lee states, “I imagine myself as one of the group and then make a person out of the parts I see….” (Lee 2007). Lee’s focus on aesthetics that speak to sensory and emotional values as well as those of taste, speak to her 94 Moreover, it should be noted that Lee only changes her skin color as part of her process of changing from Korean to “Other” in The Hip-hop Project and The Hispanic Project which conflates the ways that the skin colors of black and brown minorities are used to indicate racial identity. Lee’s light colored skin as a Korean woman allows her to perform whiteness in much easier ways and suggests the ways that Asians and Asian Americans are visibly marked as minorities in the United States, yet may also be racialized as closer to “white” than blacks. 182 awareness of how her work is being judged according to broad considerations in the mainstream art world of how aesthetics are paramount when determining what counts as “high’ and “low” art and what and who formulate the criteria for judging what counts as art and “culture.” Identifying these other works in the series helps to establish Lee’s process as a conceptual artist as one that that relies on improvised translations of diverse codes of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and cultural identities interpreted in her performances. Nikki S. Lee: Following in the Conceptual Art Tradition of Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman As a conceptual artist, Lee continues in the tradition of other female conceptual and performance artists such as Cindy Sherman and Adrian Piper who use their bodies to perform the limitations of racial, ethnic and gender identities. Both Piper and Sherman have used photography to document their performances. Like Piper and Sherman, Lee’s work circulates in galleries and museums all over the world. She is lauded by critics as a transformative artist and continues to enjoy tremendous profit from her work. Lee’s photographs sell from $2500-$5000 and are included in the permanent collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Kemper Museum in Kansas City and other prestigious art institutions across the United States, Europe and Asia. 95 Lee’s works 95 Lee’s photographs are also included in the permanent collections of the following institutions: Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, NY; The Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art,; The University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; International Center of Photography, New York; The Bronx Museum of The Arts, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The New School, New York; The Refco Collection, Chicago; The Saint Louis Art 183 join those of Sherman and Piper in museums around the world and are included as examples of late 20 th and 21 st century images of Modern art. Lee’s images document her performance of various identities and circulate as representations of the various identities she investigates in popular culture. However, though Sherman and Piper intentionally explore the malleability of social categories of race, ethnicity and gender, Lee blatantly rejects the idea that her work engages issues of race, ethnicity or gender. She states that her concept is specifically grounded in the idea of “changing” and the multiple possibilities of expressing her subjectivity. Despite the artist’s intention, Lee’s performances and the photographs that document them, always already engage issues of race, ethnicity and gender. The photographs allow us to analyze the performative codes that the artist uses to create her work. Despite scholarly engagement with Lee’s work that addresses issues of race and ethnicity (Lee 2002; Waegner 2003 96 ) Lee does not see her work as interrogating racial, ethnic and gender identities. In fact, the only category that Lee strongly identifies with is her national identity as a Korean subject. Lee refuses to identify with the category “Asian American,” instead choosing to identify as “Korean, Korean.” (Lee 2008) 97 However, Lee’s refusal to understand that her body can be read in multiple contexts in the United States contributes to the “mystique” of her Museum, St. Louis, MO; The Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS; Progressive Corporation, Cleveland, OH. 96 See Lee, Chinsun. “Portrait of the Assimilartist” In Colorlines, Issue #18, Fall 2002, also See Waegner, Cathy Covell “Performing Postmodernist Passing: Nikki S. Lee, Tuff and Ghostdog in Yellowface/blackface” Pp-223- 240, in Steen, Shannon and Raphael-Hernandez, Heike, Eds. Afro-Asian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, New York: NYU Press, 2006. 97 Hodges Persley, Nicole. Excerpt from field notes from “Visions and Voices: Artist Talk with Nikki. S. Lee,” The University of Southern California. March 2008. 184 performance once we realize that Lee is Korean. Her position as a Korean national living and working in the United States allows her to maintain a relationship to stereotypes of the “perpetual foreigner” and to observe Hip-hop from a global perspective. Lee also makes disclaimers about her inability to speak and understand English and “innocently” proclaims her ignorance of the socio-historical racial hierarchies in the United States, which are part of post-minstrel performance. She also plays on her good looks and uses them to gain access to various communities she infiltrates. When asked how she gained access to certain communities, Lee responded, “Because I am cute…and small” (2008). Lee plays on Asian female stereotypes and uses them to her advantage. With these public disclaimers, Lee is absolved by mainstream critics of being responsible for racist depictions of African American women or creating post-minstrel performances. All of the artist’s performances of characters are improvised from observing these various groups and focusing on their physical looks. Lee admits that the social and historical significance of the identities she performs is of little significance to her. For Lee, race, ethnicity and/or gender are not representative of identity, but are used to categorize and limit identity (Ferguson 2005; Lee 2007). Lee is able to manipulate the performative racial codes of her own Asian body to reveal the porosity of racial and ethnic categories. Her ability to translate and perform performative codes of identity that discursively produce racial and ethnic difference is evident in her 185 photographs. The photograph can be read as a theatrical still that allows us to analyze the process of the artist and how the photograph was achieved. Interpreting Lee’s Photographs as Theatrical Stills Though photography is not in itself theatrical or performative, it has the capacity to document performance. The theatrical still is an under theorized part of the theatrical process. The still allows us to re-imagine how artists create the roles they perform for the stage or other designated performance setting. Barbara Hodgdon observes: The theatrical still has a double history. Before and during the run of the performance, it takes life as a commodity, teaser, or provocation; only when the performance is no longer ‘up’ does the photograph reach the archive, where signifying the death of the theatrical event, its materiality is less factual than textual, closer to written imagery than painting. Hodgdon’s insight into the potential of a theatrical still to engage the “past as present” (Elam 2005) is important in analyzing Lee’s photographs and performance practices. Once Lee feels she has established relationships and can convey a relationship with her subjects that can be read as “authentic,” she asks a friend to take the photograph. We can read this moment as the “death” of the theatrical event, because it is the end of that section of her performance. Just as a linear play may have several acts, each part of Lee’s performance comes to an end. However, the photograph allows us to relive the performance. Where my analysis diverges from Hodgdon is that I do not agree that the photograph operates as the “death” of the theatrical event. Instead, I offer the idea that the theatrical event can be read as a “living/dead” event that allows the audience to recreate the possibilities of the 186 performance (Roach 1998). It is living because the audience has multiple possibilities to recreate the performance. They can talk about it with friends, see a still of the performance in a newspaper, read about it in a review, and watch the performance on video or any number of other possibilities. The event is “dead” because the ephemerality of the performance is over. Though we can never know a performer’s intention, we can recreate what we witnessed or offer a recreation of what the performance might have been, based on the remnants of the performance that exist in the photograph. Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned my encounter with Lee’s photographs in the Bronx Museum exhibit. When I saw her work, I recreated a performance in my imagination of the woman in the photographs. In that performance, I witnessed an African American woman hanging out with friends in various Hip-hop locales. The theatrical still incites this process of reproduction of the actual performance. The “live” performance is gone and cannot be duplicated; however, the photograph exists as a trace of the performance that allows an audience to use it as evidence to imagine the steps used to achieve it. Lost in the “live” aspect of the theatrical event is the context in which a gesture was performed, the way a hairstyle, make-up or outfit was received as Lee wore it. We can never know this aspect of the performance. Even if we speak with the artist, we can never capture the spontaneity of the moment. However, the narrative that Lee offers of the performance is not its only possibility. The theatrical still offers the audience information they can use to make an assessment of what the performance might have been. Though the photograph can 187 be translated in a myriad of ways depending on the social context, Lee contends “people can make up their own stories when they see my work” (2001, 101) and thus suggests that the photograph can facilitate any number of imagined recreations. The Hip-hop Project can be read as a series of theatrical stills that document the artist’s performances in various social milieus just as theatrical stills are used in the theater to provide a record of a performance. The photograph is the material representation that the event took place; that which allows it to be (re) membered or its parts put back together to recreate one of several possibilities of the performance. Identifying Sampling as Theatrical Process of Improvisation in Lee’s Photographs Lee’s ability to synthesize the details of self-presentation of African American women and to enter into African American Hip-hop communities heightens the theatrical experience for her as an artist as well as her audience. Lee’s African American female characters are convincing to African Americans so much so that she is accepted into African American Hip-hop cliques. She pays specific attention to cultural details, yet bases her appearance in recognizably African American female stereotypes in order to make her translation of African Americanness and Hip-hop easily accessible to an audience. Her ability to play with concepts of “reality” and fantasy of many African American female rappers reveals that improvisation is used as a strategy of identity negotiation in African American culture and Hip-hop. African American women are often aware of the ways that their bodies are perceived and objectified in Hip-hop. However, the agency they 188 assert to participate in or subvert this process in Hip-hop culture is an important consideration that is often dismissed in analysis of Hip-hop. All performers must negotiate the space between reality and fantasy in their performances. From actors memorizing lines to dancers practicing steps, performers must take what they have learned and observed and reproduce it in seemingly improvised moments that appear to be spontaneous. In the case of conceptual art and solo performance, the performer and writer are often the same. The performer can improvise all of the history of the character, because they create the performance script. Lee states in each project that she imagines herself as “one” of the group. She performs an improvised history to create her characters because she cannot ever “be” one of the group; especially in groups that are defined by race and ethnicity. However, just as actors in performance in theater, film and television want to convince their audience that the character they perform is a “real” person, Lee must take various “samples” of behavior, dress, hairstyles, etc., and link them together to create a cohesive performance. As an artist, Lee’s ability to perform as both an “outsider” and insider in the communities she inhabits allows her to maintain a distance from her subjects to achieve her photographs. The photograph exists as a commodity of the performance. It is a commodity because Lee sells the photographs as “art” and also because the photographs are souvenirs that can be used to imagine that a performance took place. In the same way that theater stills from a play or film give us a snapshot of the larger performance, Lee’s photographs document that a re-production of identity took place 189 in performance. Roland Barthes makes an abstract connection between photography and theater in Camera Lucida: If Photography seems to me closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediary … by way of Death …. [H]however lifelike we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. (31–32) Barthes idea that photography operates as a type of “primitive theater” references a two dimensional, mask-quality to Lee’s performances as recorded in the photograph. Lee’s performances of blackness reveal her “made-up face” as an attempt to mask her identity as a Korean woman. Lee’s performance of African American female identities as Hip-hop also indicates a masking of the performative codes that link her to her Korean ethnicity. However, there are indicators of Lee’s ethnicity that the photograph cannot capture that have the capacity to undermine her performance of blackness as Hip-hop. For example, the photograph cannot capture the fact that Lee has a pronounced Korean accent that may have impacted her performance as being accepted as “authentic.” The fact of Lee’s accent escapes the realm of the theatrical still. However, once we are aware that Lee had some obstacles in constructing her character, this information allows us think about how these impasses impacted her performance. Lee argues she was accepted in most of the African American Hip-hop communities she infiltrated. Lee’s overall performance focused on the physical performative codes of African American female “looks” in order to translate those 190 codes to her African American audiences as well as other racial and ethnic groups who would view them, as “authentically” Hip-hop. Another example of Lee’s use of sampling as a form of theatrical improvisation can be seen in Figure 5. Lee is pictured in the center of the photograph surrounded by four African American women. She is tanned to a light brown complexion. Figure 5: The Hip-hop Project. Nikki S. Lee pictured center with African American women. Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. 191 She has her hair braided in a popular style worn by many African American women or women in the United States of African descent. She wears a low cut top to reveal her cleavage and an “expensive” gold chain reflecting her knowledge of styles worn by men and women in Hip-hop. Revealing clothing in the context of Hip-hop is often associated with the “video ho” and “gold-digger” stereotypes, and expensive jewelry is a code of self-adornment used by African American men and women in Hip-hop to indicate prestige or “baller” status as discussed in Chapter 2. Lee also wears trendy sunglasses, a popular trend in Hip-hop clubs. She holds a glass of cognac, which is another symbol of “prestige” in African American Hip-hop communities. Many African American women in Hip-hop often buy this drink and sip it in Hip-hop clubs to indicate they have expensive taste. Cognacs of choice in the African American Hip-hop community are French brands such as Hennessy and Martel. 98 Lee’s ability to translate both physical and social performative codes of African Americanness addresses her ability to take what she observes in various environments and to incorporate these nuances into her performance. Lee pays special attention to small cultural details in order to authenticate her performance. The codes she uses, such as holding the glass of Cognac and wearing sunglasses in Hip-hop clubs circulate in popular culture. These are codes have to be 98 These brands have now been associated with Hip-hop music and culture along with champagnes such as Cristal and Dom Perignon though the brands themselves disassociate themselves with Hip-hop in the United States because of its association with African Americans. An example of the type of brand association with Hip-hop and African Americanness that can occur happened in 2006 when Cristal Champagne announced that it did not want to be associated with the culture surrounding Hip-hop. This reference to a generic “culture” of Hip-hop was inferred to mean “African Americans” by African American rap mogul Jay-Z. Jay- Z immediately called for a boycott of the brand by all African Americans, and the Hip-hop community at large. Lee’s attention to these types of cultural details adds “street” credibility to her performances of Hip-hop while they stress the African American translation of the African Americanness she associates with Hip-hop. 192 observed and learned by spending time with African Americans in Hip-hop spaces and learning what people do over time. Moreover, Lee’s exploration of counter images that deemphasize African American female sexuality and focus on more Afro-centric representations of beauty such as the “down sistah” and “b-girl” characters I discuss in Section 3, also suggest that African American women’s’ styles of self-adornment and behavior in Hip-hop are varied. Lee’s inclusion of alternative images that exist in Hip-hop culture of African American women that counter the hyper-sexual images that circulate in popular culture speaks to her documentation of what she observed and not necessarily what she thinks people want to see. When I asked Lee about how she sees herself in relationship to the African American community, she stated “I just imagined myself as growing up in one of these black families like I was [a] real black girl” (Lee 2008 99 ). In order for Lee to become this “real black girl,” she uses her body to reproduce a composite of African American female identities in Hip-hop blurring the line between reality and fantasy. The photograph has the potential to be read as a documentation of Lee’s performance. It can also be read as a picture of an African American woman engaged with Hip-hop, posing with her friends. Lee’s ability to blur this line between “original” and “reproduction” is one of the most compelling components of her work. As other African Diaspora blacks, Asians and other racial and ethnic groups embrace Hip-hop and blackness, the believability of Lee’s photographs challenges arguments about black authenticity in Hip-hop. If we know who Lee is and what her 99 Lee, Nikki S. “Personal correspondence between Nicole Hodges Persley and Nikki S. Lee,” March 2008. 193 project is as an artist, photograph is instantly transformed into “art.” However, only Lee has the agency to decide if she wants to be read as the object and subject of her art. The African American women and women who pose with her never have the agency to decide if they want to be placed in a photograph that will be labeled “conceptual art.” The African American women with whom Lee poses think that she is an art student hanging out in Hip-hop clubs and that she is their friend. While Lee may indeed make friends during the time she engages with various groups, she never tells them that she has imitated their “looks” she introduces herself as the character she has created. Lee’s performance of blackness underlines the fact that multiple blacknesses exist within Hip-hop; both those articulated by black people and those by non-blacks. Though the photographs circulate stereotypes of African American Hip-hop identities, I argue Lee’s performance offer alternative ways to think about the embodied presence of gender and racial identities through theatrical performance. Section 2: Afro-Asian Coalitions and Tensions in Hip-hop Afro Asian coalitions and tensions have been explored by scholars and artists before Hip-hop began. From the famous Bandung Conference of 1955, which explored the possibilities of African and Asian alliances against white hegemony, to recent scholarship on Afro-Asian connections and disconnections (Wu 2003; Prashad 2005; Steen and Hernandez 2005; Ho 2006), Africans and Asians of diverse ethnicities, as well as their African and Asian Diasporic communities, have analyzed and continue to address, their relationships to white hegemony, anti-racist struggles 194 and their individual and collective capacity to enable coalitions and/or their capacity to marginalize one another in acts of cultural appropriation and/or denigration. Recent discussions in Hip-hop scholarship address these types of transnational engagements with African Americanness and also debate the historical contributions of Asian and Asian American contributions to Hip-hop (Wang 2005; Chang 2005), the sampling of Asian culture by African Americans (Whaley 2003) and conversely, the cultural appropriation of blackness by Asian Americans in Hip- hop (Yarrow 2005). While many read Hip-hop as an international music form that embraces all racial, ethnic and national contributions, critiques of Asian and Asian American appropriation and identification with African American articulations of blackness suggest a complex relationship to African American culture as reflected in Hip-hop narratives, such as Ice Cube’s “Black Korea.” The links between African Americanness, Asian and Asian American culture is pronounced in Hip-hop music. Lee’s translation of blackness to African Americanness can be read as “calling out” African Americans in Hip-hop who conflate all Asian ethnicities with a monolithic “generic” Asianness creating a fetishistic relationship to Asian culture. Actor and rapper Ice Cube brings many of these tensions to light in his 1991 song “Black Korea,” which foreshadows the violence that took place in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict acquitted three of the four accused police officers. In 1992, during the Los Angeles uprising, hundreds of African Americans looted Korean markets after the acquittal verdict left many African Americans silenced and without justice. One of the most remarkable incidents that represent the bitterness 195 between African Americans, Koreans and Korean Americans was the shooting of 15 year-old Latasha Harlins by Korean American shop owner Soon Ja Du. The violence happened just weeks after the King beating occurred. Rapper Ice Cube argues that these sores between races have been festering since the 1980s, when Korean entrepreneurs began to take ownership of grocery and liquor stores in Black communities. He posits in “Black Korea”: Cube states: Every time I want to go get a fucking brew I gotta go down to the store with the two Oriental one-penny-counting motherfuckers; They make a nigger mad enough to cause a little ruckus. Thinking every brother in the world’s out to take, So they watch every damn move that I make. They hope I don’t pull out a Gat, try to rob Their funky little store but, bitch, I got a job. So don’t follow me up and down your market Or your little chop suey ass will be a target Of a nationwide boycott. Juice with the people, that’s what the boy got. So pay respect to the Black fist Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp. And then we’ll see ya? Cause you can’t turn the ghetto into Black Korea. ----"Black Korea" by Ice Cube, from the 1991 album, Death Certificate Here, Cube expresses the frustrations of many African Americans who feel resentment towards Korean grocers for moving into black communities to open businesses that sell products marketed to black consumers. Korean immigrant and Korean American owned stores that sell African American hair products, liquor and ethnic foods consumed by African Americans, permeate many urban spaces in South Los Angeles, as well as other predominantly black neighborhoods in the United 196 States. Many African American entrepreneurs have been denied opportunities to open these types of stores based on red-lining practices in South Los Angeles. As a result, many African American consumers must rely on these stores in their communities, yet feel hostility towards many Asian shop owners. Ice Cube’s use of the terms “oriental” and “chop suey” demonstrate how many African Americans refer to any person of Asian descent as “Chinese,” conflating all people of Asian descent with Chinese ethnicity. Despite the fact that many communities in Los Angeles, such as Leimert Park, Boyle Heights and the Mid-Wilshire (Sanchez 2003) have a history of cross-racial coalitions between African Americans and people of Asian descent and, many African Americans categorize Asians and Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners”( Ma 1996) 100 and as “whites.” In 2007, New American Media conducted a poll 101 of Asian, African and Latino Americans in order to access how minority groups in the United States felt about one another. 52% of the 1,105 African Americans polled stated “most Asian business owners do not treat them with respect” (Rader 1). Negative beliefs Asian Americans held about African Americans were also documented. 47% of Asians and Asian Americans polled argued they were “generally afraid of African Americans because they are responsible for most of the crime” (Rader 2). Though this poll offers a snapshot of perspectives and does not reflect the views of all 100 Many African Americans issue racial slurs to refer to Asian and Asian Americans as reflected in Ice Cube’s narrative in ‘Black Korea.” For a compelling Asian American perspective see Ma, Yin. Black Racism” in The United for a Multicultural Japan Newsletter, Vol 2. 30. Ma offers a gripping story of a Chinese immigrant who grew up in Northern California and was verbally abused perpetually by African Americans in his community. 101 Rader, Daniel “Deep Divisions, Shared Destiny - A Poll of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans on Race Relations.” New America Media, Posted: 12 December 2007 Accessed 18 April 2009. 197 African Americans and Asian Americans, the poll does offer us is an idea of how racial and ethnic stereotypes are perpetuated by the mainstream media and circulate in divisive ways in minority communities. For Ice Cube and many other African Americans, Korean immigrants in black communities become racial “stand- ins” for whites (David Palumbo-Liu 2005). For Ice Cube, many Korean and Korean Americans behave not as part of a coalition of minorities living in the ghetto together, but rather as Koreans trying to “be” white oppressing African Americans. Ice Cube suggests that many Koreans have incorporated the behavior patterns of many white Americans who believe stereotypes of African Americans as untrustworthy, lazy people who must be “watched” in places of business because of their propensity to steal. Ice Cube’s suggestion of a “Black Korea” superimposed over what is now South Los Angeles is compelling and is important to understanding the social tensions that Nikki S. Lee embodies in The Hip-hop Project. Lee’s photographs capture the possibilities of African American, Korean immigrants and Korean Americans realization that they potentially share similar plights as minorities. The photographs also suggest the possibility for many Asians and Asian Americans to be racialized as “whites” in the United States. Because Lee does not identify the pain of blackface and its impact on the social identities of African Americans, she invokes past blackface and yellowface practices performed by whites used to denigrate blacks and Asians. 198 Many African Americans believe that Korean immigrants and Korean Americans have access to more opportunities and encounter less racism than African American. However, these assumptions do not consider the history of subjugation that different ethnic groups of Asians and Asian Americans have and continue to face on a daily basis. Despite attempts by the status quo to create divisive labels such as “the model minority,” a term most often used in the United States to refer to East and South Asians to emphasize Asian immigrant and Asian American success, the term de-emphasizes the problems that many Asian immigrants and Asian Americans continue to grapple with, such as racial discrimination in all areas of society. The perpetuation of Asian stereotypes is evident in Ice Cube’s discriminatory comments about Asian Americans and also in social relations between African Americans, Asians and Asian Americans outside of Hip-hop. Both African American and Asian American Hip-hop scholars acknowledge the fact that Hip-hop is inextricably tied to black public culture (Neal 1999; Wang 2005). However as Asian American Hip-hop artists and scholars make claims to Hip- hop, we must be consider the way that Hip-hop is also attracted to a wide range of Asian influences that impact its articulation of blackness. Deborah Wong illuminates the complexities of these exchanges: When Asian Americans participate in African American music, they do not simply inscribe African American histories onto Asian bodies. Improvised music and its performers are situated in a particular tradition of politicized music making (2004, 277) 199 Therefore, as Wong explains, the juxtaposition of “Koreaness” over what Ice Cube argues is an “African American” space (the stores in his community) suggests the potential for cross-racial coalitions as much as disconnections. Wong implies that Asian American and African Americans have shared histories of subjugation in the United States. So then, perhaps we can imagine that processes of cross-cultural exchange allow for both black and Asian communities to borrow improvised strategies from one another that can enable both individual and collective redress of their relationships to white hegemony. Divisive tactics used by the status quo to create dissention between these groups reduces the possibilities of both groups to recognize their shared experiences of racialized inequality. Both Ice Cube and Nikki S. Lee mobilize stereotypes for theatrical effect and for provocation. The contradictions between Ice Cube’s depiction of Asians and Asian American in his narrative are narrowly conceived, yet provide a critique of Asians who engage blackness without dealing with black people. The image of parsimonious Korean merchants that Ice Cube creates fails to recognize the complexities of the exchanges between African American, Asian and Asian American communities that are complicated by class and ethnicity. Likewise, Lee’s use of the stereotype of African American women presenting themselves as “video hos” and “golddiggers” speaks to the vulnerability of many African American women who must struggle with their incapacity to be recognized outside of extant images and stereotypes of Africa American women that circulate in Hip-hop as depictions of “authentic” African American womanhood. Lee’s work offers new 200 ways to think about how “American” identity is complicated by race, ethnicity and class. Minorities interacting with one another have a significant impact on the progress of all people whose skin color limits their opportunity for social advancement. These types of cross-racial and ethnic borrowings are already happening in Hip-hop as African Americans and Asian Americans both use Hip-hop as a site to explore their similarities and differences, connections and disconnections. Jin, the first Asian-American rapper to be signed to a major record label, Jin’s CD, The Rest is History (2004), challenges many of the negative images of people of Chinese heritage in American culture presented in Hip-hop narratives such as those put forth by Ice Cube. Jin’s work as rapper attempts to reconcile the divides between blacks and Asians in Hip-hop. He was signed to an African American label, Ruff Ryder, which is a subsidiary of Virgin Records. Hip-hop continues to have a dialectical relationship to Asian and Asian American culture. As Hip-hop circulates outside the United States, specifically in various locales in Asia, it imposes a less familiar set of historical relationships that also impact how these relationships are articulated. The practice of “tanning” in various parts of Asia as a process of improvising African American racial identity to create a “Hip-hop” identity is referenced in Lee’s photographs and is often read as a positive identification with African Americans, despite the negative history of blackface in the United States. In the 1990s, as Hip- hop circulated around the world, Asian youth in Korea, Japan and parts of China began to use dark make-up and tanning to “become” black in order to appear 201 “authentically” Hip-hop (Marxsy 2005). In Figure 6, the popular Korean singing group the “Bubble Sisters” mimics the hairstyles and dress of “African American” women. The singers also sample from African American female vocal styles in Hip- hop and R&B music. However, the exaggerated “blackness” that “The Bubble Sisters” sample, even in supposed tribute to African American women, can be read as post-modern minstrel images that further marginalize and silence African American women from abroad. Figure 6: "The Bubble Sisters" - A Korean female R&B group in blackface. The Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Web. http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/letters/bubbles.htm 24 May 2009 202 The uses of blackface make-up in the new millennium by many Asian youth are almost identical 19 th century blackface practices. The vocal sampling of African American soul singers by the “Bubble Sisters” is similar to the practices of white men and women in the United States in the 1960s who often took on the hairstyles and styles of self-adornment of African American men and women in order to develop a “jazz” persona (Berliner 2000; Deshong 2005). Many white Americans felt that by consuming American culture through jazz and dressing and talking like African Americans that that they would be acknowledged as “hipsters.” Nikki S. Lee’s reduction of Hip-hop to the performative codes of African American female identities and her focus on physical translations of blackness can be read as an identification with Hip-hop culture that both pays homage to African American women in Hip-hop as it creates a parasitical relationship to African American culture. Growing up in Korea in a homogeneous society, Lee’s identification with “American” music and culture was based in identifications with Western perspectives and did not consider how race and ethnicity impacts cultural production. Lee grew up in Korea, associating the United States and all things “American” with American cultural “products” such as McDonald’s, Mickey Mouse and actors such as Rock Hudson (Lee 2002). She recounts that as a child she consumed these general “American” products as a process of “becoming” more “American.” The idea that different racial groups within the United States are historically disenfranchised and removed from places of social and political agency does not 203 register for Lee. For Lee, African American female identities in Hip-hop are subsumed under the rubric of “American” culture and can be reproduced as representations of Hip-hop identities without consideration of the ways African Americans and their cultural production are racialized. The fluidity of racial categories are indicated by Lee, in that she can identify and translate enough of the performative codes of self-adornment of African American women in Hip-hop to transgress her Asian identity and to be read as “black,” depending on who reads the photographs. Perhaps to some Asian, Asian American and African American communities, Lee’s use of blackface imagery is more obvious. However, the fact that Lee is accepted into African American Hip-hop circles indicates that she has successfully blurred the lines between the performative codes that indicate her “Asianness” with those that indicate “African Americanness.” Lee’s work is troubling because she uses her status as a Korean immigrant to systematically disavow the social, historical and political histories of blackface performance in both the United States and abroad. She states: “I am not Korean American so I don’t have all the problems and issues about race that other Americans do” (Lee 2001). Unfortunately, Lee does not make an attempt to forge coalitions with other Asian and Asian American women, but instead feels her status as a ‘Korean, Korean” woman exempts her from having to deal with the ways that Asian American women are racialized and stereotyped in the United States. Lee’s ability to manipulate performative codes of African American and Korean identity are used by the artist to perform the identities she investigates as well as her public 204 persona as a conceptual artist. 102 When I asked how much research she engages in prior to her performances Lee contends: I don’t’ do that much. I think I have good instincts when it comes to different lifestyles. I just go to the shops that those people go to and check them out…sometimes if people want to copy a style; they buy the most unusual things from the shops. They don’t buy average things. I never want to pop out. I want to be eighty percent of any person from whichever group. (2001, 107) Here, Lee relies on her instinct and esoteric knowledge of the communities she inhabits and uses her technical ability as a performer to synthesize and translate this knowledge into spontaneous, playable characteristics and actions that can be read by the audience as indicative of a group. Lee’s identification of Hip-hop with African American women also performatively speaks to the ways that African Americans also sample from Asians in Hip-hop without recognizing their social and cultural contributions under the sign of Hip-hop. Like Hip-hop Theater and Performance, Hip-hop’s relationship to Asian and Asian American identity is situated within Hip-hop’s contentious relationship to African Americans and perspectives of Hip-hop as a “multiracial” and/or “multicultural” art form. Asian American Hip-hop scholars such as Jeff Chang (2006) and Oliver Wang (2005) see Hip-hop as a site that is produced out of African American and African Diasporic exchanges. However, for Chang and Wang, the multi-racial and cultural exchanges that Hip-hop enables are more important than identifying criteria of “authenticity.” Conversely, African American Hip-hop 102 Lee directly addresses her manipulation of her identity and how she is perceived as an artist in her 2007 documentary A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee. In this film Lee performs several versions of herself leaving the audience to discern who the “original” Lee is and who is the reproduction. 205 scholars such as Kenyon Farrow (2005) have consistently taken Wang and Chang to task for not recognizing the ways many Asian and Asian Americans engage with Hip-hop by using African American culture to validate their Hip-hop identities. Many people identify Hip-hop’s narratives of African American subjectivity as representative of a monolithic African American experience. Because Hip-hop is one of the most popular African American music forms in the world, many see its linguistic, aesthetic and embodied texts as representative of Hip-hop “authenticity.” Yet, “authenticity” can be translated to mean validity. Sampling in American popular culture of Hip-hop’s performative texts suggests a desire of African American and non-African American performers to validate their relationship to Hip-hop music and culture. What Chang and Wang do not consider is the ways that Asian and Asian Americans identify with blackness using the performative codes of African American identity in Hip-hop to articulate their subjectivity because the codes have become synonymous with some form of resistance to the status quo. Just because diverse groups of dancers dance ballet, the association of ballet with the French does not diminish its impact on dancers around the world. The Alvin Ailey dance company is predominantly African American, and though it has developed its own translation of ballet dance language, it has used the performative codes of ballet to articulate the experiences of African American life. However, their engagement with ballet is not diminished by acknowledging ballet is a French art form that has been developed all over the world. Ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong acknowledges Hip- 206 hop as a black music genre, arguing that Asian American practice of Hip-hop can be read as “Asian Americans experimenting with African American genres…”(2004, 16). Despite this on-going debate over who has claims to Hip-hop and its cultural property, the connections and disconnections that cross-racial and ethnic explorations in Hip-hop enable and foreclose can only be reconciled by acknowledging the ways the social positions of both blacks and Asians in the United States are inextricably tied. Section 3 - Lee’s Theatrical (Re) Production of African American Female Identities In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin discusses the ways that reproducing fine art and film diminishes the aura. Writing in 1935, Benjamin examines the effects of technology on art and commodity consumption and the ramifications for the audience and consumer of art. For Benjamin, reproductions allow the audience and consumers of art to have a disconnected history to the original histories of the art object. Those who come in contact with a reproduction automatically experience the presence of the “original,” yet lose the occasion to experience its history. What Benjamin calls the “cult value” of an original piece of art is diminished in the age of mechanical reproduction. The spiritual and social value attributed to works of art is often lost in reproduction. Art pieces with “cult value” usually remained within a community and were not exhibited but revered as representational or functional art used to document particular religious and spiritual rituals. This type of art has been lost to art with 207 “exhibition value.” Exhibit value is concerned with issues of functionality, pleasure, profit and politics. In his discussion about art and the reproduction of originals versus copies Benjamin contends: … Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room (220) Though Benjamin writes specifically about art and more generally about capitalism and commodity consumption, he is writing about fine art in general. I take the liberty of examining Lee’s photographs as fine art objects that document her theatrical performance. Benjamin’s commentary on the process of reproduction lends itself to examine Lee’s performance process and her photographs in relationship to the “original” performances of blackness created by African American women in Hip- hop. Benjamin asserts that modernity is dependent upon its ability to cite the past and the present simultaneously in art production and reproduction. I contend Lee’s art operates as post-modern pastiche that allows the artist’s body to become an embodied site of “theatrical” reproduction of identities. Thus, the seemingly “original” identities performed by African American women in Hip-hop are reproduced by Lee in theatrical acts that remove the social and historical contexts of their production. By sampling and remixing several parts of African American female identities in Hip-hop, Lee creates artistic works that reference original 208 performances by African American women, yet she liberates them from traceable relationships to African American culture by simply presenting them as Hip-hop objects. Lee identifies Hip-hop as a site to validate her Hip-hop performances and to create her reproductions, yet dehistoricizes her performance of their identities from the social and political histories that produced both their styles of self-adornment and African American female stereotypes that persist in Hip-hop. Lee’s performances engage the performative codes of self-adornment of African American women without consideration of the social, cultural or political consequences of her performance on the identities of black women. Lee avoids what she calls “Western” preoccupations with race to explore what she calls her own personal engagement with “changing”: People are always bringing up the question of identity. I don’t care if people call me a chameleon—its cliché and people are too lazy to invent new words. But I forgive them. Changing me is part of my identity. That’s never changed. I’m just playing with forms of changing. (2001, 100) However, in the context of Hip-hop and its historical relationship to blackness in the United States, Lee’s desire to “play with forms of changing” directly engages issues of race, ethnicity and gender. Lee’s sampling from performative codes of African American female identities is achieved through the use of skin darkening, the duplication of African American female hair and clothing styles to change herself from Korean to “Hip-hop.” However, because Lee diffuses any incendiary discussion about race and instead focuses all the attention on herself, she refuses to engage issues of race, ethnicity and gender that pertain not only to the other groups 209 whose identities she reproduces in performance, but also her own identity as an Asian woman. Her disavowal of issues of race and ethnicity allow her to miss opportunities for the possibilities of coalition building between Africa American and Asian women. Her conscious efforts to reproduce the physical identities of African American women in Hip-hop create post-minstrel images based in Hip-hop stereotypes. The critical praise that Lee receives about her work by academics and mainstream art critics (Goldberg 2000; Ferguson 2003; Kino 2006) suggests that American popular culture and mainstream art communities have incorporated the various translations of the minstrel image by white and non-black performers, as acceptable representations of African American subjectivity and of Hip-hop. Moreover, Lee’s translation of Hip-hop into “conceptual art” has removed it from the “ghetto” to “high art” and relieves museum curators and their audiences from having to engage with the original African American female identities that Lee reproduces in her photographed performances. White and wealthy gallery audiences can experiences “urban” art without having to interface with black people in urban spaces. Just as actors have the capacity to create compelling characters that allow audiences to believe that they can actually perform another racial, ethnic and or gender identity in performance, as a conceptual artist, Lee creates believable characters that are received by her African American colleagues. Because the African Americans that pose with Lee do not have access to the foundational 210 elements used to achieve the character she presents, such as her use of self-tanning, hair weaves and improvised translations of their codes of self-adornment, they have no indication of the transgressive qualities of her cross-racial performance. Lee’s performance of African Americanness as Hip-hop summons drag performance in that both male and female drag artists cleverly manipulate performative codes that indicate masculinity and femininity as well as race and ethnicity to create drag personas (Muňoz 1999; Sieg 2003; Senelick 2004). The difference is that most drag performances are presented as performance; that is the audience is aware that a performance of identity is going to take place. In most cases audience members are aware that they are going to see ‘drag.’ The audience understands that there may be offensive components that transpire to achieve a particular character. For example, a white male playing Tina Tuner in drag may wear dark make-up or “tan” his skin, but the audience would not read the performance as black face, even though the act of darkening the skin in this way automatically reinvests the minstrel image. However, the transgression of “acting” black becomes a part of the virtuosity of the performance because the performer is not seeking to demean Tina Turner, but to pay tribute to her and revise the past image of blackface. However, Lee does not tell her audience what she is doing and that she is performing. The subjects who pose with her do not know that she is performing and trust that what they see is “real” playing with the borders of reality and fantasy. This play between notions of the “original and the “reproduction” that happens in drag and Lee’s performance are connected because many drag performers 211 enter into society “passing” as another gender, race and/or sexuality. The people they come into contact with may not know this, thus they transgress the boundaries of the “real” of their racial, ethnic and/or gender identities to embody the reproduction of the “look” they aspire to achieve. As discussed in Chapter 1, artists who engage in post-minstrel performance offer public disclaimers to highlight the potentially racist qualities of his or her performance, yet make these pleas to relinquish themselves from their social responsibility to address the transgressive qualities of the art they produce. Because Lee works in the United States and is visually “marked” as a minority, even in her attempts to disavow her racial identity and those of the black women she portrays, her performances become part of a larger archive of blackness and “Asianness.” Nikki S. Lee, Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill: “Original” or “Copy?” Here I consider the contradictions that arise when Lee’s samples from “original” looks of African American women in Hip-hop. The photographs of Lee’s performance operate by representing reproductions of African American female identity using their styles of self-adornment. Comparing Lee’s work with two of her favorite rappers, Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill, I am able to identify other performative codes that were mobilized by Lee to create her photographs. Lee’s focus on physical and sexual codes of self-adornment of African American women in The Hip-hop Project does not consider the historical context of their original use and production. Many African American women manipulate their bodies to create Hip-hop looks in acts of subversion. Rappers such as Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill manipulate these Hip- 212 hop stereotypes that are derived from longstanding stereotypes of African American women in popular culture that find their origins in slavery. As Lee samples from the “real” Hip-hop looks of her favorite African American rappers, she does not consider the ways that African American women also sample from a wide range of cultural sources to create their styles of self-adornment. Nor does Lee’s sampling of particular codes of self-adornment consider the social and historical circumstances that produce African American female identities in Hip-hop. Women of African descent have just as many identity issues as women of other races and ethnicities however, the circulation of stereotypes of black women around the world make it increasingly difficult for black women to define themselves without referencing negative stereotypes that marginalize them. In the case of Hip- hop, many stereotypes are manipulated by African American women in order to gain access to social and economic opportunities that may be foreclosed to them because of how they look. In Hip-hop music and culture, black women articulate their experiences of African Americanness in a myriad of ways that are reflected in their processes of self-adornment. Stereotypes such as the “Tragic Mulatto” and “Jezebel” characters are recast in Hip-hop as the “video ho” and “gold-digger” stereotypes, while the “Mammy” and “Topsy” characters are revised in the “down sistah” and “b-girl” stereotypes. In The Hip-hop Project, Lee is most attracted to reproducing images that reinvest the Tragic Mulatto and Jezebel stereotypes. K. Sue Jewell argues the Jezebel and Tragic Mulatto often share a likeness to whiteness, including "thin lips, long straight hair, 213 slender nose, thin figure and fair complexion." 103 Lee’s translation of stereotypes is her sexually seductive portrayals of a light-skinned black woman who wears long- blond hair weaves and revealing clothing. Lee’s photographed performances draw attention to the ways that black women are eroticized in Hip-hop in hypersexual ways that continue the legacy of pre and post-slavery and colonial encounters. Lee’s Sampling from the “looks” of Lil’ Kim Lil’ Kim has been revered by The Source, a premier Hip-hop publication in the United States and abroad, as one of the best female Emcees of all time. She is known for her ability to transform her appearance to create a wide range of glamorous looks and personas. From lightening her skin to wearing long blond wigs, Lil’ Kim manipulates performative codes of African American identity to create personas that are sexy and that challenge existing social categories of race. In some images she can “look” white and in others “black.” Lee’s performance of the “Tragic Mulatto/Jezebel” character, recast as the “video ho/gold-digger” samples directly from her observations of many African American women in Hip-hop who also sample from these stereotypes to create their Hip-hop personas. African American rapper Lil’ Kim is a Hip-hop artist who manipulates the popularity of the “video-ho/gold-digger” stereotype in Hip-hop. What Lee does not consider in her sampling of Lil’ Kim’s “looks” is the agency that Lil’ Kim asserts to manipulate various stereotypes of African American women. Lil’Kim creates public characters that appeal to the attraction the mainstream media has for images of the Tragic 103 K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images & the Shaping of US Social Policy London: Routledge, 1993, 46. 214 Mulatto. By recasting the Tragic Mulatto in Hip-hop as the “video ho/gold-digger” character, Lil’ Kim privileges Eurocentric ideals of beauty that revere light skin, straight hair and light eyes, all of which are characteristic of the Tragic Mulatto stereotype. She manipulates this stereotype for profit and finds new ways to remix it sampling from various fashion and beauty trends over time. Nikki S. Lee identifies Lil’ Kim as one of her favorite American rappers and samples from her looks in her photographs. However, Lee’s sampling of Lil’ Kim’s “original” Hip-hop looks also highlights how Lil Kim samples from other cultures to create her look. Lil’Kim’s various identities in Hip-hop also samples from other cultural influences that are absorbed under the sign of African Americanness. Hip- hop music and culture often create contradictory representations of “African Americanness” that sample from European conceptions of beauty and fashion that are resignified under the sign of Hip-hop. For example, many African American women rely on European goods to create their styles of self-adornment. From the use of artificial hair imported from Europe and Asia to the use of clothing created by white European and American clothing designers, many African American women create their styles by sampling from the dominant culture. Both representations of African American female identities in Hip-hop, Lee’s and Lil Kim’s, reveal the ways that African Americanness can be reproduced through performance as well as the ways that American African women’s styles of self-adornment in Hip-hop are always already connected to their relationship to whiteness and other cultural influences. 215 Therefore, Lee’s reproduction of an “original” Hip-hop look created by African American women is a complex reproduction that operates as an embodied remix of already sampled aesthetic codes. Figure 7: Rapper Lil' Kim, wearing a blond weave and tanned skin. VH-1 Video Music Awards, 2004. In Figure 7, Lil’ Kim is pictured on the red carpet of an award show. She wears a provocative dress, diamond earrings and dramatic make-up. Her skin is spray “tanned” to appear bronze and her hair is dyed blond to match her long blond weave. Her eyebrows are painted a light brown and her eye color has been changed from brown to green by using colored contact lenses. She has synthetic breasts achieved 216 through cosmetic surgery and has altered her facial features to appear more “white.” Lil’ Kim manipulates the “video ho/gold-digger” role as she uses her body and styles of self-adornment to communicate to her audience. Her constant editing of her appearance using plastic surgery, injectables for the skin such as Botox, changing of hair color contribute to the multicentricity of blackness and the multiple ways that people of African descent as well as non-African descent can imagine themselves. The use of spray tanning by African American women is becoming more popular amongst light-skinned African Americans. Because many Europeans see “tan” skin color as a representation of success and wealth and make a differentiation between “tan” as having value and “black” as having less value. Many African American women receive social status and acceptance by their white colleagues if their skin color appears to be closer to “white.” If they can change their light-skin to appear tan, they thus appear more affluent and “white” invoking the “Tragic Mulatto” image. In Lee’s reproduction of Lil Kim’s tan look, she “tans” her skin to look more “black” like Lil’ Kim. Lee’s samples separate gestures, looks or other performative codes from their history to reveal an improvised understanding of African American female subjectivity that is superficial. In Figure 8, Lee is pictured with very tan skin, heavy makeup and painted brows that mimic Lil’ Kim’s make-up in Figure 7. In Figure 9, we see another ‘blond and tan’ look from Lil’ Kim that we can link to Nikki S. Lee’s performance. Like Lil’ Kim, she also wears a long, golden weave, a low cut top, heavy eye make up and tan skin. However, Lee’s reproduction of Kim’s “look” becomes a caricature when we compare the two images, because 217 Lee’s interpretation of the “video ho-gold-digger” look, is almost “too black” and does not successfully translate the specificities of the codes used by Lil’Kim to achieve her style of self-adornment. Figure 8: Nikki S. Lee samples from the "looks" of Lil' Kim. The Hip-hop Project, Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. Figure 9: Lil' Kim's blond and tan "look". MTV Publicity Photo. Haitem/Contour Photos.com 218 Lee tries to make the look her own by adding a “thug” edge wearing a bandanna scarf, yet her reproduction is close enough to Lil’ Kim’s “blond looks” to identify the source of her sampling, the remixing of various performative codes with her own observations of African American women in Hip-hop to create her reproduction of Hip-hop. However, what is lost in translation of these codes is what Benjamin calls “the history of the original.” The codes of African American female identity represent a map used by the artist to reproduce Lil' Kim's "look." However, Lee disregards the ways her recontextualizing of these elements in performance also repositions African American women in a new social context. Particular histories of the African American woman as art object and subject of the work are lost in translation between the "original" representation of African American female identity and Lee's reproduction. Additionally, Lee’s body, marked as Asian, further complicates her reproduction because it suggests the presence of Asian and/or American female identity. Like Lee, Lil Kim is obsessed with “changing” her look for the public. She has donned every hair color from black to blond and almost always wears “weaves,” a more semi-permanent way of wearing wigs that provides Lil’Kim with flexibility in styling her hair in various colors. Lil’ Kim also uses tanning and bleaching creams to change her skin color and colored contacts to change her eyes. Like Lee, Lil Kim’s performative codes that indicate her representation of blackness and Hip-hop are ever changing and are a part of her artistic process. Lil Kim’s manipulation of dominant “video vixen” stereotypes is a part of her identity negotiation as an African American woman who is accepted or 219 rejected in American society based on her ability to conform to particular representations of African American female identity that circulate in American popular culture. Lil’ Kim, unlike Lee who is not black, must grapple with the ways her African American body is rejected and accepted by the public based on her appearance and her black racial identity. However, as an Asian woman, Lee faces similar struggles, even if she does not discuss or admit them in public. Lil’ Kim will always be racially “black” even if she alters how her body is read as a “black” text. She cannot change her racial identity, but, as Harry Elam argues, she can manipulate the “gestures, behaviors, linguistic patterns, cultural attitudes and social expectations” (2002) associated with African Americanness for her own artistic and political purposes. Lil’ Kim’s choice to lighten and subsequently tan her skin in order to gain more acceptance as “beautiful” in Hip-hip is problematic, because it reinforces stereotypes of light-skinned women as “more beautiful” in American popular culture. Even though Lil’ Kim may be manipulating her appearance to advance her career and even to subvert historical stereotypes that position light-skinned and dark- skinned African American women against one another, she still evokes historical stereotypes of the “Tragic Mulatto” and the “Jezebel” that are recast as the “video vixen and “gold-digger” in Hip-hop. Lee’s performances suggest the ways that African American women are silenced and must submit to a set of cultural stereotypes that present then as sexual 220 objects in order to have agency in Hip-hop. Though there are Hip-hop artists such as Lauryn Hill, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Eve, who attempt to “split the difference” between the extremes of hypersexual black women and the conscious “down sistah” role in Hip-hop, ultimately African American women have little agency outside these limited parameters in Hip-hop. Further, Asian women in Hip-hop must also grapple with the ways their bodies are associated with particular stereotypes of Asianness and Asian femininity. Lee misses opportunities to engage Asian and Asian American women’s identifications with the identity negotiations of African American women. Many Asian and Asian American women have been inspired by African American women to create their own strategies of resistance. These cross- racial exchanges speak to the ways Asian women are portrayed in American and global popular culture (Kim 2003; Wong 2005; Cho 2008). However, because Lee is not interested in (or avoids) discussions of race, ethnicity or gender identities, she misses the potential connection that Asian or Asian American men and women can make by engaging Hip-hop without mimicking the physical representations of African Americans. Lee negates her Asian identity in her performance by painting her body to appear “tan”, and thus “black,” she embodies complex relationships and tensions between African Americans and Asians in American popular culture and Hip-hop. There was always the possibility for Lee to explore Hip-hop music and culture in New York as a Korean woman, yet she makes a conscious choice to mask her Asian identity under blackness. Lee ‘s performances reinvest the minstrel image as they also reference histories of yellow face performance in American popular 221 culture (Whaley 2003). In her engagement of Hip-hop, Lee misses valuable opportunities to address Afro-Asian tensions in Hip-hop and the possibility to further Afro-Asian coalitions that could be enabled through her performance. Lee’s Sampling from the looks of Lauryn Hill Lauryn Hill is a Grammy Award winning rapper and actress. A former member of the popular rap group The Fugees, Hill launched her solo career in 1998 with the release of the critically acclaimed album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. 104 In Hip-hop the “down sistah” stereotype is a re-articulation of the 1960s “radical” black woman who displays a preference for natural hairstyles (hair not treated by chemicals or hot irons) as a direct rejection of European ideals of beauty and embraces darker skin and broader features as beautiful. By celebrating their “natural” hair textures, their African ancestry and darker skin tones as beautiful, many African American women subverted mainstream culture’s privileging of light- skin images of African American in popular culture. The 1960s slogan “Black is Beautiful” speaks to this process of “de-centering”; Lee samples from these “Afro centric” Hip-hop looks in citing Lauryn Hill as another favorite rapper. Hill is known for her Afro-centric styles of dress and her sampling of various African Diasporic hairstyles from Jamaican dreads to African American Afros worn in the 1960s during the Black Power movement. She is proud of her African heritage and refuses to succumb to Eurocentric ideals of beauty. In her lyrics from 104 It should be noted that Hill samples the title of her album from Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro written in 1933. 222 her song “That Thing,” Hill speaks to African American women who use “fake hair by Europeans and wear nails done by Koreans”(1999). Hill’s lyrics address the ways that African American women sample from both European and Asian sources to construct their styles of self-adornment. Hill tells young African American women to embrace their natural beauty to reject conceptions in American popular culture that their natural hair textures and skin colors are not beautiful. Images of the “Mammy” and “Topsy” stereotypes are recast and subverted in Hip- Hip-hop representations of the “down sistah” and “b-girl” characters. Hill uses Hip-hop narratives and her skill as an Emcee to debunk social stereotypes of African American women and to encourage them to embrace themselves as thinking subjects who have the agency to self-define. Hill is aware that African American women must subscribe to some representation of “beautiful” that will translate in American popular culture in order to be accepted by mainstream media. Hill also understands that Hip-hop audiences are always searching for the “new” thing, so she must update her “look” in ways that translates to both African American non-African American audiences so that she can profit from her art. Hill makes concerted efforts to use identifiable codes of self-adornment that can be referenced in other parts of African American, African and African Diasporic cultures sampling from diverse black “looks” (hooks 1993). Like Lil’ Kim, Hill’s styles of self-adornment also suggests that she addresses the residual effects of slavery on the self-esteem of African American women. Hill grapples with issues of slavery and the representation of black women, 223 yet her social perspective gestures towards a more “Pan African” politics that makes connections across African and African Diasporic spaces. Because Hill embodies the “down sistah” stereotype in Hip-hop, she is expected to present an image and narratives that reflect her social views. She has a wide range of fans across racial and ethnic lines. Though many critics would categorize Hill’s look as representative of an African American woman who is confident and embraces her blackness without any socially imposed stigmas, I contend that Hill’s public personas are often just as problematic as Kim’s. Hill, like Lil’ Kim, must come to grips with the ways her body is read against historical stereotypes of African American women in popular culture. Even though Hill attempts to subvert these images, creating various positive depictions of black women that are attempt to redefine what “beautiful” means, Hill’s various looks and the performative codes that produce them are also sampled from a wide range of African and African Diasporic cultures. These acts of sampling as a form of theatrical improvisation can be linked to larger practices of improvisation in the African American community in which African American men and women have had to collage their styles of self-adornment because they were denied access to their African culture because of slavery. Many remnants of African cultures exist in African American culture, however, much that exists is forged through acts of improvisation by African American who sample from various African cultures and remix them under the sign of African Americanness. 224 Figure 10: Rapper Lauryn Hill wearing a 1960s inspired Afro. Rush PR News, www.rushprnews.com. In Figure 10, Lauryn Hill creates a 1960s inspired character reminiscent of Angela Davis. She wears a large Afro, yet glamorizes her look by wearing dramatic make-up and African jewelry. Here Hill creates an African Diasporic black “look” to articulate her Hip-hop style. Her dress samples from 1970s styles of dress. Her look is modest and covers her body, highlighting the down sistah character in Hip-hop who wants her audience to focus on her skill and talent and not her body This look provides a contrast to the more open and sexy clothing worn by the ‘gold-digger/ho stereotype’ in Hip-hop. 225 Figure 11: Lauryn Hill in another "Afro-centric" look. Lee samples from various representations of Hill’s “down sistah” persona. Figure 12: Nikki S. Lee's reproduction of Hill's Afro-centric "look". The Hip-hop Project, Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. 226 In Figure 12, Lee has darkened her skin again, and this time wears a curly Afro wig. She wears more conservative clothing that covers her body. She also samples from previous looks worn by Hill in the late 1990s where she wore dark glasses as representative of her focus on being perceived as intelligent. Lee poses with her “sistahs” evoking images of a sorority of African American women. Figure 13: Nikki S. Lee is pictured left wearing an Afro. The Hip-hop Project, Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, 2001. In Figure 13 Lee also takes on the “b-girl” character and remixes it with the “down sistah” stereotype. She focuses on her “skill’ as a b-girl and does not pose in the photo, but is photographed in the moment of her breaking performance. However, despite these engagements with Afro-centric Hip-hop looks, in most of the 25 (of 37) images I was able to locate of the estimated 37 total in The Hip-hop 227 Project; Lee privileges images of the “video ho/gold-digger” which reflects its dominant circulation in popular culture. These numbers were given to me by gallery owner/dealer Leslie Tonkonow who was reluctant to talk to me about Lee because I told her my project addressed issues of race and ethnicity. Though Lee reproduces representations of African American female identities her performances, she captures a partial presence of African American female identities. Conclusion Lee’s reproductions of the African American female stereotypes in performance can be read as a form of “theatrical” reproduction that attempts to capture these negotiations that African American women face with the choice to “keep it real” or to manipulate their bodies in order to have access to economic and artistic opportunities to express their identities in public forum. Reading Lee’s body as a site of theatrical reproduction means that we can imagine her (re)performing already existing performances of the performative codes of blackness she observed in Hip-hop spaces by African American women. Lee uses her body as a site to improvise the identities she has observed taking bits and pieces of the codes of self adornment of African American women in to create a theatrical collage of a ‘whole’ character. However, reading Lee’s interpretation of Hip-hop in her photographs as a part of her process and intention as a conceptual artist, we can see that her photographed performances as an “African American” woman and her centering of African American female identities as representative of Hip-hop, challenges the 228 hyper-masculinity and misogyny in Hip-hop. Lee’s performance of African Americanness reinforces the multicentricity of blackness and the way blackness can be performed by non-African Americans. I have identified the transgressive qualities of Lee’s cross-racial performance and also located the performative codes she uses to construct representation of African American female identities in Hip- hop. In making these comparisons, we also learn that Lee’s reproductions of these codes reveals the fact that many African American women create styles of self- adornment that address their complex identity negotiations as African American women and the ways that their bodies are either accepted or rejected by the media based on their relationship to whiteness or accepted representations of blackness that resonate with multiracial and ethnic audiences. Reading Lee’s photographs as a theatrical stills allow multiple possibilities in interpreting Lee’s performances. I, and many other audience members, interpreted Lee’s photographs as “original” representations of African American female identity. It is only after studying the performative codes identified and translated by Lee in her performance in The Hip-hop Project that many of the pieces that Lee samples of African American female identities in Hip-hop become visible. The circulation of Lee’s images as representative of Hip-hop and African American female identities and the popularity of her work indicates that in the United States and abroad, representations of blackness can be performed by non-African Americans. After several attempts to interview Lee about “The Hip-Hop Project,” I was rejected by her agent at the gallery that represents her in New York because my project addresses 229 issues of race, ethnicity and gender. I was later invited to an artist talk at the University of Southern California by art historian Richard Meyer. I went to dinner with Lee and was able to talk to her about race, yet she was reluctant to take on this subject at all. She did state that she was becoming more aware of her body being read as a minority, yet rejects these labels. Lee’s more recent engagement with issues of race and ethnicity, seven years after The Hip-hop Project was completed, indicate a realization by the artist that after 10 years of living in the United States she can no longer feign ignorance about race relations. Furthermore, her inability to see how race, ethnicity and gender are at the center of her work is less believable and forgivable. Moreover, when I asked Lee about her social responsibility for potentially offending the groups whose identities she performs, Lee argues: “I am not responsible for people’s feelings. I am responsible for myself. People can think what they want to think.” (2007) 105 The styles of self-adornment of African American women in Hip-hop discussed here consist of a series of cultural codes that reveal complex negotiations of identity. For example, Lil’ Kim is an African American woman, however, she has bleached white skin, dark black hair that is imported from India, wears colored contact lenses. When Nikki S. Lee samples from the “original” looks of African American women such as Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill, she also reveals the identity negotiations of these African American women who grapple with the ways that their bodies are read within larger social and historical contexts of oppression and 105 Lee, Nikki S. Personal Conversation with Nicole Hodges Persley. Los Angeles, 25 March 2008. 230 marginalization in the United States. The changing personas of these rappers in Hip- hop reveal their conscious manipulation of their “looks” that can be translated is acts that subvert stereotypes of African American women in Hip-hop and also reinscribe them. The personas created by these African American artists sample from their lived experiences as much as they sample from their imaginings of African American female identity. As Harry Elam notes, the performance of African Americanness can occur “in acts of personal survival as well as reaffirmations and renegotiations of cultural identity” (2005) Lee’s attention to the physical detail of performative codes of African American female identities in The Hip-hop Project and her choice to translate Hip-hop as “black” and “female” reveals her awareness of the performable qualities of racial and gender identities. The problem that Lee’s images pose is that they simplify African American women in Hip-hop, who are denied their complex and contradictory styles of self- adornment through Lee’s reductive manipulations. As I have demonstrated, Lee’s representations of Hip-hop and African American women place them in spaces that they may never have access to on their own terms such as exclusive galleries, museums and private universities. Lee’s photographed performances challenges African American men and women to consider how they represent themselves in Hip-hop and how those images and narratives are circulated as cultural texts for appropriation and reproduction. 231 Chapter Four: (Re) Membering Hip-hop: Embodying Multicentric Blackness in Jonzi D’s “Tag...Me vs. the City.” This chapter explores the ways that non-African American dancers in Hip- hop Dance Theater in London employ dance moves in Hip-hop that identify, translate and embody Hip-hop dance language associated with African American Hip-hop dancers in the United States. Dance vocabularies, like verbal languages, contain idiomatic phrases and ideas that cannot be translated word for word or experience for experience across cultural lines. In dance, the cultural particularity of gesture is important. As all culture is shaped by race, ethnicity, class and gender, the fact that African American culture dominates Hip-hop dance language is an important part of understanding its meaning. If we understand “culture” as a fluid set of practices shaped by the differences of the people that produce it, then a process of embodied translation can be read as the process of one body translating the racial, ethnic, gender and national specificities that exist within a gesture or dance move and performing it with his or her own interpretation in a dance performance. Afro-British choreographer and dancer Jonzi D’s Hip-hop Dance Theater piece “Tag…Me vs. The City,” is a site to explore these acts of embodied translation. Jonzi D’s “Tag” is the story of a white graffiti artist from London whose life had been shaped by Hip-hop music and culture. Jonzi D uses a cast of dancers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. All of the dancers perform moves specifically linked to African American translations of Hip-hop to chronicle the story of his white protagonist, Banxsy. An Afro-British choreographer, Jonzi D, uses this multi- 232 racial group of dancers to indicate a multicentric blackness in Hip-hop. The diversity of the dancers speaks to the wide range of cultural influences that constitute Hip-hop music and culture as well as the possibilities of other racial and ethnic groups to indicate the “black body” associated with African American Hip-hop by embodying dance gestures associated with Hip-hop dance (Gottschild 2003). 106 Jonzi D is able to act as a Hip-hop DJ who, uses the dancer’s racial and ethnic difference, nationalities and genders to suggest Hip-hop’s sampling from diverse cultural practices to constitute its aesthetic. Jonzi D’s ‘“TAG” reflects Hip-hop’s ability to incorporate many overlapping “centers” of influence within blackness, as it shows the successes and failures of embodied translation. Section 1 situates Hip-hop Dance Theater in London within the larger context of Hip-hop Theater in the United States. I discuss American Hip-hop dance language and its categorization as both social and concert dance. I provide a general set of dance codes in the African American Hip-hop dance vocabulary to provide the reader with a key that explains the moves I discuss throughout the chapter. I contend that Hip-hop dance can be used as a site to examine how embodied gestures of African Americanness are embedded in gestures related to Hip-hop dance. I argue this repertoire of movement (Taylor 2003) is embodied and performed by diverse racial and ethnic groups through processes of improvisation. This process of improvisation through acts of embodiment requires the dancer to inhabit experiences of blackness that already exist in the history of the gesture performed. 106 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. The Black Dancing Body: Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Macmillan, 2003. 233 Section 2 analyzes a performance of Jonzi D’s Hip-hop Theater piece “TAG...me Vs. the City,” a Hip-hop dance performance I saw in the spring of 2006 at the Peacock Theater in London. I argue Jonzi D’s choreography uses predominantly African American Hip-hop dance gestures as representative of Hip- hop culture. I claim his diverse groups of dancers contribute new translations of African Americanness to Hip-hop. As dancer’s bodies demonstrate a level of fluency of African American Hip-hop dance codes, they also contribute to the polycultural repertoire of blackness because their bodies can be read as “non-African American” disrupting the “normatively” African American bodies associated with Hip-hop dance. This process of (re)membering Hip-hop or reconnecting the various members of the global Hip-hop community requires audiences to read these performances of African American dance against the diversity of performing bodies. I discuss how non-African American dancer’s bodies operate as texts that can be read against the gestures they perform. I argue these performances impact understandings of blackness, its multicentricity and the performance of subjectivity. Section 3 compares the work of two African Diasporic contemporaries, Jonzi D and African American choreographer Rennie Harris. I compare Rennie Harris’ dance company Pure Movement’s production of “Rome and Jewels” with Jonzi D’s “TAG” to explore how two racially black choreographers from different countries enact the multicentricity of Hip-hop’s blackness. I suggest that Jonzi D and Rennie Harris address the specificities and generalities of blackness assumed in their interpretations of Hip-hop. Both choreographers use dancers with particular 234 corporeal histories to reveal how blackness and African American dance traditions both shape and are shaped by global translations of Hip-hop music and culture. As British dancers and choreographers sample from Hip-hop and create Hip- hop dance in London, they acknowledge the transnational impact of Hip-hop and its influence on American and European dance traditions. Because Hip-hop is viewed outside the United States as “American” they also acknowledge the important impact of African American cultural practices on global popular culture, as African Americans are always already subsumed under “American” (Raphael- Hernandez 2005). Further, how does the “centering” of African American articulations of blackness in Hip-hop shape notions of “American” and “European” culture and dance? As dancers from around the world learn Hip-hop dance, they engage an embodied practice that connects them to the social plight of African Americans in the United States. As Hip-hop dance is performed by non-African American dancers around the world, many important cultural elements of the dance are lost in translation, in favor of creating performances that are strictly for entertainment and are void of any connection to the larger social, cultural or political history of Hip-hop music. Students of Hip-hop watch American television reality shows such as “America’s Best Dance Crew (2008)” and films engaging Hip-hop dance that circulate globally in order to learn how to “become” Hip-hop. However, dancers often want to sample only the entertainment component of Hip-hop culture and know little of its cultural development and association with black people in the United 235 States. Audiences/consumers must improvise their relationship to the movements they witness. Here, improvise is meant to underline the imagined social relationships that are created to particular stereotypes and/or performative codes linked to African Americans in Hip-hop. For example, a dance gesture associated with the “thug” stereotype in Hip-hop is associated with gang culture, crime, etc. Performing these gestures with a “happy” demeanor is to mistranslate the gesture completely. However, if the dancer has no relationship to what it means to live “thug” life, they must come up with some improvised history to relate to the performance of the gesture. Without any links to the social contexts in which the gestures are produced, many dancers, including those who may be African American, may lose much of the social and political urgency of Hip-hop dance gestures in the physical process of learning. On the other hand, some dancers translate the gestures of Hip-hop dance with such fluency that they blur the lines of racial, ethnic and national identity and convince many people that they grew up in the United States, in African American communities, dancing Hip-hop their entire lives. By social and political urgency I allude to Hip-hop’s development within a particular historical moment in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when black and brown people were faced with devastating cases of poverty, unemployment and institutional corruption and used Hip-hop to denounce the effects of white capitalism (Rose 1994; Chang 2005). One would assume that a “rebellion” against white capitalism would mean that black and brown youth would distance 236 themselves from the commercial aspects of Hip-hop materialism and consumerism, which often glamorizes images of the “ghetto” and “gangsta” life with little consideration for the ways these stereotypes impact the life chances of urban youth. In our current moment, Hip-hop’s commodification of the title “urban” has incorporated blackness and its relationship to the racial and cultural identities of African Americans as more representative of a “style” than racial and/or cultural identity. While many “underground” Hip-hop artists and dancers are committed to debunking the social stereotypes of rappers in urban communities, they are often undercut by Hip-hop artists and producers of all races and ethnicities, including African Americans, who profit from these contradictions. Literature in Cultural Studies addresses cross-cultural appropriation of Hip- hop. Sunaima Maira’s ethnography of South Asian youth in New York and their identifications with blackness and Hip-hop (2000) as well as Bakari Kitwana’s study of white American youth and their identifications with Hip-hop both support my claims that non-African American youth see performative codes of African American identity as representative of Hip-hop “authenticity.” However, my work contributes to these conversations offering the language of Hip-hop dance as a set of codes that can be embodied by non-African Americans to indicate blackness and notions of authenticity in Hip-hop. Yet to be discussed in the literature are the ways that embodied experiences in Hip-hop also reflect the social experiences of African Americans and are sampled by non-African American youth as representative of Hip-hop “authenticity.” 237 If we think of dance as a site of knowledge production that occurs through embodied acts of exchange, then separating the original gestures from the racial, ethnic and cultural identity of artists who created them leaves us with no way to understand the history of the gesture. For example, in studying Modern Dance, one may aspire to learn the choreography of African American dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham who sampled many African and African Diasporic dance gestures into African American dance vocabulary (O’Connor 2000; Aschenbrenner 2003). 107 However, if we attempt to learn a particular move created by Dunham within the larger repertoire of Modern Dance, translating the social and historical context, as well as the emotion of the gesture is part of the embodied process. If we do not know that the gesture is linked to a synthesis of African American, West African of Caribbean dance traditions, we can master the move technically, but the performance will lack the emotional intention that is shaped by the cultural history that produced the gesture. When a non-African American dancers perform a piece from Dunham’s archive of dances, they automatically ignite the past and present of the gestures they perform creating conversations between their bodies and those of the original dancer. Just as any language can be learned through processes of exposure and immersion, many non-African American Hip-hop dancers have been dancing blackness from the beginning of Hip-hop. If we examine Hip-hop music and culture 107 Both O’Connor and Aschenbrenner address Dunham’s quests to use dance to link African Americans and other African Diasporic people with their African past. Like Hip-hop music and culture, Dunham saw African American dance as a hybrid form that sampled from many African and African Diasporic dance forms. See Aschenbrenner, Joyce. Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002 and O’Connor, Barbara. Katherine Dunham: Pioneer of Black Dance. Minneapolis: Carolhoda Books, 2000. 238 as a site of multi-centricity (Cheng 2002) whereby diverse racial, ethnic and gender groups engage the music and culture, each interpreting it in his or her own way, then these groups can be understood to operate as independent “centers” that exist within Hip-hop that always intersect and overlap blurring notions of authenticity, cultural particularism and “origins.” Meiling Cheng argues ‘the notion of multicentricity privileges different entities’ right to ‘centricity’: …it has the discursive effect of allowing each center –or unit, kind, group, the “genus” in heterogeneity – to assert its autonomy, even when it simultaneously compels each center to acknowledge the co-presence of its own margins and of other centers. (12–13) Consequently, if we examine African Americanness as “one” of many centers within Hip-hop, we can see that the privileging of this particular translation of blackness in Hip-hop dance theater as a site of Hip-hop “authenticity,” is one that is less about the claiming of origins or the importance of one cultural interpretation over another. By locating the performative codes in Hip-hop Dance Theater that allow us to trace the dominant influences in Hip-hop dance which are African American, we can see how a particular set of cultural practices are shaping diverse dance practices around the world. We can also see how cultures intersect, exchange and impact one another in profound ways. Hip-hop dance can be understood as a polycultural crossroads where the performance of African American blackness by non-African American performers represents the possibility of exploring new venues of cross-racial and cultural exchange and the de-centering of “Eurocentric” models of concert dance that exist in 239 the united States and abroad. Moreover, understanding Hip-hop Dance as a facet of Hip-hop Theater in the United States reveals the international importance of Hip-hop inspired art and the possibilities of collecting the embodied histories of Hip-hop music and culture that escape the written archive (Taylor 2003). The cross-cultural and racial exchanges created through Hip-hop dance signal the significance of black cultural production generally on the global arts community. Section 1 – Situating Hip-hop Dance within Hip-Hop Theater in the United States and England As Hip-hop music and culture began to travel to Europe from the United States in the early-1980s, the music shaped the social, cultural and artistic perspectives of youth. Outlets such as MTV linked Hip-hop lovers of all races and ethnicities in the United States and abroad. In London, British youth learned the visual, sonic and embodied texts of performance connected to African American culture in Hip-hop. Emcees, Graffiti Artists and DJs sampled from the sounds and styles of famous African American Hip-hop artists they heard on the radio or whose videos they watched on television. Hip-hop dancers imitated the moves they saw in Hip-hop videos or live productions that traveled to England, and they began to create their own versions of the moves. This sampling from the visual and aural texts as well as the embodied gestures of African American Hip-hop artists in Hip-hop dance were intended to create Hip-hop identities that reflected their personal experiences as 240 British subjects. British based Hip-hop artists developed their versions of Hip-hop, 108 a remix of African American Hip-hop styles with those of the diverse African Diasporic, European and Asian Diasporic youth living together in various neighborhoods in London. The British version of Hip-hop music and culture was muffled under what Heike Raphael Hernandez calls “The African American presence” (2007). This presence, suggests that African American culture has and continues to shape traditional “European structures” (3). By the late1980s, Hip-hop in the UK began to find its own voice and cultural particularity that reflected the diverse racial and ethnic groups that consumed U.S. based Hip-hop music and culture in Britain (Harrington and Bielby 2001). 109 However, this “voice” was still largely patterned on the cultural and linguistic codes of African American rappers (Neal 2003). For example, white Hip-hop communities in London and its environs often translated the blackness of Hip-hop by imitating speech cadences and raps of Bronx born African Americans to show their Hip-hop ‘authenticity’ and thus translated the blackness of Hip-hop into terms used to construct their own identities. Many British Hip-hoppers found superficial ways to connect themselves to Hip-hop, so when white youth in the UK created these translations, they were often dismissed by “Black” Brits of Afro- Caribbean and Asian descent who refused to accept their performances of American blackness as “authentic” because they were white. However, many white, Afro- 108 These specific “British” versions of Hip-hop often referred to as “Brithop” include but are not limited to Trip- hop, UK Garage, Bhangra and Acid Jazz. 109 Harrington, C. Lee and. Bielby, Denise D., Eds. Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2001. 241 Caribbean and Asian and other ethnic groups in London identified with African American because they identified a shared social plight of being working class expressed in many African American Hip-hop narratives (Bennett 2003). 110 By the 1990s, the influence of Hip-hop music and culture in the United States began to influence other artistic forms around the world such as theater and fine art. Hip-hop dance began in street corners and underground party spaces in the United States where audiences erupted around the dance cipher, or the circle location where the dancers created their performances. Because of the global popularity of Hip-hop dance today, the “cipher,” (or improvised stage in the round), is often recreated on street corners as well as theater stages in mainstream theater venues all over the world. London is a premier city that has a thriving Hip-hop dance practice. By the late 1980s, an emerging Hip-hop dance scene mirrored the emerging rap scene in England, reflecting the ways British Hip-hop enthusiasts began to create their own polycultural mixes of Hip-hop inspired art which was nevertheless strongly influenced by African American cultural retentions. The history of Hip-hop Dance Theater in the United States begins as early as the1970s, with the advent of popping and locking which later became the core movements of Hip-hop dance. 111 Hip-hop 110 Bennett, Andy. “Hip-hop Am Main, Rapping on the Tyne: Hip-hop Culture as Local Construct in Two European Cities,” in That’s the Joint: the Hip-hop Studies Reader. Neal, Mark Anthony and Forman, Murray, Eds. London: Routledge, 2004. 111 Popping and Locking are dance moves that originate in the United States with African American and Latino dancers. Both are considered “funk” dance styles moves that form the foundation of Hip-hop dance. Popping was a word given to one of several street dance styles by world famous dancer ‘Poppin Pete” in the late 1970s, early 1980s. For video of popping and locking styles see www.thefantasticpopers.com accessed 9/15/2008 and Holman, Michael. “Styles: Locking and Popping” Dancers Delight www.msu.edu/~okumurak/styles/pop.html on the history of Hip-hop street dance. 242 dance productions can be understood as the precursor to the “Hip-hop Theater” movement as we understand it today. In the United States, Hip-hop Theater privileges solo performance, spoken word and plays, yet Hip-hop performance more generally includes dance, performance art and other artistic practices inspired by Hip-hop music and culture. As Hip-hop dance groups such as the Rock Steady Crew 112 and the back-up dancers of rappers toured Europe and Asia , coupled with MTV circulation of their videos, many transnational Hip-hop scenes emerged creating new and innovative translations of Hip-hop that spoke to diverse national and regional experiences. The call-and-response tradition that is apparent in Hip-hop dance is found in audience reactions to Hip-hop dance moves. As audiences became more fluent in Hip-hop dance language, dancers could communicate with audience members through their skill in executing particular moves. Hip-hop dance originates as “street” dance and was most often performed on street corners or impromptu party spaces. When dancers were successful, the crowd would cheer, yell and/or clap. When they were not, audience members would chide them, yet give then encouragement to bust another move. As Hip-hop circulated to the UK in the 1980s, the diverse racial and ethnic populations in London began to connect to the polycultural components already extant in African American culture. Dancers from all of these backgrounds remixed their own performative codes of subjectivity with 112 The Rock Steady Crew, founded by b-boys Jimmy D and JoJo, is one of the most famous Hip-hop dance crews in the world. Started in the United States in the Bronx, NY 1977, the group now has international branches and members around the world. See www.rocksteadycrew.com December 2008 accessed9/26/2008 243 those of African Americans in Hip-hop with the hopes of creating a Hip-hop identity in London. Many Londoners refer to Hip-hop as “American.” When Danny Hoch founded the Hip-hop Theater Festival in New York in 2000, Hip-hop inspired theater and dance productions were surfacing in the United States as well as England. At the time of Hoch’s festival, many of the artists he assembled knew one another and were all emerging theater, spoken word and dance artists inspired to create artistic works informed by the four elements of Hip-hop music and culture. Hip-hop dance had been flourishing on street corners and underground venues around the United States however, it was not until Hip-hop dance began to be taught in classical dance studios and featured in concert dance spaces that the official “Hip-hop Dance” moniker began to take on a new meaning that associated its practice by non-African Americans. In 2001, Hoch included an international roster of Hip-hop Theater in his annual Hip-hop Theater festival in New York featuring Black British solo performers Benji Reed (The Holiday) and Jonzi D (Lyrical Fearta). As discussed in Chapter 2, their productions mark the first international dance productions in the history of the U.S. based festival. However, the festival still focuses primarily on theatrical, ‘written’ texts. Hip-hop Theater in England refers almost exclusively to Hip-hop “dance” Theater and is just beginning to include more inter-textual performance that includes plays, solo performance and other hybrid forms under its sign. Hip-hop inspired these new fusions of spoken word, dance, fine art and theater that can easily be traced to the concept of sampling and remixing made famous by Hip-hop DJs. 244 Today, artists such as Jonzi D and his American colleague Danny Hoch, are responsible for discovering much of the Hip-hop Theater talent (Jonzi D in the UK and Hoch in the U.S.) and giving them their big “breaks.” Moreover, African American Choreographer Rennie Harris’ also participated in the Hip-hop Theater Festival with his dance ensemble Pure Movement. In 2002, Jonzi D created his own Hip-hop Dance Theatre Festival, “The Breakin’ Convention” which organizes Hip-hop Dance Theater artists from around the world at a three day festival held in London. Hip-hop Theater in both the U.S. and the U.K are still considered “underground” theater movements that are just beginning to “cross-over” to mainstream subscriber based theater production companies. One could attribute the rise of Hip-hop themed plays and dance performances in subscriber based theater and dance companies across the United States and Europe specifically England and France to the rising popularity and commercial viability of Hip-hop music and culture. Both Hoch and Jonzi D have been responsible for translating Hip-hop music and culture from the “streets” to the boards of major theaters in the United States and Great Britain. The Language of Hip-hop Dance Hip-hop dance is one facet of Hip-hop culture that has its own set of performative codes that connect to larger African American dance traditions in the United States. These gestures make up the specific dance language of Hip-hop and reflect Hip-hop’s early exchanges between African American, Latino and other African Diasporic youth. Moreover, many young dancers who are African American 245 are not conscious of the links between Hip-hop dance steps and other black dance traditions in the African American dance repertoire. While their racial and cultural background does not predispose them to understanding Hip-hop dance, many African American youth grew up dancing Hip-hop moves as part of their cultural experience. They do not learn from going to dance class, they learn from one another and from television and films. However, many African American youth have not and will never realize that the gestures they perform are connected to African dance, such as the ring shout, the calenda, the chica, and the juba, yet they are connected to the social and historical context that create the gestures. These aforementioned dance gestures have been incorporated into African American dance practices that link Hip-hop to an African past. Many African American youth have learned these dance codes through processes of what I can corporeal transmission. I argue the process of corporeal transmission is the process of a dancer teaching another dancer by showing him/her how to perform the move. African American dancers do not explicitly state that the Hip-hop moves they perform are connected to their “African past;” they simply perform the moves as a part of their learned cultural practices and summon this past in performance. Many African American dancers know these dances have been absorbed into many African American dance traditions and they now perform them under different titles in their social games and popular dances. Recently, the young African American dancer and singer Chris Brown, whose music represents a crossroads of Hip-hop, R& B and electronic music, paid tribute to many of African American 246 dance traditions in Hip-hop dance such as the juba (Robinson 1999 113 ) and the cakewalk in his 2007 MTV Music Award show performance. However, because many African Americans see these gestures as always already a part of Hip-hop dance language, they identify the moves as Hip-hop. Gestures from many black American dances are connected to African American children’s games which are all passed down orally and physically in the demonstration of the dance from one child, adult, elder to another. Other black American dance moves such as the strut and shimmy can be found in Hip-hop dance, yet many black American youth have never seem these dances performed in their “original” contexts and have little knowledge of the Ragtime or Jazz music era in which they were performed. Dance Historian Susanne Carbonneau contends: …Hip-hop is an extension of traditional African dance and culture, the latest in the succession of American vernacular forms including the cakewalk, animal dances, the Charleston, the lindy hop, rhythm tap, bop, funk and disco that are derived from an African aesthetic. As such, hip-hop must be regarded as a spiritual endeavor. (2003) 114 A broad definition of Hip-hop Dance can be understood as a dance genre performed to Hip-hop music that employs a majority of gestures, turns, movements and attitudes associated with breaking yet also incorporates other African, African Diasporic, Asian and Latino dance vocabularies based on their intersections with African American culture. Despite the thirty-plus years of Hip-hop music history in the United States and abroad, the history of Hip-hop dance is still primarily oral and 113 For more on the juba dance and its links to slavery and West Africa see Robinson, Beverly. Ant Phylis. Los Angeles: University of Califonia Press, 1997. 114 Carbonneau, Suzanne in “Rennie Harris Puremovement: History of Hip-hop” Cue Sheet for the Lecture Series at the Jackson Hall Mondovi Center. 10 October 2003. 247 corporeal. A wide range of scholars (Kelley 1998; Dyson 1999; Neal 2003; Morgan 2005) dancer-choreographers such as Doug Elkins, Jonzi D, Bill T. Jones, and Rennie Harris and dance historians most notably Katrina Hazzard-Gordon (1990), Jacqui Malone (1996) Brenda Dixon Gottschild (2003), all link, Hip-hop to “black” American dance traditions and improvisation. 115 Additionally, all read Hip-hop music, culture and dance as part of the African American continuum of cultural production that can be linked to other African American art forms, as Carbonneau suggests. Here I identify some of the core moves of Hip-hop dance that can also be linked to other African American, African and African Diasporic (including Puerto Rican and Dominican) dance traditions such as capoeira, juba and soca. Because there are so many Hip-hop dance moves in the United States that vary by region, here I present what can be read as the “core” moves of b-boying/b-girling that begins in the United States and is translated through dance practice by youth of all races and ethnicities around the world. The term “break-dancing” is a contested term in Hip- hop dance, as it is a term invented by the media to describe the actions of “break” boys and girls who danced in the “break” of Hip-hop music. While regional influences such as krumping and clowning 116 continue to impact Hip-hop and signal 115 See also Thompson Robert Farris Flash of the Spirit. Yale University Press, 1989 and Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. The Black Dancing Body: Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2004 116 116 Krumping - Clowning are terms that are used interchangeably with slight differences in the dance styles. Pronounced Krum-pin' (using Hip-hop Nation English), this dance is an underground form of Hip-hop dance that began in South Los Angeles in the early 2000s. Dancers compete in freestyle dance battles improvising dance moves that sample from martial arts, Hip-hop and modern dance which culminate in a frenzied style of self- expression that often borders on "trance" dance. Many dancers say krumping allows them to relieve stress in their lives. Clowning, focuses on contorting the body, sampling from images in Cirque du Soleil and other "circus" 248 its dynamic qualities, these core moves are a set of the most familiar Hip-hop gestures and are core moves upon which dancers from all over the world build their Hip-hop dance repertoires. These dance gestures are all linked to African American dance in the United States. Breaking or B-Boying/B-Girling in Hip-hop are terms used to describe many of the improvised movements that dancers use that include the shifting of hands, feet and legs in a rhythmic fashion to move their bodies on the dance floor. The term “break” refers to the dancers responses to the “break” in the music. While many of these “start-and stop” movements are rehearsed and are presented in choreographed routines, they are part of an embodied repertoire of gestures that are used in improvisational dance battles and/or freestyle sessions. Breaking usually happens on the floor and is usually a mix of choreographed dance routines and improvised moves made up by the dancers, but most of what is improvised is the remixing of existing steps and personalizing them in innovative ways. However, new moves surface constantly and are incorporated into the larger dance vocabulary once they are passed around by dancers. Most breaking moves on the floor begin with what is called a “six-step” pattern: shifting the body on the floor moving from side to side. This body shifting type performance. Both styles focus on "feats". The dancers perform individually and collectively, yet unlike traditional Hip-hop dance, choose to perform out of synch with one another focusing on dancing on odd numbered beats instead of even counts. The movements are largely improvisational and have a frenetic feel that are linked to African tribal dances and Native American trance dances. Many dancers look possessed as they dance off the beat in the break of the music. David La Chapelle made a documentary film chronicling this dance tradition 2000 film Rize. Clowning may use face paint and is also associated with freestyle-, frenetic movements danced to hip-hop beats. The language of both dance forms includes processes of bodily communication whereby dancers engage in battles and call to one another with gestures to solicit responses. 249 allows dancers to perform footwork on the floor and to position their bodies to pop up to do standing moves. The following definitions provide a sampling of popular Hip-hop gestures: Standing Moves • Popping - The dancer moves the body with the appearance of popping joints. These “pops” correspond to the beats in a Hip-hop song. • Locking (also “Campbell Locking”) - Making a sudden move and “locking” it in order to link it to another in both jerking and fluid movements. • Toprocking - A swaying motion that includes hand gestures, shoulder contortions and footwork that indicates the dancer is preparing him/herself for “battle.” These moves are varied and often improvised. Floor Moves • Spinning – The dancer uses body, back and legs to push his body clockwise and counterclockwise in quick turns on the floor. Popular spin moved include, back, head and elbow spinning. • Freestyling - The dancer combines any of these moves with creative samples from other dance languages and responds on the spot to another dancer’s innovations. • Down rock – This is a term used to describe hand and foot work on the dance floor used by the dancers to shift the body. Most of this work is done on the floor. Power Moves—these moves are lauded by audiences and respected by other dancers because of their difficulty. • Swipe - The breaker leans back and then whips his arms to one side to touch the ground in the movement of a cartwheel with his legs following fast to twist 360 degrees to land on the ground. • Windmill - The dancer spinning with the legs flailing in the air to indicate a “windmill” 250 • Headspin - Spinning the body on the head in a circular fashion. • Flare - The breaker supports his body with his arms, swings his legs around his stationary torso in continuous circles never allowing his legs to touch the ground. • Suicide – These are dramatic moves used to punctuate a dancer’s routine. They include flipping forwards and backwards in various maneuvers and then dropping suddenly on the back. These moves are usually reserved for the end of a dance routine and often shock audiences because the move appears to have hurt the dancer. • Freeze - This move is used to describe a dancer balancing all of their weight on one part of their body and “freezing” it in midair for a remarkable amount of time. Many freeze moves are held on the hand, the head, forearm, elbow and/or shoulder. Freezes have various forms and names that refer to the “look” of the freeze or the body part that it isolates, EX: Armchair freeze, planche, etc. Other popular moves • Waving- The dancer moves a motion from one side of the body to another to create the effect of a rippling wave in the ocean. This gesture often begins with the fingertips or toes and the motion ripples up or sideways. • Floating—the dancer moves his or her body sideways using heel toe shifts to travel across the floor. • Sliding- The dancer moves his or her feet in a gliding fashion as if floating on air and shifts his body weight in different directions. • Snaking – The dancer shifts his or her body moving head first, then following with shoulder and hips in a snakelike slithering motion. This move is often referenced in R7B dance vocabulary and is not always used as a “hip-hop” dance move, yet is often used by dancers in various translations to transition from one gesture to another in Hip-hop dance. The aforementioned breaking moves are a sample of a much larger and complex Hip-hop dance language. As we can understand the European code of a 251 “tour jeté” as specifically ‘French’ and part of the larger ballet dance vocabulary, we should be also able to recognize then when a dancer “top rocks” that s/he is inhabiting a gesture that links him/her to a specific black dance tradition of African American Hip-hop dance. Like verbal language and written text, dance languages reveal the social relationships between groups. Once a fluency in the foundations of Hip-hop music and culture is achieved, the performances by non-African American people focuses less on imitation and more about creating their own identifications with Hip-hop that speak to their own cultural and national experiences. In Hip-hop dance, concepts of “street” dance, a term used to associate a particular set of dance styles with urban populations, began to be categorized as a “social dance” in the mainstream dance world because of its ethnic specificity. However, within black dance traditions, Hip-hop dance was already social and continues in the tradition of several African American dance forms (Gilroy 1997; DeFrantz 2004). 117 As Hip-hop dance began to intersect with “concert dance” because of its global popularity, Hip-hop dance was ushered out of the streets into “legitimate” theater spaces. By “Legitimate,” I mean theater and dance spaces that privilege “concert” dance styles that are based in European, i.e. “white” culture. Here I distinguish between social dance whose primary purpose and/or function is to facilitate some type of social exchange, and concert dance, choreographed and 117 De Frantz, Thomas L. “The Black Beat Made Visible: Hip Hop Dance and Body Power” in Lepecki, André, Ed. Of The Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. For more on breaking as a social dance and its conception in global popular culture see Gilroy, Paul. "Exer(or)cising Power: Black Bodies in the Black Public Sphere" in Dance in the City, Helen Thomas, ed., New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 252 performed specifically for an audience. While most of these “social” dances (swing, country-western, ballroom, etc.) are partner-based, “ethnic” dances, such as Hip-hop, are also categorized in dance language using the term social dance. Most of these social dances usually are transmitted orally and corporeally 118 (e.g. showing someone a dance step). In many cases these dances are created in response to a social, political, spiritual and or musical inspiration, even when the performer may translate these movements as spontaneous “feelings” which are translated into particular dance moves. When non-African American dancers perform Hip-hop moves that are connected only to the entertainment and commercial value, they often miss personal and artistic connections to the movements that link them to the rhythm and beat of the music instead of the perfection of the gestures themselves. This is not to say that African American dancers cannot miss these nuances of the dance language of Hip- hop. Most often, disconnections between the dancer’s ability to execute the technique of Hip-hop dance gestures is based in their incapacity to make visceral connections to the rhythm and beat of the music. These disconnections may also be complicated because the dancer may not have an understanding of what a gesture means (e.g. anger, joy, pain, etc.) which provide the prompts for the moves. Additionally, notions of “eight counts” are not a Hip-hop dance that comes directly from the streets. When “ trained” dancers (e.g. those who have studied dance, usually in classical forms) attempt to dance Hip-hop, they often impose notions of 118 This is my term and I use it to indicate how the body is used to transmit information without the use of “text’, written or verbal” and is an intricate part of developing a corporeal language of hip-hop dance. 253 “counting” to the beat, which often steals focus from their bodies’ viscerally feeling when they should move to the music. When Hip-hop dancers who have not been formally trained teach one another, they rely on instincts and their physical connections the beat of the music to demonstrate the moves. The student watches, repeats and revises until the move is mastered. Counting in dance is derived from European traditions (Harris 2005), 119 whereas most African and African Diasporic dance forms rely on more physical and visceral connections to timing that are based on both individual and collective responses to the music. Conversely, concert dance refers to those moves that are created specifically for an audience. Hip-hop Dance Theater is both social and concert as it interfaces with the protocols of both dance styles. We must consider that Hip-hop Dance is built upon a foundation of African American dance traditions. In the past 20 years, Hip-hop dance shifted from its categorization as “ethnic” social and/or “street” dance. It now attracts invitations from many concert venues that privilege European dance forms. Traditional concert dance obeys the protocols of theater practice that operates under the idea of suspended disbelief, whereby audience agrees to believe what they see on stage as “real” for the time of the performance. The fourth wall is never broken. Hip-hop Dance Theater, however performed today in “traditional” venues, often disrupts this convention. Many choreographers such as Jonzi D and 119 In a master class on Hip-hop taught by Rennie Harris, he states that Hip-hop dance cannot be contained in the "counting" of beats and must be felt viscerally by the dancer. Equally, at the Hip-hop dance conservatory in New York, the director Sekka, tells his incoming classes that they are part of an ensemble and have no relationship to :individual” movement that is not always already tied to the collective. The Hip-hop dance conservatory teaches dancers of all races and ethnicities Hip-hop dance, while Rennie Harris has a predominately African American dance troupe. 254 Rennie Harris, as well as Hip-hop Theater performers such as Danny Hoch refuse this theatrical convention and often create interactive and improvised theater experiences that solicit responses from the audience. Hip-hop Dance Theater invites its audience to participate in the rhythm and movement of a performance. Though routines are choreographed, there is usually a space for dancers to improvise in every performance. This dynamic quality of Hip- hop Theater is also present in Hip-hop Dance Theater. In both, dancers, actors and audience members participate in a structure of feeling (Williams 1984). 120 Raymond Williams uses the term "structure of feeling" to emphasize the emotional connections that exist with and/or between specific groups, classes, or cultures (64). Hip-hop dance privileges a visceral understanding of knowledge production that is learned through embodied practice, observation, cross-cultural exchange and “feeling” in the moment that inverts notions of the ”primitive” associated with the dance of minoritized subjects across cultural and national lines. Hip-hop dance also has the potential for both African American and no-African American dancers to re-inscribe these notions. As Hip-hop dance gains global popularity and is performed by people of all races and ethnicities, it de-centers conceptions of “classical” dance as a superior art form and instead samples heavily from those European forms as representative of the ways in which “black” dance traditions around the world continue to shape global dance practices. Yet their influence escapes the archive of dance history because 120 See Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1984. pp. 65-67 255 they are embodied practices whose only “textual” representation is in the bodies that perform them. If those dancers are not “black,” then the evidence of “blackness” often goes undocumented. Hip-hop Dance Theater, in the United States and in England, is a site that can be used to trace these embodied connections and to re- member the cross-roads of exchanges that produced Hip-hop dance in the United States re-membered in dance. In the United States, Europe and Asia, Hip-hop dance is one of the most transnational, racially and ethnically diverse representations of Hip-hop music and culture’s global presence. Section 2 - Translating Blackness as African Americanness in Jonzi D’s ‘TAG…Me vs. the City” Jonzi D, a black choreographer, is London’s premier Hip-hop Dance Theater choreographer and producer. He is responsible for developing the careers of some the most promising Hip-hop dancers in England. His relationship with social and concert dance is strong as he was trained at The London Contemporary Dance School and is a pioneer of Hip-hop dance theater in the UK. His company, Jonzi D Productions, is an associate company of Sadler’s Wells, which names itself as London’s premiere venue for international dance in the city. This relationship between Jonzi D and Sadler’s Wells began because his widely successful three day Hip-hop dance conference, ‘Breakin’ Convention,’ which began in 2004 and united Hip-hop dancers from around the world. The global appeal of Hip-hop dance caught the attention of the Sadler’s Wells producers. Today, Jonzi D’s productions are regularly featured at Sadler’s Wells. 256 There was great anticipation among London’s Hip-hop enthusiasts for Jonzi D’s Hip-hop Dance Theater show “Tag…Me vs. the City”. The show’s limited run at the Sadler’s Wells Peacock Theater was sold out when I saw it February 18, 2006. The performance I attended had a multi-racial audience from a wide range of ethnic, age and class groups. Many young theatergoers between the ages of ten and eighteen attended the show with their parents. There were also sixty-something ticket holders who seemed more enthused by the excitement of something new in the theater than by Hip-hop. The energy in the lobby of the show was palpable as many guests mingled sipping drinks and eating snacks before the show with anticipation and curiosity. Featuring some of the UK's finest Hip Hop dancers, “TAG” attempts to use Hip-hop dance and the shared knowledge of its gestures to bridge racial, ethnic and class backgrounds. The show’s cast consists of both classically trained and street dancers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Jonzi D is able to indicate the polycultural exchanges that exist within Hip-hop’s blackness as well as its multicentricity by showing dancers of different races engaged with Hip-hop dance. This multi-racial representation of Hip-hop addresses the music and culture’s multicentric engagements with African American dance. “TAG” opens in blackness, only to startle the audience with a white police flashlight and police car sirens signaling the jeopardy many graffiti artists experience as they risk persecution by 257 police to put up “burners” 121 around the city. The spotlight reveals large spray painted sculptures upon which dancers are draped. The sculptures spell the word “TAG” however, their abstract design and shapes allow them to also stand individually as art. As the music begins, a Hip-hop score featuring an exciting fusion of African Diasporic music from Hip-hop to Reggae and Jazz created by DJ Pogo, five dancers, representing the diversity of the graffiti writer’s experiences, begin to “drip” off the letters and break their way down stage. The dancer’s bodies performing these fluid moves imitates the paint of graffiti writers and also references the Hip-term “physical graffiti” often used in Hip-hop to refer to Hip-hop dance. Standing down stage lifeless, the dancers await the arrival of their host—the white male whose experiences they represent. Emerging from the shadows of the police strobe is the white lead dancer, performed by a popular UK Hip-hop dancer named Banxsy. He is dressed in baggy pants, layered, oversized t-shirts and a tight fitting skull cap. His life is illustrated in many “colors” as two white, two black and one Asian dancer begin to dance his experiences. The dancers represent the many components of his identity as a Hip-hopper. Banxsy begins to “spray” the other dancers with “paint,” using popping moves and an aerosol can as a prop. The dancers come to life by also locking and popping their joints, to indicate that they are dripping into place at the mercy of his aerosol paint can. We hear sounds of paint being shaken with the metal ball rolling and mixing the paint in the can. Other sound effects include the swishing sounds of paint spraying or the whisper of Banxsy’s 121 A “burner” is an international graffiti term used to describe a price of art put up by a graffiti artist in public spaces. 258 breath blowing the paint represented by the dancer’s bodies blending into various shapes. This “blending” process represents the technique of many graffiti writers, who must blow the paint in the direction they want it to drip and to shape letters. The dancers contort their physiques; some are suspended upside down for minutes, as others quickly plop to the stage, flipping onto the sculptures in acrobatic twists, turns and suicides. The music that animates the score varies from old school Hip-hop beats sampling from African American rappers such as Run DMC and Eric B and Rakim, to African American jazz to European Brithop and techno sounds, creating a sound collage. The dancer’s movements correspond to Banxsy’s paint strokes. The backdrop of the performance features video of subways cars and other public spaces in London that showcase the work of different aerosol artists (used as synonymous with graffiti artist) that have influenced the white protagonist’s life. Video of subway trains with graffiti of famous London graffiti artists are projected onto the stage and serve as transitions in between the dance sequences. Dancers wave and pop themselves into shapes that spell “TAG” making letters with their bodies, collaborating together in partner styles which reveal the social dance element of Hip- hop Dance Theater. Katie P, one of two white dancers (including the lead male Banxsy) is the only woman. She represents the lack of female representation in Hip- hop. However, she defies stereotypes of golddiggers and video vixens and is presented as an equal to her male colleagues. She confidently uprocks to the beat of 259 the music then starts her six-step, finally descending to downrock, showing off her impressive hand and footwork. She rises to move about the stage in aggressive moves, inserting hardcore gangsta gestures, grabbing her crotch and letting the audience know that she can hold her own among an all male cast. Fusing old school and new school Hip-hop, Katie P’s gestures show that she is ready to battle and stake her claim as a b-girl who can dance. Many of Katy P’s translations of Hip-hop gestures seemed heavily influenced by jazz and modern dance languages and reveal their influence on her translation between dance languages. B-boys Soopa J and Nathan Geering are the two black dancers in the show. Both have varying levels of fluency with Hip-hop dance vocabularies (at least based on what was presented in the show). Soopa J performs only big power moves (swipe, windmill and flare), which are at the core of breaking styles. Nathan Geering appears more comfortable with old school Hip-hop moves of popping and locking, yet seems more uncomfortable with floor work. However, his incorporation of new Hip-hop moves such as “krumping” indicate his awareness of the most current Hip- hop vocabulary and direct links to new moves performed by African Americans in the United States. Tommy Frazen, a dancer of Asian ethnicity, is technically adept at performing standing and floor moves of Hip-hop dance, yet what is missing from his performance is an organic connection to the rhythm of Hip-hop music. His style is more mechanical and lacks an individual flair. Jonzi D’s attempt to represent the four elements of Hip-hop music and culture are apparent as he draws our attention to the ways in which Hip-hop inspires 260 artistic practices across racial, ethnic and national lines. The choreographer also explores the physicality of graffiti art and its connection to rapping, and break- dancing. The narrative of “TAG” follows a white, un-named graffiti writer’s journey as a troubled youth. His love for Hip-hop and graffiti art defines his life and provides an outlet for him to claim his identity. Thus, the dancers are physical representations of the various graffiti styles that have shaped his life and help him articulate his experiences. As I mentioned earlier, through the use of a video projection screen, we are able to see the work of several of London’s premier graffiti artists that have influenced the lead character’s life. Many of the supporting dancer’s movements sample from these styles of these famous graffiti writers, which vary from Japanese animé to Arabic script, thus indicating the intersection of African American articulations of Hip-hop with global culture. Hip-hop music, mostly from the United States, is the soundtrack to the protagonist’s life story performed in Hip- hop dance styles. As an ensemble, the dancers give the audience an amazing master class in Hip-hop dance technique. However, missing from the performance is a larger connection to the narrative of the white male lead’s experiences with Hip-hop culture other than graffiti. We never understand how the other dancers’ differences, which cannot be avoided, connect to Banxsy’s life. Equally disconnected are the video projections of moving subway cars, graffiti scenes around London and the sound effects of the “street.” Though they provide the audience with a general context for the moves performed, we have no idea of how they connect to the life of the 261 protagonist. However, as “physical graffiti” the dancer’s bodies are easily read as part of the white male Hip-hopper’s identity. He is white on the outside, yet polycultural Hip-hop on the inside. As all of the dancers embody gestures that are historically tied to African American dance, they re-activate this African American presence on stage. The lead seems to over compensate for his whiteness by showing how “down” he is with Hip-hop, using hyper masculine gestures of crotch grabbing and thrusting top-rocking moves that reveal his anger and fight against ‘The City’ in the title. Jonzi D’s use of aggressive Hip-hop gestures such as toprocking, popping and locking showcase the white dancer’s fluency in Hip-hop dance. However, they are upstaged by his comment that this character’s life has been impacted by “blackness,’ “whiteness” and “Asianness” because of the histories their bodies bring to the story. Both Asian and African Diasporic communities in London have colonial histories that speak to their attraction to Hip-hop as a site to address social and political inequalities, racism and social disenfranchisement. Moreover, references to “blackness” in London often refer to the experiences and cultural production from both Asian and African Diasporic groups. Additionally, white working class youth in London also have a history of connecting to African American music genres, namely Jazz, Soul and R&B, to articulate their experiences and allegiances with African American struggles for civil rights (Bennett 2003). Furthermore, all of the dancers in “TAG” create conversations with their bodies about the relationships between their ethnic identities as British subjects and how those relationships are in conversation 262 with African Americans. Perhaps because the lead character’s whiteness links him to the status quo of British establishment, he must prove his “anti-establishment” status by flipping off the audience and showing them that he is not just white but “Hip-hop” on the inside. However, this superficial engagement with the “rebellious” quality afforded to Hip-hop seems shallow and does not add any depth to the overall development of the character or the story. As a black choreographer, Jonzi D’s use of a white character to show how Hip-hop shapes the everyday representation of white British identity is important. However, the impact of African American culture on white British youth identity formation through Hip-hop is presented mostly in superficial ways. Jonzi D’s characterization of b-boy life is best used when he allows the dancers to improvise in a breaking cipher. Each dancer has a turn at portraying an assumed side of the white lead character’s life. Here is when we see the versatility and fluency of the dancers’ knowledge of Hip-hop dance vocabulary. Jonzi D’s decision to restrict the dancers mainly to confrontational b-boy/b-girl battle vocabulary, with some partner work, misses opportunities for more in-depth explorations of Hip-hop dance language. The show’s narrative of the white b-boy in despair is weak, yet it provides important opportunities to see how choreographers are also translating larger messages than the main narratives of their characters. Equally important are the relationships of power that Jonzi D’s choreography seemingly shifts in the performance. The black, Asian and white cast are not animated at all until the white male gives them “life” by spraying them into being. 263 However, there are several ways that Jonzi D as the black male choreographer is able to make a complex critique of Hip-hop’s association with African Americanness, issues of cultural appropriation and black authenticity. First, his diverse cast represents how racial, ethnic and gender groups influence how white male youth in London articulate their identities. Second, Jonzi D’s choice to engage diverse racial and ethnic groups withAfrican American Hip-hop dance language creates corporeal conversations with African Americanness and the social and cultural history of Hip-hop. Third, Jonzi D addresses how other racial, ethnic and national groups are impacted by African American dance. Lastly, as a black male choreographer presenting Hip-hop in a traditional “concert” dance space, Jonzi D challenges what counts as concert dance and how those assertions are shaped by race and ethnicity. Jonzi D’s attempt to create an ensemble production of African American Hip- hop without African American dancers is not an anomaly, as b-boys around the world do this every day. Notable is his isolation of the codes of Hip-hop dance, particularly breaking moves, to reveal what is lost in translation when other racial, ethnic and national groups translate Hip-hop dance. The most remarkable part about this piece is that the white lead character’s lack of fluency in Hip-hop dance language allows him to articulate his experience through Hip-hop dance in only in limited ways. Consequently, the character is bound by his own superficial understanding of Hip-hop. Banxsy’s identifications with Hip-hop are directly connected to Hip-hop stereotypes of the thug and gangsta characters used by many 264 white males to construct a Hip-hop “masculinity” that exaggerates the always already exaggerated postures of African American stereotypes. Jonzi D’s “TAG” is most successful in that it reveals the effects of the circulation of African American male stereotypes in Hip-hop and how they are sampled by whites to create pseudo- rebellious identities that Banxsy represents in “TAG.” Many white male youth often identified as wiggas and wannabes, discussed in Chapter Two, have used African American male experiences in Hip-hop as templates of anti-establishment behavior (Mailer 1957; Kitwana 2003). In “TAG,” it is unclear whether we are expected to sympathize with Banxsy’s onstage persona and if this is even possible. As an African American artist inspired by Hip-hop and fluent in its cultural codes, I translated his performance as the white kid who grew up listening to Hip-hop in London and felt as if “coloring” his whiteness (Roediger 2003) could justify his rage against his social circumstance so he could “fight the power,” or in this case “The City.” Jonzi D’s representation of Banxsy as a white kid who is “Hip-hop” before he is “white,” links the character to a larger group of white youth who identify with Hip-hop’s blackness and its polycultural links to African, African American, Asian, Latino and other cultural contributions as well as women engaged within Hip-hop. This representation of a white Hip-hopper seems hopeful, yet it gives more premises for white men to create Hip-hop’ “style” sampled and remixed from the cultural contributions of minorities. Banxsy does not want to be part of the white system of authority in London that oppressed his creativity as an artist. However, his whiteness makes him always 265 already a beneficiary of privilege. By “tagging” an auto-biographical story of his life, he hopes to incite empathy for his predicament as this social outcast. Class is an important consideration when we address issues of white privilege and it is used by Jonzi D as an important point of identification for many white youth in London who identify with Hip-hop’s rebellious messages. Yet despite Banxsy’s seemingly working class background, the character is not sympathetic, because he identifies only with superficial ideas and concepts in Hip-hop that are linked to stereotype. Though “tagging” is radical behavior, writing on public property by black and Latino youth in the Bronx in the late 1970s was an act of resistance that allowed them to reclaim public spaces that often ignored the needs of their communities and dismissed their art (Rose 1994; Demers 2000). Many white graffiti writers in the United States and in Europe often participate in graffiti writing for these same reasons. For those white artists who leave graffiti behind after their rebellious “stage” in life is over and translate their skills into more “acceptable” art forms, their whiteness still affords them more opportunities and privilege than their black and brown contemporaries. The representations of Banxsy’s “minority” soul, danced by the diverse dancers of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, bring diversity to Banxsy’s ‘inner life,’ 122 as a character, yet he benefits from whiteness and the novelty of being a white boy in mainstream London who loves Hip-hop (Kitwana 122 In An Actor’s Handbook, Stanislavski argues the “inner life” of a character is “concealed in the outer circumstances of their life, therefore in the facts of the play.” See Stanivlaski, Constantin. An Actor’s Handbook: An Alphabetical Arrangement of Concise Statements on Aspects of Acting. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2004, pp. 21-22. 266 2005). As the lead character in this show, he can attract white audiences as well as make Hip-hop more palatable for white audiences who are a part of the subscriber base of Sadler’s Wells Theater. The black dancers’ fluency in Hip-hop dance moves was quite strong, yet lacking was a sense that the dancers spoke Hip-hop dance language as a “first” language of dance or had learned any of these moves through a connection to their social experiences. Most of the dancers appeared to be studio- trained dancers who learned Hip-hop dance in classes and/or clubs and not as part of their cultural experiences. The performance lacked an emotional and visceral connection to the physicality and theatricality of Hip-hop dance theater, yet the virtuosity of the performances allowed us to experience the show on a purely entertainment level. The emotional content of the performance was missing. However, how do we see these disconnections manifested in performance? Many of the issues of emotional and visceral connection that were missing from these translations of Hip-hop dance are based in experiences that escape the written archive because they are “feelings” that are evoked when we witness a performance and are based in the performer’s ability to translate the feeling into the gesture he or she performs. In some instances, a speaker of a new language is so immersed in the culture of the language that even a native speaker cannot tell they are from another country. In other instances, no matter how grammatically correct a speaker may be, there are moments in speaking that the translation between his native and the new one language re not believable-or reveal the lack of knowledge the speaker has about how to convey his or her 267 thoughts. This takes me to the next facet of the processes of embodied translation which is using the lived experiences of the artist to aid in translating the gestures they perform. Section 3- Re-membering Hip-hop: Processes of Embodied Translation in “TAG” Using the story of a white graffiti artist from London, Jonzi D is able to re- member the impact of African American articulations of blackness in Hip-hop that are often lost in translation across national spaces. “TAG” addresses the importance of embodied texts and how dance languages are shaped by race and ethnicity as well as the racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the performers who engage them. By embodied practice, I mean the search for both successful and unsuccessful translations which seek to find the connections that other racial, ethnic and national groups make to African American culture through Hip-hop dance. The process of translating the specificity of Hip-hop moves to audience members and the dancers are the responsibility of the choreographer. However, Jonzi D cannot teach an entire audience the history of Hip-hop dance and its social protocols. For example, many audience members did not respond to many of the power moves performed by the dancers nor songs played by the DJ (such as tracks from such famous rappers such as Eric B and Rakim) that usually move Hip-hop crowds because they evoke particular “old school” Hip-hop history. Brent Hayes Edwards’ concept of “décalage,” the lapse in time, space and meaning between the translations of lived experiences, (2005) speaks to the ways that the cultural 268 memories of blackness embedded in American Hip-hop dance are translated as African Americanness abroad and their impact on non-African American performers. Jonzi D’s use of racially and ethnically diverse dancers to translate the similarities and difference between cultural specificities of blackness through Hip-hop is suggestive of the polycultural blackness of Hip-hop. Underscoring my analysis of this improvised exchange of cultural practices through the body is Joseph Roach’s concept of performance genealogies: … performance genealogies draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in the silences between then), and imaginary movements dreamed in minds, not prior to language but constitutive of it, a psychic rehearsal for physical actions drawn from a repertoire that culture provides. (26) Joseph Roach’s reading of performance genealogies is informed by the way in which bodies in performance have the capacity to record, remember and reactivate history (2001) and they transcend national borders, 123 in this way Jonzi D’s Hip-hop Dance Theater is able to articulate the polycultural elements of African Americanness in Hip-hop. Like Roach, I read the body as a repertoire of experiences, behaviors, gestures and ideas that are not recorded as written text (Taylor 2003), 124 yet can be understood and accessed as a process of “writing” histories that can be “transferred” from one body to another through dance (Taylor 2003, 29). Because the “body” of Hip-hop is ultimately hybrid because of its diverse 123 Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 124 Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 269 cultural deposits and the global circulation of blackness associated with it that is specifically linked to African Americans, the (re) membering process in dance can be understood as one that reconnects many of the parts together that are often forgotten as elements of the whole. These moments of what Brent Hayes Edwards calls décalage (2005) in “TAG” represent how dancers share and exchange corporeal histories which may or may not succeed in translating and reactivating the “old school” feelings archived in Hip-hop movements. Though a new Hip-hop dancer born in the 1990s may not know the history or particular cultural origins of a backspin move, s/he has improvised an understanding of its significance and the importance of including it in his or her repertoire of physical moves to evoke a communal feeling of nostalgia and street credibility. Jonzi D’s use of racially and ethnically diverse dancers to translate the similarities and differences between cultural specificities of blackness through Hip-hop gestures towards the polycultural blackness of Hip-hop. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to remember is to “to retain in, or recall to, the memory; to bear in mind, recollect (a thing, person, fact, event, saying, etc.)” (2008). 125 This usage of remember suggests an act of recall. What happens when particular histories are performed through the exchange of embodied cultural practices? The body participates in acts of remembering, or recollecting facts and events. In Hip-hop dance, gestures are learned through a process of embodied practice. Thus, the history of Hip-hop dance language is contained in each gesture 125 Oxford English Dictionary on line, 2008. http://dictionary.oed.com/learning. Accessed 16 September 2008. 270 and can be recalled through dance practice. The ability to read these histories and translate them effectively occurs based of the dancer’s skills, the choreographer’s ability to translate between cultural experiences and guide his or her dancers to the larger meaning of the performance. To hyphenate the word “re-member” indicates an act of re-call. However, the hyphenated definition changes the meaning and includes the process of connecting thoughts or experiences. It also, as Toni Morrison reminds us, allows us to reassemble the past and present it in a way that makes connections across space and time that permits the history of the past to inform new choices in the present, thus giving agency in the process. To re-member is “to put together again or to supply with a new member” (Oxford 2008). Consequently, I use the process of re-membering in Hip-hop dance to define the process of re-collecting and connecting the diverse experiences that a dancer encounters through the body by performing a particular dance gesture that has its own history and memory. When, for example, an Asian dancer from London performs an African American Hip-hop move his Asian body is read as presenting another history not associated with the gestures s/he performs. The Asian dancer presents multiple histories, his/her relationship to blackness, to Britishness and to Hip-hop. Yet, his or her embodiment of these gestures suggests a performative relationship to the subjugation of African Americans that are always already contained in the history of the gesture. The dancer’s body can never escape the history of the gesture s/he performs, yet his or her performance contributes new understandings of how blackness associated with African American culture can 271 influence and affect the life experiences of other racial and ethnic groups. As choreographers bring together diverse gestures and embodied narratives together, they are in fact using bodies to re-write perspectives. In dance, this process happens as the choreographer guides the dancer to use his or her body as a vehicle to explore dance language. I theorize (re)membering as a physical and emotional process whereby the dancers inhabit the past and present of particular Hip-hop dance moves and gestures through processes of practiced improvisation. As is the case in most acts of improvisation, one has to remember both physically and mentally, particular embodied experiences and have the capacity to recall them in a spontaneous moment. I argue here that Hip-hop dance moves are a repertoire (Taylor 2003) of cultural practices complicated by notions of race, ethnicity and class. If we look at dance generally, we can easily see how particular racial and ethnic groups have used dance to respond to and suggest new life chances. Diana Taylor argues the repertoire “enacts embodied memory: performance, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing--in short all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge”(20). So then, what happens when diverse groups across time and space exchange and embody these gestures without pretext and context to their use, creation and meaning? What types of relationships are enabled and foreclosed as a result of these performances and reenactments? In “TAG” we see these connections and disconnections between embodied translations as dancers struggle to articulate their understandings of Hip-hop. 272 To (re)member Hip-hop is to connect the samples from diverse racial and ethnic groups that have contributed to Hip-hop’s multicentricity and to represent them through the performance. The fact that in Hip-hop dance diverse bodies are unified in their performance of “blackness” through dance around the world represents how blackness in Hip-hop is more than a racial identity. It is a set of emotions, behaviors, experiences and ideas that be traced to a particular social experience captured in Hip-hop moves and thus can be reactivated through performance. Section 3- Jonzi D and Rennie Harris – (Re) Membering African Americanness through Hip-hop Dance Jonzi D and Rennie Harris are two of the most prolific choreographers in Hip-hop dance. Both wear dreds, are black, middle aged men engaged with Hip-hop as an African American art form. However, by comparing their intentions in engaging Hip-hop, we are able to discover spaces of décalage, or what is missing in translation when non-African American artists perform Hip-hop’s blackness. Jonzi D is dedicated to creating outlets for dancers around the world to learn Hip-hop dance and to articulate their experiences within it. Rennie Harris’s engagement with Hip- hop dance explores it as an African American cultural practice. These subtleties reveal how non-African American performers often miss important moments of “feeling” that escape their lived experiences and cannot be incorporated into their performance of a Hip-hop gesture. 273 As an Afro-British choreographer and dancer who has toured Europe, Africa and the United States performing Hip-hop dance, Jonzi D has been instrumental in bringing Hip-hop Dance Theater into London’s more “classically” based dance houses. Rennie Harris is an African American choreographer and dancer who is at the forefront of the Hip-hop Dance Theater movement in the United States and has also toured Europe performing Hip-hop. Jonzi D has a long-term residency at The Sadler’s Wells Theater, a premier dance theater in London. Rennie Harris is the founder of the troupe Puremovement, an African American Hip-hop dance company in Philadelphia. Both Hip-hop choreographers see Hip-hop Dance as a unique art with its own dance vocabulary and want to preserve its history. What separates these two choreographers are their views on how Hip-hop dance is learned and experienced by dancers and what Hip-hop dance is within the larger scope of dance practices around the world. Both colleagues see the intersection of Hip-hop with other dance forms. Jonzi D’s philosophy is to teach and perform Hip-hop as a vehicle of cross- cultural exchange. Rennie Harris is committed to teaching and performing Hip-hop as an act of archiving African American culture. Jonzi D identifies Hip-hop as a “Black American” dance, as does Rennie Harris. However, Harris believes that one’s lived experiences as an African American subject greatly informs the translation and performance of the dance. Harris’ philosophy underlies the “spiritual” component of Hip-hop dance that is often dismissed in dance theory and suggests a visceral quality that speaks to the “feeling” that cannot be translated in Hip-hop dance practice that 274 are often overlooked in dance studies. Here I explore how their different philosophies of choreography intersect and disconnect in order to understand how specific translations of blackness are articulated as African Americanness in Hip- hop. Jonzi D’s Choreography in “TAG”: Dancing African Americanness in Hip-hop When I spoke with Jonzi about the concept for “TAG” he stated that he wanted to reflect the diversity within Hip-hop, he argued London has a particular Hip-hop voice despite the dominant American representation in Hip-hop music and culture. For Jonzi D, Hip-hop is a place where one can experiment creatively with styles and images in order to construct an image that communicates the identity you want to portray at a particular moment using Hip-hop as a tool. When asked about his positions on Hip-hop and blackness, Jonzi D argues: We have to be careful about what we are saying is “black” because of the many black people throughout the African Diaspora and Africa. But if we are talking about Hip-hop, there is a very specific ‘Black American’ thing that we all imitate a bit. Like ‘you know what I’m sayin’ and the moves and everything you know….we all talk it …but Jamaicans, Indians, whites—we all relate to it.” 126 In defining Hip-hop Theater, Jonzi D mostly referenced African American History in Hip-hop, mentioning old school American Hip-hop references and controversies. Yet, he was more interested in how Hip-hop is being used as a site of cross-racial and ethnic connection for groups that find social connections through ideas of “American” blackness. Jonzi D’s ability to translate the “blackness” of Hip- hop as a “polycultural” site of cross-cultural exchange specifically recognizes 126 Jonzi D. “Personal discussion with Jonzi D” Holiday Inn, London, February 2006. 275 African American cultural expression in Hip-hop. The specificity of Hip-hop’s blackness becomes a polycultural site of cultural exchange because of the identification diverse groups have with anti-establishment ideals expressed in Hip- hop. For example, in “TAG” Jonzi D uses the dancers to create a cipher on stage whereby the dancers stage a freestyle battle. Each dancer enters into the cipher to perform an improvised routine. Nathan Geering, a twenty-something black British dancer, is well versed in old school toprocking and new school krumping. He confidently presents a comfort with the gestures that suggests he has danced them hundreds of times before. Yet, when he enters the cipher and begins to break, he engages in some power moves in which many of his back spins end with his feet positioned in the air in a “freeze” position. This move is usually applauded in American breaking circles because of its difficulty and for the length of time the dancer is able to keep his feet in the air. I was shocked that not only was I the only audience member to translate this move and initiate a clap, but that the dancer did not pause in the break and wait for this acknowledgement by the audience. In Hip- hop dance battles, a dancer and his or her crew take turns performing a series of “old school” and “new school” Hip-hop moves, which operate as a call to their competitors to acknowledge the history of Hip-hop. If the opposing crew does not have a repertoire of moves from this particular historical moment in Hip-hop dance, they may be booed or dismissed by the audience. Certain gestures, such as power moves, are a call to the audience to clap and for the dancer to wait in the break for the acknowledgment. This is one example of 276 the translating an “old school” Hip-hop where the dancer’s lack of knowledge about the culture of the gesture allowed him to miss an important moment in the performance and in the choreography. When speaking to Jonzi D about the cipher and his choreography, he informed me that he created the context for the moves by giving the dancers the story and the emotions that he wants conveyed to the audience. He then allows the dancers to improvise, changing their moves from show to show. However, Jonzi D acknowledged that the audiences rarely clap and cannot recreate any experiences from more realistic ciphers that occur on the street, because they have not experienced them for the most part. Because the moves are never the same twice, perhaps this is not a correction that Jonzi D can make from performance to performance as he cannot control the audience. Much of the emotion in Hip-hop dance must be obtained through connections to the dance language and how it is used. Often these emotions are learned through embodied translation. While Geering and another black dancer in “TAG” are connected to the larger history of black dance performance in the African Diaspora, they do not automatically have fluency in the specificity of different ethnic and national codes of dance, such as African American dance language and its larger connection to Hip-hop dance. Jonzi D’s use of an elaborate set that included sculpture and video may have been used to compensate for the limited cultural fluency his audience and dancers have of Hip-hop’s history. Jonzi D’s ‘word for word’ translation of Hip-hop reflects the needs of the audience. Perhaps this is a limitation translating social dances for concert venues. 277 What Jonzi D and the dancers in “TAG” cannot account for in their performance are the ways in which their bodies communicate with the audience as texts. Hip-hop dance as a “multicultural” and “American“ art form often attempts to distance itself from its association with African Americanness, because to some this dialectic between Hip-hop and blackness appears to limit its possibility to be read as international and polycultural. If Hip-hop is “polycultural” and is always already produced through a hybrid blackness emanating from African American cultural experiences, then the way Hip-hop is sampled in the United States in all facets of popular culture suggest that it always maintains its blackness, even when non-black consumers borrow, consume and embody it through Hip-hop. However, African Americans respond in kind to cultural commodification by continuing to sample and remix other cultural contributions of other groups under the sign of Hip-hop and African Americanness. The difference between African American sampling and other racial and ethnic minorities that sample from Hip-hop may be that in most instances, African Americans blatantly reference the sources that they sample from, almost as a form of status—to express their cross-cultural knowledge, while other groups sample a generic “Hip-hop” without citing African American culture as the reference point. The references to a specific African Americanness in Hip-hop as a site against which dancers validate their dance performances allows for Hip-hop to exist as black, polycultural, and multicentric because it contains all of these relationships to of blackness by both black and non-black consumers and artists. 278 Often dancers are so fluent that African American audience members may assume the dancers to be from the United States and/ or connected to African American culture racially, socially or culturally outside of Hip-hop. Angela Ards argues that Blackness can be defined in multiple ways and must be understood within specific social, historical and cultural contexts to effectively access the meaning of how cultural practices can ultimately be understood. If we can envision Blackness as a set of cultural practices that can have multiple idiomatic translations across national and ethnic lines, then African Americanness, as articulated in Hip- hop, is but one of many “blacknesses” that describes not only racial identity, but also cultural identity: Of course, words in one language don't always have exact equivalents in another. Take "Blackness," for example. There are as many varied and contested ways to describe Black racial identity in English (Black, Negro, nigger, colored) as there are in French (noir, negre, homme de coleur, bon neg), with no term capturing all the shades of meaning of another. In other words, an ineffable "something" is always lost in the translation. 127 Ards comments specifically reference Brent Hayes Edwards’ concept of décalage, or what is lost in translation within blackness across national lines. Few b- boys and b-girl enter into Hip-hop dance without understanding the fundamentals of Hip-hop dance language, such as popping and locking. However, this knowledge is not learned from reading histories of Hip-hop dance. The translation of African American Hip-hop gestures by non-African American dancers is mediated by the 127 Ards, Angela. The Harlem Renaissance and Black Transnational Culture: The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Nationalism By Brent Hayes Edwards. The Crisis. July/August 2003. 279 racial, ethnic and national identities of the performers. Bodies are also texts that can be read in performance and bring with them particular histories. Even regional specificities that can be translated into the dance that indicate specificity to local Hip-hop movements, such as krumping, 128 are now being mastered by dancers around the world because of the global circulation of local African American Hip- hop dance circulates the world via music videos. Corporeal transmission in dance is much like an oral history except the body is used in corporeal histories instead of the voice. For example, a Korean youth who travels to Oakland may learn a krump move in a cipher. He then takes the move to Korea and (re) members it though his body and passes it on to other Korean youth who learn it; perhaps even adding new nuances to the gesture. This process of corporeal transmission and remembering is important to sampling from the embodied gestures of Hip-hop. By identifying with the social experience of African American subjects articulated in Hip-hop narratives and dance moves, many British youth are able to sample from African American ideas of self-expression. As dancers become more fluent in Hip-hop dance language, they begin to viscerally identify many of the social experiences that produce the moves that are embedded in Hip-hop gestures. Popping can be read as representative of breaking out of social constrictions and locking as representative of showboating 128 Krumping -is a radical form of Hip-hop that began in Oakland, California in the early 200s. The movements are largely improvisational and have a frenetic feel that are linked to African ritual tribal dances and Native American trance dances. Many dancers look possessed as they dance off of the beat in the break of the music. David La Chapelle made a documentary film chronicling this dance tradition 2000 film Rize. Clowning may use face paint and is also associated with freestyle-, frenetic movements danced to hip-hop beats. The language of both dance forms includes processes of bodily communication whereby dancers engage in battles and call to one another with gestures to solicit responses. 280 and having a good time despite living in depressed social states. Once these meaning are excavated, dancers can perform more organic and visceral interpretations of Hip- hop’s blackness that link them to the experiences of African Americans and also suggest possibilities for cross-racial, ethnic and national coalitions. Jonzi D’s improvisational process as a choreographer and director allowed the dancers to use their bodies to translate and remix Hip-hop’s blackness on stage, yet many of the dancers missed the important social meanings contained by the gestures, even when imported into the British social contexts. Like new actors learning Shakespeare, it becomes very difficult to sit through a performance of a text when you are clear as an audience member that the actor does not truly understand the intention and meaning of a line, even when they deliver it in a very convincing manner. The dancers in “TAG” vacillated from being deeply engaged with the gestures or just walking thorough them with little corporeal understanding about the feelings or emotions a particular gesture conveys, even when they executed the moves to perfection. Jonzi D, like a translator, was able to use dancers to translate between American Hip-hop and British Hip-hop, yet the lack of fluency of many of the dancers’ movements revealed sampling of experiences from other cultures without always understanding the context. The uniqueness about British Hip-hop lies in the capacity of the artist to use the performative codes of African Americanness to articulate their personal and collective stories under the sign of Hip-hop. What is emerging is a new dance language that while rooted in African Americanness, 281 creates a hybrid relationship that stresses the multicentric possibilities of Hip-hop’s blackness. Conversely, there is great synergy between the styles of Jonzi D and Rennie Harris as choreographers. Rennie Harris’ dance company Puremovement, is also focused on the complexity of the “blackness” of Hip-hop. Harris founded his dance company in 1992, in hope of preserving the Hip-hop culture through dance workshops and mentoring similar to Jonzi D’s The Surgery, a workshop for emerging Hip-hop dancers that provides a space to learn and critique Hip-hop dance. Harris’ IIadelph Festival which began in1999 is the longest running Hip-hop dance festival in the United States and often attracts many of America’s Hip-hop dance pioneers. While Jonzi D uses dancers of all races to indicate the reach and complexity of Hip-hop’s influence, Harris instead privileges the use of African American dancers and explores other dance genres and their translation through the blackness of Hip-hop. According to his website the company is committed to providing the audiences with “a sincere view of the essence and spirit of hip-hop rather than the commercially exploited stereotypes portrayed by the media” (Harris 2008). Unlike Jonzi D, Harris is not classically trained and has been a street dancer his entire life. He was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Center at the age of fourteen to teach “stepping” a Philadelphia based dance which also has various translations in Chicago, Detroit and Georgia. Both Jonzi D and Rennie Harris reiterate a fundamental belief that Hip-hop ultimately expresses universal themes of struggle, adversity, social discontent, etc. 282 Harris’ dance piece “Rome and Jules,” reflects Hip-hop’s sampled aesthetic as the choreographer remixes several interpretations of Romeo and Juliet to articulate his version of the story. Sampling from West Side Story and Baz Luhrman’s 1996 film adaptation of the Shakespeare play entitled Romeo + Juliet, which starred Leonardo De Caprio and Claire Danes, Harris creates his own remixed version of the Shakespeare classic, translating previous adaptations into Hip-hop dance language. The choreographer uses the West Side Story adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that focused on tensions between rival gangs, “The Jets” and “The Sharks,” to inform his translations of “family” as relationships between rival African American street gangs. Harris sampled from these translations of the original Shakespeare text to explore how non-black theatrical forms have influenced African American cultural practices. Using Hip-hop English to rename the feuding families in Romeo and Juliet in Hip-hop style, the Montagues are remixed by Harris to become the African American gang '' The Monster Qs'' and the Capulets become ''The Caps.'' Harris samples from Hip-hop styles of self-adornment associated with “old school” and “new school” Hip-hop clothing and its relationship to the gestures performed. Rome and the "Monster Q's" are dressed in baggy black street clothes and dance representing more contemporary, Hip-hop styles. Tybalt and the "Caps" (the "Capulets") are dressed in red outfits that cite specific “old-school” Hip-hop fashion 283 such as Adidas warm-ups 129 that have become a part of Hip-hop visual and fashion iconography. The Caps break in ciphers and perform backspins and powermoves in old school b-boy styles. The color of the clothing can also be read as representing gang color feuds in African American gangs in the United States. The two gangs clash because Rome has been seen with Tybalt's woman Jewels (Juliet). This specific choice to make Juliet the center of the feud between gang members also mirrors Hip- hop rivalries in the United States between “East Coast” and “West Coast” rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. Both rappers were murdered, and many link their deaths to this rivalry between “crews.” In Romeo and Jewels, Harris makes a connection to this history in Hip-hop by focusing in the rivalry between the men leaving the female character “Jewels” as an invisible object of their desire. The invisibility of “Jewels” can be read in multiple ways. In one way, her absence can be understood to reinscribe the misogyny in Hip-hop and the silencing of African American women. In another way, Harris’ choice to focus on male relationships and gang culture could be used by the choreographer to suggest the tensions within African American male relationships and their contentious relationships with African American women reflected in Hip-hop narratives and iconography. At one point in the production, the character “Rome” speaks to “Jewels”: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” 129 Adidas warm-up suits have become a part of African American Hip-hop history due to their association with the performances of “old school” rap groups such as Run DMC who made these two-piece suits famous by wearing them in many of their concert performances. The African American rappers resignified their usage from being “track suits” used for exercise to be associated with Hip-hop performance. Run DMC were one of the first Hip-hop acts in American history to receive an endorsement deal from a major retailer because so many young people imitated their style. 284 quoting the original Shakespeare text, yet she is never seen. Harris uses downrock moves,(fast hand and footwork that shifts the body ) on the floor to simulate sex between “Rome” and “Jewels,” which further objectifies the female presence. However, this creative choice to make the female character invisible can be read to represent her integral relationship to shaping masculinity and the disconnections between African American men and women. Much of the foul language Harris asks his dancers to use to punctuate the dancing in Rome and Jewels reflects conversations between African American men about their frustrations with women in their inner circles as well the ways they articulate their struggles as men, irrespective of women. However, despite these sexist undercurrents, Harris appropriates Shakespeare’s story and remixes it as one that focuses on the coming of age of African American men. The story unfolds on the “streets” which represent the site where many African American men come of age and define their place in the world. Rome’s journey to becoming a man is plagued by violence, poverty and uncertainty about what his life chances are. By claiming territory as a gang member or the right to love, he finds agency, even if he is surrounded by factors that speak to his demise. Like “TAG,” Harris uses video projection to create vivid backdrops of the streets. Harris, unlike Jonzi D, mixes in more verbal narrative to complement the dance narrative, thus we are able to connect Rome’s journey to the images on the screen and the dance moves instead of the images operating separately from the whole of the production. 285 The “Caps” and Monster Qs” creep about the streets. Their bodies appear like the disjointed images that slither about seeking out the enemy hiding in the shadows and second guessing every step as they look over their shoulders to locate their target. Rome delivers a monologue that speaks to his life chances as a product of the street. Citing preachers, war heroes, and pimps, Rome chooses his gang as his “family” and the core of his identity. His world-view is shaped by his experiences in the streets, and gang life represents protection, comfort and brotherhood and perhaps even a surrogate family. The final dance sequence visually samples directly from scenes in the film West Side Story. Each gang dances, the gangs clash and then the individual dancers enter the breaking cipher to show their individual skills. The two women in the production dance as men and unsettle the hyper-masculine production. Mercutio dies in Rome's arms and Rome’s crew dances to show their anger over his death. Rome instructs his gang "Break him off” which translates from Hip-hop English to Standard American English as “Get them.” The dancers in red begin a forceful sequence of dance moves that include strong footwork, ensemble moves and even suicides. "O, I am fortune's fool" declares Rome, faithful to the original text, as he, too, falls to the ground. Harris’ ability to sample from Hip-hop verbal language and dance language and remix them with samples from Shakespeare’s original texts and film references, reveal his fluency in Hip-hop dance language and his ability to find the similarities and differences between these languages. 286 Finding African American experiences “within” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet means Harris is able to see the intersections of European and American theatrical forms specifically the ways that Shakespeare addresses class issues and his perspective of writes for the “common man.” Harris states "Shakespeare was and is the essence of hip-hop. The lyricists of today - the rappers - probably come closest to his dynamic of writing” (Herta 2001). 130 Harris’s perspective that the rhythm of Shakespeare’s writing is the “essence” of Hip-hop may be an attempt to “canonize” Hip-hop by showing the connections between African American working poor and working–class British identities. This gesture could be read as somewhat undermining Harris’ larger goal of preserving Hip-hop culture and its various expressions in Hip-hop dance as an integral part of the “American” experience, not one that must be validated against classical art forms. Harris also samples superficial translations of Shakespeare and reduces some of the complexity of the original plot and characterization in Romeo and Juliet, by sampling not from the original text, but copies made of copies. Focusing simply on the rivalry between the Capulets and the Montagues, can be read as reductive, however, Harris’ choice to focus on issues of masculinity and the struggles men have with socially prescribed roles of gender and class positions in society, is innovative. As far as the role of gender and the performative codes of femininity in the play, many read Juliet as a “damsel in distress” yet she is a powerful female character who is assertive and demanding. She knows exactly what she wants and what she is willing to sacrifice for it. However, 130 Huerta, Donald. “”Knowing the Culture: Interview with Rennie Harris.” Dance Umbrella News August, 2001 287 her voice is muted in Harris’ version. Yet, Harris argues his exploration of these various samples of Shakespeare’s work was more to indulge his own process as an artists and his interest in healing male relationships and sexist perceptions embedded in African American masculinity ( Harris 2001). However, Harris’ ability to translate the connections between Hip-hop street life and Shakespeare achieves exactly what “TAG” aimed to accomplish in identifying with African American culture in Hip-hop: that we are all connected through our difference and can learn through the exchange of cultural practices. As an audience member, I never separated the execution of these Hip-hop moves from the bodies of the dancers that performed them. In addition, the connections between the narratives being danced with the bodies of the performers were synthesized so that I could read the performance as a narrative and not a “start and stop” performance of individual Hip-hop dance moves connected by music and light transitions that occurred often in “TAG.” I was immersed in the dancers’ abilities to use their bodies to translate the gestures they performed to advance the story. Many of these non-verbal codes embedded in Hip-hop dance gestures were never fully explored in “TAG.” For example, instead of “battle” moves being used to demonstrate ability as they were in “TAG”, In “Rome and Jewels,” they are used as narrative tools that advance the story and successfully portray the anger and rage of rival gang members. The performers also use the moves within their original context in Hip-hop dance history as many popping, locking, toprocking, downlocking and freeze moves 288 continue to be used in dance battles. Harris argues “rappers and lyricists, hip-hop poets of this generation, probably owe something to Shakespeare's writings and complexity as much as any poet today” (2006). In “Rome and Jewels” dancers use verbal texts that sample Shakespeare and remix them using Hip-hop English to break the fourth wall and to present asides to the audience about the story, much in the way that a chorus operates in classical drama. This call and response component of Hip- hop Theater is reiterated her in Hip-hop Dance Theater making a specific point to dismiss concert dance styles that may object to this call and response between the dancers and the audience that are a part of Hip-hop. Because the dancers in “Rome and Jewels” were predominantly African American and fluent in Hip-hop dance language, they could afford to concentrate on embodying the nuances of the narrative of the work and not simply the perfection of movements. Comparatively, Jonzi D ‘s dancers are still trying to prove their fluency in various Hip-hop moves and do not always connect to the dance practice as a whole, but as separate parts. Harris’ use of Shakespeare reflects Hip-hop’s ability to borrow from and be inspired by other cultures yet use these cultural samples to further explore experiences that reflect African American subjectivity. Jonzi D was able to use his dancer’s diversity to represent the cultural sample within Hip-hop and its impact on different racial and ethnic groups in London. As Hip-hop continues to influence artistic practices, we will see more nuanced translations that personalize a non-African American’s connection to Hip- hop dance and their personal relationship to blackness that is more visceral and 289 emotional. We will see more and more fluent translations of African Americanness in Hip-hop by non -African American artists reflecting the cross-racial and ethnic collaborations that Hip-hop enables through dance in the United States and in the UK. In discussing the recent phenomenon of dancers around the world learning Hip- hop dance moves, Rennie Harris observes: You may know the movement, but not the culture. I would never approach modern dance without trying to understand it. But black culture always gets kicked into this thing of entertaining. It's approached as a commodity, without understanding the history. People forget that the true foundations of hip-hop are an extension of traditional culture in the States. The understanding of it is different between the US and Europe… (Huerta 2001) We can also read Rennie Harris’ sampling of Shakespeare and its adaptations as his attempt to understand European cultural traditions and history. By making connections between African American life and Shakespeare, Harris addresses the recycling of knowledge and its translation in various mediums. He does not sample Shakespeare as a commodity, but explores the story and his dancers’ relationships to it. “Rome and Jewels” won a “Bessie Award” in 2001, perhaps because Harris’s work suggests the impact of Shakespeare on many racial and ethnic groups who may not typically see themselves as having a relationship to classical texts. Hip-hop’s multicentricity allows for these types of social improvisations to occur. For Harris, what cannot be translated in performance is lost, and what can is incorporated into African Americanness through Hip-hop. 290 Conclusion Both Jonzi D and Rennie Harris’ different approaches to translating the racial, ethnic and national specificities of Hip-hop’s dance language are important contributions to the evolving aesthetic of Hip-hop Theater and performance. Both artists (re)member the multiple racial, ethnic and national contributions that are dynamic within Hip-hop that have shaped and are continually being shaped by African American articulations of blackness. We must understand the impact of African American cultural production on global culture. It should be recognized as having impacted artistic perspectives across racial, ethnic, gender and national lines. By identifying the particularity of African American culture as a dominant articulation of Hip-hop music and culture, I am indeed essentializing blackness. However, I identify the “essential” in order to determine why specifically African American translations of blackness are used to authenticate Hip-hop performance. I am not simply claiming “origins” but enabling new possibilities for understanding the lasting impact of African American cultural production on the artistic practices of non-African Americans around the world. Moreover, by examining this specific articulation of blackness, we can also see the ways that other racial and ethnic groups learn from one another and borrow strategies of articulation. Linking African American particularity to the dominant circulation of Hip-hop music and culture enables new imaginings of blackness as engaged and performed by non-African American people. Just as the Harlem Renaissance inspired other blacks in France and the Caribbean to create art movements inspired by jazz and African American 291 culture, Hip-hop is inspiring artists around the world and influence their social and artistic world-views. Documenting this influence is essential to further our understanding of how cultural practices are exchanged , translated and reconfigured through acts of performance. By (re)membering Hip-hop’s cultural history and its ability to serve as a site that facilitates cross-racial and ethnic exchanges, the choreographers and dancers in these productions can rewrite and remix the wrongs of past appropriations and thefts by acknowledging the polycultural samples within African Americanness and Hip- hop. By sampling from blackness, diverse groups borrow from the social experiences that produce black subjectivity in the United States and use them to develop their social identifications with Hip-hop. Perhaps through these embodied acts of (re)membering, we can begin to understand the importance of African American cultural practices and the creativity of African Diasporic people within the larger scope of global popular culture. Perhaps then we can begin to think through the ways that identifications with blackness by people across racial, ethnic, gender, class and national lines can enable new possibilities to imagine and improvise the possibilities for better life chances. If we can isolate the cultural and artistic impact of African Americans in Hip-hop on the artistic practices of non-African Americans perhaps we will locate clues as to how other oppressed groups, those marginalized by race, ethnicity, gender, class, and/or sexuality, can sample and remix their limited resources with those that inspire them to make a way out of no way. 292 Chapter Five: (Re) Imagining Hip-hop- Performing African Americanness in American Popular Culture For much of the last century the burden of being Black in America was the burden of a systematic denial of human and constitutional rights and equal economic opportunity. It was also a century in which much of what American sold to the world as uniquely American in character—music, dance, fashion, humor, spirituality, grassroots politics, slang, literature and sports—was uniquely African-American in origin, conception, and inspiration (Greg Tate, Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, New York: Broadway Books, 2003, p. 3). Will I. Am was instrumental in helping galvanize youth engaged with Hip- hop across racial, ethnic and class lines to vote for African American presidential candidate Barack Obama, who was elected the first African American President of the United States on November 4 th 2008. Will I. Am composed Hip-hop music to Obama’s speech delivered after winning the New Hampshire primary, Tuesday, January 8th, 2008. In the speech, Obama used the phrase “Yes We Can” referring to his belief that all Americans, despite race, ethnicity, class or sexual preference could work together for the greater good of the country by seeking social change. Moved by Obama’s speech,Will I Am created a Hip-hop song entitled “Yes We Can.” The song was a remix of sampled sound bites from Obama’s speech, the singing and spoken word voices of several of the performer/producer’s celebrity friends of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, reciting parts of Obama’s speech all 293 remixed with a Hip-hop inspired melody. The producer documented the process of creating the song and created a video that he posted on YouTube, urging millions of people across racial and ethnic lines to vote for change. 131 According to the Huffington Post on August 28, 2008, the video received over a million hits on YouTube after being posted for five days. The power of Hip-hop to influence social change was undeniable. Will. I Am used his multi-racial and ethnic Hip-hop fan base to identify with the multicentric possibilities of blackness and what Hip-hop has the potential to represent in the United States. Remixing Hip-hop inspired music, the words of Barack Obama and the images and voices of celebrities who represented the diversity of American people, Will. I. Am saw how Hip-hop and Obama’s blackness, were articulated differently, yet had the potential to re-imagine America as a place that could potentially represent the interests of people across intersecting categories of difference. The African Americanness associated with Hip-hop music and culture represents possibilities for social change in the United States. However, we must consider how identifications with blackness and African American culture by diverse racial and ethnic groups revise previous understandings of the term multicultural. “Multicultural” models that imply that our different cultures are monolithic and exist without being influenced by other racial and ethnic groups are outdated. They do not account for the polycultural contributions that exist in the cultural production of all racial and ethnic groups or for the cross-racial and ethnic exchanges that exist in our 131 "Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'". YouTube.com. 18 March 2008. Barackobama.com. 6 November 2008 <www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU>. 294 everyday interactions with one another. As Robin D.G. Kelley has posited, “black culture is not the secret root of all American popular cultures, nor has it remained pure and unaltered, nor can it be reduced to the cultural/racial binaries of African/European” (2003). By acknowledging the impact of black culture articulated by African Americans on American popular culture, we simply give credit to the ways that one group of Americans have influenced our lives and begin to imagine the ‘American’ popular culture not as “white” but as a remixed expression of American subjectivity articulated by groups of racial, ethnic, class, gender and sexual orientations who all want to be fully recognized beyond the hyphens that distinguish their differences from the importance of their contributions to American society. The performances in this study suggest that Hip-hop music and culture represent African American cultural production and the accomplishments that African Americans have made to forge a cultural presence within the limits imposed upon them because of their blackness in the United States. Hip-hop also represents a site for many non-African Americans to re-imagine new ways to articulate their subjectivity outside socially imposed stereotypes and to use their engagements with Hip-hop to inspire cross-racial and ethnic coalitions through their identification with blackness. However, “post-racial” idealism, the belief that out collective similarities outweigh our differences, is not without problems and concerns. The election of an African American president in the United States will make it more difficult for 295 African American men and women who experience racism to make claims of inequality. African Americans who do not have Ivy League educations, are not a part of the “talented tenth,” that do not claims to any traceable cultural roots outside of slavery, will inevitably, arrive at a crossroads. This crossroads consists of unforgivable atrocities of the past of American history and the present hopes of a new generation. We must consider that the future Obama represents for race relations and healing the wounds of racism that continue to plague the lives of African American and all racial minorities in the United States, who desire to be acknowledged as full citizens without the need to qualify their racial and/or ethnic backgrounds before the nationality “American.” At the same time, because African Americans and their cultural production have been absorbed under the sign of “America,” yet continuously ignored as having shaped ideals of American culture, African Americans will continue to make claims for their cultural productions to be acknowledged. The hopes of an idealistic Hip- hop generation, the grim realities of racial and ethnic inequality that still plague the present of black, Asian Latino, Native American and other minority groups in the United States and a new African American world leader suggest that social change can occur as contradictions have the possibility of being recognized and potentially reconciled in some capacity. Hip-hop’s ability to unite diverse racial and ethnic groups and an African American President cannot undo the fact that that race, ethnicity and gender shape the disparities between relationships of power on a daily basis. Hip-hop and Obama represent multicentric blackness and the capacity to be 296 both “black” and “multicultural” which attracts diverse racial, ethnic and national groups to identify as representing possibilities for identifying moments of unity within categories of difference. Hip-hop’s potential to be understood simultaneously as both “black and “multicultural” serves many African Americans who feel a sense of pride to know that their cultural experiences have impacted people around the world. Many American youth perhaps identify with Hip-hop because it its global success validates their experiences. However, Hip-hop’s dominant cultural producers are African American men. Drawing a parallel between Hip-hop and larger socio-economic system of contradictions in the United States reveals that as a black man can be President, the same man could also be racially profiled and jailed for driving after dark without security in a white neighborhood in Washington, D.C. For the first time in American history, blackness in its multiple and conflicting translations, may be openly recognized as a crucial part of the foundation of American popular culture. As Greg Tate alerts us, black American culture has always been a vital part of American popular culture however, the contributions by African Americans have often been appropriated as ‘American’ without giving African Americans the proper credit. The global reception of Hip-hop already indicates that many view African American culture as the centerpiece of “American” cultural production. The recent affection citizens around the world expressed for Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency in the United States reflects a larger desire of 297 people around the world who want to change the way we perceive difference and its ability to shape social, political and artistic experiences. Theater and performance have the capacity to impart new understandings to audiences of racial and cultural differences. Like DJs who sample, the artists in this study all remix their lived experiences and engagements with Hip-hop which in turn shape Hip-hop music and culture. When non-African American artists engage specific performative codes of blackness such as language and physical gesture they in turn create new imaginings of blackness that re-contextualize parts of African American life. Some performances rely on acts of racial mimicry and/or cultural appropriation while other performances hope to transgress the limitations of whiteness, Jewishness, Asianness and blackness. By remixing their lived experiences as non-African Americans with carefully selected articulations of blackness that are African American, all of the artists in this study desire to be identified as “Hip-hop.” The process of musical sampling has been used in this dissertation as a heuristic for understanding how culture is exchanged and translated among racial and ethnic groups using the body and voice in performance. Perhaps Hip-hop Theater and Performance’s sampling of African Americanness will allow for a more complex readings of blackness generally and its relationship to Hip-hop. Hip-hop Theater and Performance, both by African American and non-African American artists, can be read as a site to examine performance practices that privileges African American aesthetics in theater and performance. When African American Hip-hop DJs used the sample as a way to 298 create new music out of existing sounds in the beginning stages of Hip-hop, they participated in a greater tradition of African American improvisation and re- contextualization in the everyday cultural life of black Americans. Hip-hop, like other black American art forms, has been absorbed into the mainstream of American popular culture as a representation of “multicultural” America without consideration for what the simultaneous presence and invisibility of blackness means within larger local and global contexts. In each chapter, I have used the work of specific artists to demonstrate how particular performative codes of blackness linked to African American cultural practices are used to validate their Hip-hop performances. Though many critics such as Susan Gubar (2000) Jonathan Kalb (2001) 132 have argued that artists such as Danny Hoch are racial mimics, I feel that Hoch’s works offer analysis of cross-racial and ethnic exchanges through Hip-hop, even though they cross social boundaries of what is politically correct. For example, Hoch follows in line with many Jewish American performers such as Lenny Bruce and Sandra Bernhardt whose “insider” relationship to the African American community and fluency in intra-racial cultural codes of African American have given them a “ghetto” pass to use the “N” word with little backlash from African Americans. Many of these artists make sure to construct a Pirandellian “show-within-a show,” presenting a white character that pokes fun at other whites who are less fluent in translating between the discourses of African American and Jewish American communities. They assert the simultaneity of their Jewish identity which gives them 132 Kalb, Jonathan. Documentary Solo Performance: The Politics of the Mirrored Self Theater - Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2001, pp. 13-29 299 access to whiteness and to the status of the oppressed. These are not deliberate acts of racial impersonation or appropriation as earlier studies by Roediger (2003) and Kitwana (2003) have argued, though points of pleasure and of transgression are present in all of the performances studied here. However, despite the artists’ intention the performances can still operate as negative impersonations and appropriations of blackness. Chapter One’s exploration of sampling as form of theatrical improvisation offers improvisational practices in Hip-hop Theater and performance as strategies for social change. I linked sampling in music to the actor’s improvised process of selecting particular codes of behavior, physical costumes, language, hairstyles, etc to create a character in performance. Many actors and performers portray roles that are racially and ethnically different than their lived racial identity. In order to portray a character effectively, they must study and translate these codes in performance as they relate to the role they are attempting to present. When artists sample, they participate in an improvisational process of meaning making whereby they perform the effect of African Americanness by utilizing codes that audiences recognize and associate with African American subjectivity in Hip-hop. Therefore, when we see a performer use gestures, clothing and hairstyles associated with African American Hip-hoppers performed by artists that are not African American, we immediately connect the performance to blackness, even when a black body is not present. Chapter Two’s discussion of Danny Hoch’s “talkin’ and actin’” black by sampling the Hip-hop language and stereotypes enables us to see how many white 300 performers envision Hip-hop as a space to disarticulate their white bodies from social histories of white hegemony that include but are not limited to slavery, blackface minstrelsy, and acts of anti-black racism. These types of performances span popular culture in theater, film and television outlets. Examples include performances by Warren Beatty in Bulworth (1998), Jamie Kennedy in Malibu’s Most Wanted (2003) Steve Martin in Bringing Down the House (2005) and Robert Downey, Jr. in an Academy Award nominated performance of a “black” actor in Tropic Thunder (2008). All of these examples feature performances that engage blackness and African American culture through Hip-hop. Performances of blackness by white artists also transcend U.S. borders: British actor Sasha Baron Cohen’s immensely popular television show Da’ Ali G Show, retooled for American audiences on HBO from 2003-2005, featured a white rapper “Ali G” who used African American English and Hip-hop slang to construct a character based in black racial stereotypes. In France, the film Agathe Cléry (2008) directed by Etienne Chatiliez, recounts the story of a racist cosmetics executive who turns “black” overnight. Agathe Cléry embarks on a journey of self-discovery where she must right the wrongs of her racist viewpoints and suffer discrimination as a “black” woman in French corporate business. Equally important are the ways that other minority groups engage Hip-hop’s African Americanness through Hip-hop. Chapter Three’s exploration of Nikki S. Lee’ work in The Hip-hop Project and her sampling of styles of adornment of African American women in Hip-hop such as Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill gives us tools to identify how many non-African 301 American women are sampling from the looks of African American women in Hip- hop. However, many of the cultural innovations African American women bring to the fashion and entertainment industry are credited to a generic Hip-hop culture. Many new trends in fashion such as hair weaves, acrylic nails, colored contact lenses, etc, are often sampled from African American women’s experiences. Conversely, as we saw in the styles of self-adornment used by Hip-hop artist Lil’ Kim, many African American women could not survive without Asian imported hair weave products, the predominantly Asian nail care industry and hair color trends. Some of the latest trends in African American hairstyling industry are sampled from Asian influences such as Japanese Animé. Moreover, Lee’s The Hip-hop Project also suggests how African American and Asian, and Asian American cultural influences are sampled by white women in American popular culture. Pop artists Madonna to Gwen Stefani have sampled Japanese femininity as well as African American female styles of self-adornment in Hip-hop to articulate their subjectivity as female entertainers. However, Madonna and Stefani are given credit for the trends they set, not the Black and Asian women whose styles they sample. Additionally, Lee’s exploration of the “looks” of artists such as Lauryn Hill reflect how styles of self- adornment of African American women circulate in Hip-hop and impacting women around the world. These tensions and coalitions between African Americans, Asians and Asian Americans are complex sites of identity negotiation that have tremendous impact on Hip-hop and should be explored further. 302 Chapter Four’s exploration of Hip-hop dance language and its embodied translation by non-African American dancers inspire further discussion about how whites and other racial and ethnic minorities engage the performative codes of African Americanness in Hip-hop dance. Television and films in the United States such as MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew” reflect cross-racial, ethnic and international engagements with African American culture. 133 When MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew” launched in February 2007, the show became an instant hit for the network. In this reality series, dance “crews” from across the United States compete for a one hundred thousand dollar prize and the title “America’s Best Dance Crew.” Of the crews selected to appear on “America’s Best Dance Crew” only one crew was predominantly African American. In fact, the reality show’s first title winner in March 2008 was a crew called the JaboWokeeZ. The JaboWokeeZ, the California based-dance crew who ultimately won the competition, boasted members of Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Mexican and African American heritage. The diversity of this dance crew reveals the wide range of cultural influences embedded in Hip-hop music and culture in the United States since its inception. This representation of Hip-hop Dance signals a change in the way 133 “Americans’ Best Dance Crew’ is a Hip-hop based dance show that begins its second season on MTV in September 2008. The show has featured American dancers of diverse racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientations who have mastered Hip-hop dance styles. Many Hip-hop dance “purists” feel the show incorporates too many concert dance styles which diminished the legitimacy of it s a “Hip-hop” dance show. The show’s creator, Randy Jackson, is a music industry producer and a judge on the immensely popular reality Show “American Idol.” “How She Move”(2007) is a film produced by MTV directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid that chronicles an African American woman’s journey as a Hip-hop dancer. The film “Step Up” (2006) directed by Ann Fletcher follows a young white Hip-hop dancer whose engagement with Hip-hop dance gives him access to the “legitimate” concert dance world. 303 we understand Hip-hop and its association with blackness, African Americans and American popular culture. New Directions in Hip-hop Theater and Performance New directions in Hip-hop Theater and performance explore the multicentricity of Hip-hop’s blackness. Both African American and non-African American performers are identifying ways that identifications with Hip-hop’s African Americanness can enable cross-racial, ethnic, national exchanges in performance and also reconfigure other performance practices. Matt Sax’s solo performance Clay uses Hip-hop language to articulate his Jewish American experiences growing up in the suburbs of Westchester; not a fantastical black ghetto. In the Heights by Lin Manuel Miranda explores Latino experiences within New York’s Washington Heights using African American Hip-hop remixed with Latino music. The musical was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and won a Tony in 2008. The Hip-hop Theater ensemble “4ish” from The Netherlands connects theater, performance art and dance together using a thirteen member ensemble of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Perhaps Hip-hop’s influence on American and global popular culture is changing the ways that African American and non-African Americans understand the connectedness of their social positions and their relationship to power in ways that enable new conversations about race to take place. In music, African American artists such as the classical violin duet, Black Violin, are subverting notions that classical music is “white” music. The members of Black Violin are the artists Kev Marcus and Will B who are classically trained 304 violinists from Florida who met in middle school. They loved classical music and Hip-hop, trained in public school programs and decided to form a group. They were discovered on the television show Showtime at the Apollo in 2003 where they played their version of “classical” Hip-hop on violins. Not only have they subverted the stereotype that African Americans do not like or play classical music, but they also have attracted and inspired a whole new Hip-hop audience across racial and ethnic lines to play classical instruments. Another artist who is challenging and revising Hip-hop’s aesthetic by subverting stereotypes of classical music performance is Jewish artist Miri Ben Ari, a thirty-eight year old classical violinist from Israel. Ari also translates Hip-hop music and re-articulates it in a new form to be played on the violin. A Jewish immigrant to the United States, Ari is considered her generation’s “Hip-hop violinist” and has been featured on the music tracks of several top African American Hip-hop stars including Kanyé West and Jay Z. Though Black Violin and Miri Ben Ari have gained international exposure, they are still considered “underground” Hip-hop artists. The works of Danny Hoch, Nikki S. Lee and Jonzi D suggest non-African American identification with blackness and Hip-hop in the United States have the capacity to enable powerful cross-racial and ethnic coalitions and simultaneously have the possibility to further marginalize blacks. By borrowing from various sounds, performative codes of African American culture in Hip-hop, these artists mirror similar practices by Hip-hop DJs who use various sounds to create 305 conversations between the past and present of African American culture as well as the other sampled cultures used to articulate Hip-hop’s blackness. In the United States, whiteness and its multiple articulations by whites and non-whites was the “center” of identifications of success, prosperity and American identity. Because of Hip-hop’s global popularity, African Americanness can easily be read as the “center” of Hip-hop, yet is one of many existing articulations of blackness. The distinctive part of my study is my specific argument for the multicentricity of blackness. A multicentric blackness allows us the possibility to understand that African Americanness and its influence in Hip-hop can exist simultaneously with the other performances of blackness performed by non-African Americans engaged with Hip-hop. Aesthetic judgments aside, blackness contains the performances of non- African American artists as much as those by black subjects. Focusing specifically on the performance of blackness and its possibility of cross-racial and cultural translation, I identified non-African American performers engaging Hip-hop through their use of linguistic, physical and gestural codes that they identify as particularly African American articulations of blackness and Hip-hop. I highlighted how these codes and practices are used in artistic expression in theater, conceptual art and dance under the rubric of Hip-hop Theater and performance. Equally important is my argument that the work of non-African American Hip-hop performers should be counted as a performance of “blackness.” Historically, African American Theater and performance only considered performances of 306 blackness as those that were created and performed by African Americans. A performances of blackness, for example by the Afro-French rapper MC Solaar does not use the same performative codes of his African American colleagues, though he samples from African Americanness in his raps. A white Hip-hop artist such as Eminem can be said to also perform blackness through his engagement with performative codes of African Americanness in Hip-hop. Both of these non-African American artists identify with performative codes of blackness associated with African Americans to articulate their Hip-hop identities. If we situate Hip-hop Theater and performance within a continuum of African American Theater and performance practices, enacted by both black and non-black performers, then we can understand the impact and possibilities for cross- racial and ethnic coalitions that Hip-hop Theater and performance enables as well as the potential for parody, appropriation and commodification. The redemptive and denigrating possibilities of blackness and its performance by African American and non-African American subjects is most obvious in discussions of blackface minstrelsy and its residues that are present in the work of Hip-hop Theater, performance and dance artists. The history of African American cultural appropriation by whites precedes the phenomenon of Hip-hop’s shift from being marked as “black” music to “multicultural.” No matter what racial or ethnic group produces Hip-hop inspired art, codes of African Americanness that are always already a part of Hip-hop’s aesthetic and contribute to the new work being recognized as “Hip-hop.” However, we must consider how relationships of power 307 complicate these performances. With the ever increasing demand for Hip-hop inspired performances, television, film, art, etc., the performances discussed in this dissertation suggest that perhaps in the “centering” of African Americanness in American and global popular culture, we may also see a privileging of particular performances by non-African American subjects. One the one hand, the fact that non-African Americans are engaging African American culture through Hip-hop has the potential to inspire healing by acknowledging African Americans as significant cultural producers in the United States. On the other hand, by naming performative codes of African Americanness that dominates Hip-hop’s aesthetic practices as simple “Hip-hop” diminishes the impact of African Americans on shaping American popular culture. As Greg Tate observes, white America has used blackness as represented in African American cultural products for centuries, yet has “always tried to erase the Black presence form whatever Black thing they took a shine to: jazz, blues, rock and roll, doo-wop, swing dancing, corn rowing, anti-discrimination politics, attacking Dead Men, you name it” (3). Tate’s analysis of Hip-hop’s appropriation by mainstream American popular culture demonstrates the ways that many consumers of Hip-hop and artists inspired by the music, also attempt simultaneously to disavow blackness associated with Hip-hop music. What cannot be translated between racial, ethnic and national specificities of blackness, or its performance in various translations, is the social and economic disparity of power, between racially black groups, other minorities and the dominant 308 white culture. Black people cannot choose to be black one day and the next day return to a life that is not shaped by racism and white hegemony. Comparing each non-African American artist in this study with his or her African American contemporary provides examples of how non-African American performances of blackness impact artistic opportunities for African American artists. African Americans still want opportunities to be accepted as “Americans,” not African Americans. For many, Obama’s rise to power means that racism is over in the United States. To them, his election means that race does not matter and anyone can achieve based on his/her skills, hard work and determination. However, an African American president cannot erase the institutionalized racism and systemic inequality that continues to compromise the quality of life of African Americans and all other minorities in the United States. African Americanness persists as the trend setting and globally popular articulation of blackness that inspires black and non-black artists in Hip-hop around the world. My identification of these codes has more to do with an investigation of how particular blacknesses impact popular culture and the artistic practices of artists than making claims to purified notions of authenticity. By locating how multiple black and non-black performers engage the specificity of African Americanness, we can learn how one group’s articulation of blackness under the sign of Hip-hop has shaped the artistic and social identities of other groups. 309 Conclusion For the first time in American Theater history outside of 19 th century blackface performance, non African Americans, of every race and ethnicity, are re- imaging their theater and performance practices using a black aesthetic informed by African American cultural practices in Hip-hop. Unlike blackface, the majority of these performances work to bring social awareness and acknowledgement to the ways culture interfaces in Hip-hop as much as they explore specific cultural engagements with Hip-hop music and culture. Artists in this study, such as Danny Hoch, Nikki S. Lee and Jonzi D demonstrate varying levels of fluency in translating the cultural history of African American culture embedded in Hip-hop and perform an interpretation of blackness that is circulated in popular culture as non-offensive. Artists such as Danny Hoch and Jonzi D are considered Hip-hop Theater and performance pioneers, so their works are rarely critiqued for their ability to reinvest African American stereotypes in Hip-hop. However performers such as Nikki S. Lee, who reinvests minstrel images to perform her Hip-hop identities, is also exempt from critique by her contemporaries even though her works invoke blackface minstrelsy. However, what are ignored in all of these performances are the opportunities they often foreclose for African American artists. Doors are not closed to African American Hip-hop Theater and performance artists because of the competition of their non-African American colleagues. They are closed because one no longer needs African Americans to perform Hip-hop. While this is troubling because there appears to be a trend in privileging performances of blackness in Hip-hop by non- 310 African American performers, it also has the potential to be groundbreaking. Just as mainstream American theater professionals are completely comfortable with the way that theater is racialized as “white” because it is based in European tradition, we can also learn to be comfortable with the fact that Hip-hop’s Theater and performance can be indebted to African American performance practices and blackness. If we can see the ways that by sampling from African Americanness in Hip-hop, performers can use blackness as a lens to see their own experiences, this improvised understanding of difference thorough performance, may in turn resignify a “multicultural” United States that encourages cross-racial and ethnic exchange and empathy, not simply co-existence. In each chapter of this dissertation, I compared the performance of a non- African American artist with similar performances by African American performers in order to demonstrate the ways that the performances of blackness and Hip-hop by non-African American artists are often deemed more “authentically” Hip-hop than those created by black artists. In theater, fine art and dance, non-African American artists in the United States and abroad receive more opportunities to showcase their work in prestigious venues, receive more funding and critical reviews of their work than their African American colleagues. Though Sarah Jones, Lil Kim, Lauryn Hill and Rennie Harris have all received critical acclaim and are recognized as artists whose work is inspired by Hip-hop, they struggle for equal recognition with their peers whose works have been accepted within the larger scope of American theater, performance art and dance as “high” art. Of the aforementioned African American 311 performers, only Sarah Jones begins to make this transition into the white mainstream and is recognized as a “theater” artist and not an African American theater artist. However, this transition does not come without a penalty. Many African American artists who “cross-over” into white theater communities, find it difficult to develop an African American fan base when they want to return to the black “community” for artistic support. The theater, fine art and dance discussed in this dissertation are material archives of how culture is exchanged and translated across racial and ethnic lines through performance practices. In African American culture, many of the social codes that shape the aural, oral and gestural representations of black identity are subsumed under notions of the “folk” with little consideration for the ways in which particular racial and ethnic groups construct and record knowledge against dominant narratives of their identity. Transnational experiences of black subjectivity reveal how Hip-hop’s aural, oral and visual narratives, shape global popular culture. When a set of performative codes are constantly referenced and show tremendous impact on American popular culture, we must take notice and ask why and how a particular group’s experience is dominating cultural production at a given moment. The diversity and complexity of African American cultural production outside of Hip- hop also reflects the changing dynamic of racial relations in the United States as America elects a new African American president. From the beginning of the American Theater to the present, racial and cultural differences have been explored even when plays do not intend to discuss 312 “race.” However, the fact that every play in the American Theater repertoire is a “racial” play has not been explicitly theorized. Bodies operate as texts bringing with them histories and memories into spaces even when the texts they speak do not discuss racial issues. The absence of particular racial groups in American Theater (African American, Latino American, Asian American, Native American, Arab American, etc.) and performance is indicative of social relationships within mainstream performance spaces. Hip-hop Theater and Performance offer new opportunities for cross-racial and cultural exchange because it attracts artists of all races, ethnicities, genders and nationalities. If we can re-imagine American theater as multicentric in that it can contain multiple American experiences, not hyphenated American experiences, then we would no longer need to acknowledge the ways particular groups influence American popular culture because all of our contributions would be recognized as significant. Sampling Blackness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance demonstrates the ways that non-African American performers identify with African Americanness as a site to create new imaginings of identity that challenge how we understand the exchange of cultural practices and the ways that racial and ethnic identity are always already a part of culture. However, because of Hip-hop Theater and Performance’s multi-racial and ethnic appeal, it also provides a dangerous opportunity to pretend as if engagement with blackness through Hip-hop renders non-African American performers exempt from racist acts. Hip-hop’s theater and performance has privileged the commercial representation of Hip-hop as a multicultural catch all, yet 313 the only way to map the future is to understand how the past figures into it and how we can re-imagine notions of multiculturalism. Sampling Blackness offers a new way to conceive of performers, and the diverse racial, ethnic, gender and national histories they represent, as vehicles of cross-racial and ethnic exchange. My theorization of sampling as a theatrical process of theatrical improvisation in theater and performance in this dissertation enables new ways to understand how racial, ethnic, gender and national identities are translated between groups in performance. We are also able to understand how other races and ethnicities have performative codes of identity that are sampled in performance and have the potential to impact American and global popular culture. Moreover, every racial and ethnic group’s racial and ethnic identity has the potential to be multicentric and can allow for other racial and ethnic groups to identify themselves within those sets of experiences. As African Americans in the United States continue to fight for constitutional rights and equal economic opportunity, their cultural products should be recognized as having a significant impact on how we define “American” and global popular culture. As Greg Tate argues what is “American in character—music, dance, fashion, humor, spirituality, grassroots politics, slang, literature and sports—was [is] uniquely African-American in origin, conception, and inspiration (2003). By sampling blackness, many non-African Americans learn through the cultural practices of African Americans how to imagine alternative identities that subvert what they are socially prescribed to “be.” African American cultural production in Hip-hop, and outside of it, is a source of inspiration for diverse groups who see black Americans 314 as a group of people who have historically and continue to negotiate their social identities in the face of adversity. Identifying the specific impact African Americanness has on the artistic practices of non-African American artists allows us to see how categories of difference are malleable social constructs that can be sampled and remixed through performance. 315 Bibliography Abdoh, Reza. “The Hip-hop Waltz of Eurydice.” Reza Abdoh. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Aiken, George. Uncle Tom's Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly. Brooklin: Feedback Theatre Books, 1999. Alexander, Robert. A Preface to the Alien Garden. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2001. Alim, H.Samy. “Street Conscious Copular Variation in the Hip Hop Nation.” American Speech 77.3 (2002): 288-304. Barrois, Janine Sherman. “"Tyler Perry's Madea May Lead to the Black Little Miss Sunshine." Rushmore Drive 4 Mar 2009. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang , 1982. Baugh, John. Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Beatty, Warren. Bulworth . Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. 1998 Benedict, Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, Verso, 1993. Benston, KW. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African American Modernism. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 2000. Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz : The Infinite Art of Improvisation . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Bhaba, Homi. The Location of Culture (Routledge Classics). London: Routledge, 2004. Bielby, Denise, and C. Harrington. Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market: New York: New York University Press, 2008. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993. 316 Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Brecht, Bertolt. The Threepenny Opera . New York: Grove Press, 1994. Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. ---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identit . New York: Routledge, 2006. ---. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” The Routledgefalmer Reader in Gender and Education . New York: Routledge, 2006. 61-71. Casey, Paul, Terry Mc Coy, and Sue Wolf. “The Lyricist Lounge Show.” MTV. 2000. Cepeda, Raquel. And It Don't Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years. New York: Faber & Faber, 2004. Chang, Jeff. Can't stop, Won't Stop : A History of the Hip-hop generation. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. ---. Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007. Chatiliez, Etienne. Agathe Cléry. Produire a Paris, 2008. Cheng, Meiling. In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art Berkley: University of California Press, 2002. Chicago, Judy. The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation. New York: Merrell, 2007. Christgau, Robert. “In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstresly Studies Matter.” The Believer 2004. 10 May 2009. Corris, Michael, Ed. Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, Practice. New York: Cambroidge University Press, 2003. 317 Dubois, W.E.B. “Criteria for Negro Art..” The Crisis 36.October (1926): 290-297. De Palma, Brian. Scarface . Universal, 1983. Dean, Roger, and Hazel Smith. Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts Since 1945. London: Routledge, 1997. Demers, Joanna. Sampling as Lineage In Hip-hop. Princeton University: Diss., 2002. 10 May 2009 Denzin, Norman, and Yvonna S. Lincoln. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005. Dimitriadis, Greg. Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice |New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009 Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Mc Millan, 2003. Dubois, W.E.B. ““Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre." ” The Crisis 32.July (1926): 134-136. Dyson, Michael Eric. Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Edwards, Brent Hayes . The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Ego Trip. “The White Rapper Show .” VH-1.com Feb 2007. 9 May 2009 <http://www.vh1.com/shows/white_rapper/series.jhtml>. Elam, Harry, J., and David Krasner. African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Elam, Jr., Harry J. The Fire This Time: African-American Plays for the 21st Century. Theatre Communications Group, 2002. 8 May 2009 Elam, Jr., Harry, J. “Revising the Past, Pushing into the Future.” American Theatre, 2004. Farris Thompson, Robert. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. New York: Vintage, 1984. 318 Farrow, Kenyon. “"We Real Cool: On Hip-hop, Asian Americans, Black Folks and Appropriation.” Chickenbones: A Journal December (2004). 9 May 2009 <http://www.nathanielturner.com/werealcoolkenyon.htm>. Ferguson, Russell, and Gilbert Vicario. Nikki S. Lee: Projects. New York: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2001. Fishlin, Daniel, Ajay Heble, and Ingrid Monson. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue . Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Foster, Susan Leigh. Choreographing History (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers . New York: Routledge, 1995. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California . Berkeley: University of Califonia Press, 2007. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Glover, Savion, and George C. Wolfe. Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk. Public Theatre, 1996. 15 May 2009. Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art: A&I. New York: Phaidon, 1998 Goldberg, Rosalee. Nikki S. Lee: Parts. New York: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2006. 5 May Gray, Herman. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Gubar, Susan. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture Looks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1996. 441-449. ---. “What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture.” Social Justice 20.1-2 (1993): 104-111. 319 Hall, Stuart et al. “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance.” Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 16-60. Hall, Stuart, and Jonathan Rutherford. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. Harrington, Lee, and Denise Bielby. Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. San Francisco: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000. Harris, Rennie. “Rennie Harris Retrospective at Perelman: ‘Rome and Jewels’ Jun 2007. Harrison, Paul Carter. Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum. New York: Grove Press, 1974. ---. “The Crisis of Black Theatre Identity.” African American Review Winter (1997). Harrison, Paul Carter, Victor Leo Walker , and Gus Edwards. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Hastreiter, Kim. “Funny How Things Turn Out." The Keith Haring Show. Italy: Skira, 2005. 81-85. Hebdige, Dick. Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London: Routledge, 1987. Higgins, Colin. Nine to Five . IPC Films, 1980. Hinds, Rickerby. Blackballin'. Los Angeles: A.S.K. Theater Projects, 1997. Ho, Fred. “Song For Manong: Part III of Bamboo That Snaps Back.” 1985. Hoch, Danny. “Towards a Hip-hop Aesthetic: A Manifesto of the Hip-hop.” American Theatre 2004. 9 May 2009 ---. Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop and Some People. New York: Villard, 1998. Hodgdon, Barbara, Peter Holland , and W.B. Worthen. “Photography, Theater, Mnemonics; or Thirteen Ways at looking at a Still..” Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History (Redefining British Theatre History). 88-.89 May 2009 320 Barbara Hodgdon. "Photography, Theatre, Mnemonics; or Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still" in Worthen, W.B., Holland, Peter, Eds. Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. pp. 88- 120 hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1999. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 2008. Jewell, K.Sue. From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond : Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy. New York: Routledge, 1993. Jin. The Rest Is History. Virgin Records, 2004. Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Jones, Sarah. “Bridge and Tunnel.” Helen Hayes Theater. New York. Aug 2006. ---. “Surface Transit.” Grand Performances. Los Angeles. July 2000. Jonzi D. “Tag: Me vs the City.” London. Peacock Theatre.” 7 Mar 2006. Kelley, Robin D.G. “The People in Me.” Colorlines 1999. Kim, Claire Jean. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans..” Politics & Society 27: 105-138. Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005. Kondo, Dorinne. “(Re)Visions of Race: Contemporary Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary Theatre.” Theatre Journal 52.1 (2000). Kondo, Dorinne. About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. New York: Routledge, 1997. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973. Lee, Chinsun. “Portrait of the Assimilartist” Colorlines, Issue 18, Fall 2002 321 Lee, Nikki S. The Hispanic Project (1). 1998. ---. The Exotic Dancers Project. 2000. ---. The Lesbian Project. 1997. ---. The Ohio Project(28). 1999. ---. The Schoolgirls Project. 2000. ---. The Seniors Project. 1999. ---. The Skateboarders Project. 2000. ---. The Swingers Project(6). 1999. ---. The Tourist Project (10). 1997. ---. The Yuppie Project. 1998. Lee, Spike. Bamboozled . New Line Cinema, 2001. Levin, Marc. Slam. Lions Gate, 1998. ---. WhiteBoyz. 20th Century Fox, 2005. Lhamon, W.T. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. ---. Lhamon, Jr., W.T. “Optic Black: Naturalizing the Refusal to Fit” 11-125.Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture., Eds. Elam, Harry Justin and Jackson, Kennell. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Focus of Place . Brooklyn: Verso, 1997. ---. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Focus of Place . New York: Verso, 1997. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 322 Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” Dissent. Fall (1957). Maira, Sunaina. Desis In the House: Indian American Youth Culture In NYC (Asian American History & Culture). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Marksy. NeoMarxisme. “Blackface.” Website. http://www.pliink.com/mt/marxy/archives/2005/08/blackface.html 5 Aug. 2005 Accessed 5 Jun. 2009. McAllister, Marvin. White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies Mead, John. “Bridge and Tunnel: A Multicultural Love Letter to New York” The New York Times, Theatre Review, 17 May 2006. Miller, Paul D. Rhythm Science (Mediaworks Pamphlets): Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Moréas, Jean. ““Le Symbolisme” Le Figaro 18 Sep 1886. Morgan, Marcyliena, “The Africanness of Counter Language among Afro- Americans” in Mufwene, Salikoko and Condon, Nancy, Eds. Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. p.423-35. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Mudimbe, V.Y. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Munoz, Jose Estaban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Neal, Mark Anthony. Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. New York: Routledge, 2003. ---. What the music said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. 323 Ogg, Alex, and Alex Upshal. The Hip Hop Years: A History of Rap. London: Fromm International, 2001. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy . New York: Routledge, 2002. Palumbo-Liu, David, and Kent A. Ono. “Los Angeles, Asians, and Perverse Ventriloquisms: On the Functions of Asian America in the Recent American Imaginary.” A Companion to Asian American Studies. San Francisco: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 319-331. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. ---. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop: . Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Petersen, Stephen B. “Looking At Art Manifestos.” Penn 2006. Pough, Gwendolyn. Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004 Prashad, Vijay. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Rader, Daniel. ““Deep Divisions, Shared Destiny - A Poll of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans on Race Relations.”.” New America Media 12 Dec 2007. Raphael Hernandez, Heike. Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. New York: Routledge, 2003. Rapp, Phil. “The Bickersons.” 1996. Rashid, Ian Iqbal. How She Move. Sienna Films, 2007. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms). New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Roediger, David R. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Roman, David. Performance in America : Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts . Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 324 Rose, Charlie. “Interview with George C. Wolfe and Savion Glover.” 11 Apr 1999. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Rudlin, John. Commedia Dell'Arte: An Actor's Handbook. New York: Routledge, 1994. Ruland, Richard. “The American Plays of Bertolt Brecht.” American Quarterly 15.3 (1963): 371-389. Schloss, Joseph. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Seham, Amy E. Whose Improv Is It Anyway? Beyond Second City. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Senelick, Lauren. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2000. Shankman, Adam. Bringing Down the House . Touchstone Pictures, 2003. Sieg, Katrin. Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America . Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1986. Spolin, Violia. Improvisation for the Theater 3E: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999. ---. Theater Games for the Lone Actor. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Steffans, Karrine. Confessions of a Video Vixen. New York: Amistad, 2006. Stiller, Ben. Tropic Thunder. Dreamworks, 2008. Strand, Ginger Gail Performance Review: Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop Theatre Journal - Volume 50, Number 4, December 1998. Tate, Greg. Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. New York: Harlem Moon, 2003. 325 ---. Everything but the Burden -What White People are taking from Black Culture. New York: Random Books, 2003. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Uno, Roberta. “The 5th Element.” American Theatre 2004. 6 May 2009 Waegner, Caty Covell. “Rap, Rebounds, and Rocawear: 'The Darkening' of German Youth Culture.” Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. New York: Routledge, 2003. Wagner, Cathy Covell, “Performing Postmodernist Passing: Nikki S. Lee, Tuff, and Ghost Dog in Blackface/Yellowface” in Hernandez, Heike Raphael and Steen, Shannon, Eds. AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 223-240. Walidah, Hanifah. Straight Black Folks Guide to Gay Black Folks. 10 May 2009. Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. London: Blackwell Publishing, 1987. Weheliye, Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity: Alexander Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Weinreich, Uriel. Languages in Contact. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1953. Whitesell, John. Malibu's Most Wanted. Warner Bros. Pictures., 2003. Wilson, August. The Ground on Which I Stand. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000. Wong, Deborah. Speak it Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York: Routledge, 2004. Wu, Frank. Yellow: Race in American Beyond Black and White. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Yee, Lydia, and Sirmand, Franklin. One Planet under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art. New York: Atelier Books, 2001.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance uses a comparative approach to ethnic studies to examine the impact of African American articulations of blackness on the performance practices of non-African American artists. Sampling Blackness envisions sampling as an improvisational process of knowledge production and identity negotiation that has the capacity to challenge dominant narratives about racial difference. Hip-hop DJs improvise connections between disparate tracks of music to create a new piece of music. The artists in this study use their voices and bodies to sample performative codes of African American identity to create and authenticate their Hip-hop performances. Offering a broad examination of Hip-hop theater and performance practices, this is the first study to engage the impact of Hip-hop on the artistic practices of non-African American performers in theater, conceptual art and dance.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Dark matter in b-boying cyphers: race and global connection in hip hop

PDF

Hanguk, hip hop: the making of hip hop in South Korea

PDF

Image breakers, image makers: producing race, America, and television

PDF

Sensing the sonic and mnemonic: digging through grooves, Afro-feelings and Black markets in Ghana, 1966-present

PDF

Increasing representation of Black male hip-hop educators in the community colleges in California

PDF

Carrying the fire home: performing nation, identity, indigenous diaspora and home in the poems, songs, and performances of Arigon Starr, Joy Harjo and Gayle Ross

PDF

AIDS and its afterlives: race, gender, and the queer radical imagination

PDF

Speaking out of turn: race, gender, and direct address in American art museums

PDF

Flights of the imagination: Black American travelers journey toward "Africa" in Ghana and Bahia, Brazil

PDF

Stepping out on faith: representing spirituality in African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement

PDF

Another country: Black Americans, Arab worlds, 1952-1979

PDF

"As shelters against the cold": women writers of the Black Arts and Chicano movements, 1965-1978

PDF

Passing notes in class: listening to pedagogical improvisations in jazz history

PDF

The influence of African-American harmonizing on the 'American' choral works of Frederick Delius

PDF

Marks of the fetish: twenty-first century (mis)performances of the black female body

PDF

"Home is Little Tokyo": race, community, and memory in twentieth-century Los Angeles

PDF

Peculiar poetics: towards a queer-feminist theory of Black fatherhood

PDF

Multiracial politics or the politics of being multiracial?: Racial theory, civic engagement, and socio-political participation in a contemporary society

PDF

A peculiar paradise: tribal place, property and the peripatetic tradition in African American literature

PDF

Increasing African American male participation in pre-college programs: improving TRIO programs’ support for Black men

Asset Metadata

Creator Hodges, Nicole Renee (author)

Core Title Sampling blackness: performing African Americanness in hip-hop theater and performance

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2009-08

Publication Date 07/09/2009

Defense Date 06/03/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag blackness,conceptual art,hip‐hop,hip-hop dance,hip-hop theater,multicultural,OAI-PMH Harvest,sampling

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kondo, Dorinne (committee chair), Cheng, Meiling (committee member), Roman, David (committee member)

Creator Email hodgespersley@gmail.com,nrhodges@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2336

Unique identifier UC156947

Identifier etd-Hodges-3016 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-579234 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2336 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hodges-3016.pdf

Dmrecord 579234

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hodges, Nicole

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu