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In this episode, we are joined by Michael Thomas to talk about Black aesthetics and hip hop in particular. We work through what it means for hip hop to be a 'problem space' that reconstructs the cultural contradictions and political messaging of a racist society in a way that is not essentializing and that aspires to address social problems without producing easy answers. Main themes include hip hop's form, vibe, and story-telling capacity across generations.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Michael Thomas, "Singing Experience in Section.80", in Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning, eds. Christopher M. Driscoll, Monica R. Miller, and Anthony B. Pinn (New York: Routledge, 2019)Paul C. Taylor, "Black Reconstruction in Aesthetics", Debates in Aesthetics 15.2 (2020): 9-47Lissa Skitolsky, Hip-Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get a Witness? (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020)The five of us put together a playlist for this episode!Big K.R.I.T. feat. Devin The Dude, Curren$y, and Killa Kyleon, “Moon & Stars”Gary Clark Jr., “This Land”GZA feat. Method Man, “Shadowboxin'”Kanye West, “Blood on the Leaves”Little Simz, “Venom”Lupe Fiasco, “WAV Files”Makaveli, “To Live And Die in L.A.”Mobb Deep, “Shook Ones, Pt. II”Nas, “N.Y. State of Mind”Nicki Minaj, “All Things Go”Nicki Minaj, “Here I Am”Saba feat. Day Wave, “2012”Vince Staples, “Like It Is”Young Money, “Lookin Ass”Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
Description Marcus Evans teaches courses on Asian religions at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, exploring new perspectives and incorporating different voices that help students access and interpret old texts. His teaching integrates and combines classical Buddhist works and contrasts and compares these with the works of modern hip hop artists, helping students to see ways that art, literature, and religion evolve and respond in interrelated ways. In this episode, Sarah Richardson asks him about his research and how he brings fresh voices and perspectives into conversation, taking these as strategies for greater student inclusion and antiracist teaching in the University. Quotes "The Bhagavad Gita means the Song of the Lord. These brothers, way back in the ancient days, they were rhyming. They were kicking raps.” Marcus Evans “I wanted them to see if they can pick up on this notion of change in itself and how change and impermanence support a Buddhist concept, because that was something that was very subtle in the lyrics.” Marcus Evans “I decided to incorporate black American voices into this [course]. I was thinking about it in a way of decentering whiteness and looking at the narrative of transmission of Asian texts to North America by decentering the white gaze.” Marcus Evans "Which voices can I bring in to challenge the standard way that we do it? This is effective in itself, even in just the people that we attract to the course.” Marcus Evans “You know, when I taught my course the Great Books of Asian Religions, it was so fascinating because when I looked into the audience it was the first time that I saw a lot of black in the audience, I had never really seen that in a religious studies course.” Marcus Evans Music References RZA Wu-Tang Clan Nicki Minaj T.I., “I Believe” https://youtu.be/0GsVTsuPyOg Killer Mike KRS-One Tina Turner Dead Prez, “Learning, Growing, Changing” https://youtu.be/ttHukW70TAM Stic.man, The Workout, 2011 https://open.spotify.com/album/5LHhOmal06SQEBREgV7hR1?si=ikA7LKDlQWuy_lkW3AMwIQ Dead Prez, Let's Get Free, 2000 https://open.spotify.com/album/7gXuElmegVReY7imkb5bf8?si=ubkZ20qGTX6UYWJzsjrbyg Dead Prez, Information Age, 2013 https://open.spotify.com/album/1ctEzpKcYukYAOXpyXx7C9?si=WNdJii0qQkmk4-zNcb7CVg Links to articles and books Marcus Evans, PhD Candidate at McMaster University https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/people/evans-marcus James Robson. “Daoism.” In Norton Anthology of World Religions, edited by James Miles. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/563049/the-norton-anthology-of-world-religions-daoism-by-james-robson/9780393355000 Malory Nye. Religion: The Basics. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. https://www.routledge.com/Religion-The-Basics/Nye/p/book/9780415449489 KRS-One. Ruminations: A Philosophical Outlook on Urban Hip-Hop. New York, NY: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2003. https://www.amazon.com/KRS-ONE-Ruminations/dp/1566492742 KRS One. The Gospel of Hip Hop: First Instrument. Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse Books, 2009. https://powerhousebooks.com/books/the-gospel-of-hip-hop-first-instrument/ Ellie Hisama. “‘We're All Asian Really': Hip Hop's Afro-Asian Crossings.” In Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies, edited by Ellie Hisama and Evan Rapport, 1–21. Brooklyn, NY: Institute for Studies in American Music, 2005. Bill V. Mullen. Afro-Orientalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/afro-orientalism Deborah Elizabeth Whaley. “Black Bodies/Yellow Masks: The Orientalist Aesthetic in Hip-hop and Black Visual Culture.” In Afro-Asian Encounters, edited by Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, pp. 188–203. New York, NY, New York University Press, 2006. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40301281 Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller. Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. https://www.amazon.ca/Method-Identity-Manufacturing-Distance-Academic/dp/149856562X Adeana McNicholl. “Being Buddha, Staying Woke: Racial Formation in Black Buddhist Writing.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 86, no. 4 (December 2018): 883–911. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfy019 Ann Gleig https://dib.harvard.edu/event/ann-gleig-undoing-whiteness-american-buddhist-modernism
Tune in as Dr. Monica R. Miller, one of the recognized scholars of African-American religion and culture, joins Sister Jenna on the America Meditating Radio Show to discuss an important and emerging field of study – religion and hip hop. Dr. Monica R. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies and director of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University who holds research interests in religion, youth culture, popular culture, identity and difference. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Religion and Hip Hop and a co-author of the new book, Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain. Her work has been featured in a host of regional and national print, radio, live video, and TV news outlets including NPR, The Washington Post and Huffington Post Live. She has presented her research at colleges, universities, and conferences throughout the U.S., Cuba and Canada. Get the OFF TO WORK CD & Off the Grid Into the Heart CD by Sister Jenna. Like America Meditating on FB & on Twitter.
The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller’s efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relationship to larger social pathologies, the religious rhetoric and style of Hip-Hop knowledge productions or books written by Hip Hop artists, and a visual ethnography of the dance culture of Krumping where the body is examined as a site of significance through aesthetics, style, taste, and dispositions. Very often these interrogations challenge the category of religion in new ways and leave us asking what counts as religion and what is left out. Altogether, Miller does a lot in this book, much of which we did not get to discuss in detail. In our conversation we discussed authorial authority, social constructionism, youth religious participation, the Black Church, KRS One, morality, intentionality and habitus, complex subjectivity, postmodernism, classification, and many other interesting things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller’s efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relationship to larger social pathologies, the religious rhetoric and style of Hip-Hop knowledge productions or books written by Hip Hop artists, and a visual ethnography of the dance culture of Krumping where the body is examined as a site of significance through aesthetics, style, taste, and dispositions. Very often these interrogations challenge the category of religion in new ways and leave us asking what counts as religion and what is left out. Altogether, Miller does a lot in this book, much of which we did not get to discuss in detail. In our conversation we discussed authorial authority, social constructionism, youth religious participation, the Black Church, KRS One, morality, intentionality and habitus, complex subjectivity, postmodernism, classification, and many other interesting things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller’s efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relationship to larger social pathologies, the religious rhetoric and style of Hip-Hop knowledge productions or books written by Hip Hop artists, and a visual ethnography of the dance culture of Krumping where the body is examined as a site of significance through aesthetics, style, taste, and dispositions. Very often these interrogations challenge the category of religion in new ways and leave us asking what counts as religion and what is left out. Altogether, Miller does a lot in this book, much of which we did not get to discuss in detail. In our conversation we discussed authorial authority, social constructionism, youth religious participation, the Black Church, KRS One, morality, intentionality and habitus, complex subjectivity, postmodernism, classification, and many other interesting things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller’s efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relationship to larger social pathologies, the religious rhetoric and style of Hip-Hop knowledge productions or books written by Hip Hop artists, and a visual ethnography of the dance culture of Krumping where the body is examined as a site of significance through aesthetics, style, taste, and dispositions. Very often these interrogations challenge the category of religion in new ways and leave us asking what counts as religion and what is left out. Altogether, Miller does a lot in this book, much of which we did not get to discuss in detail. In our conversation we discussed authorial authority, social constructionism, youth religious participation, the Black Church, KRS One, morality, intentionality and habitus, complex subjectivity, postmodernism, classification, and many other interesting things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller's efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relationship to larger social pathologies, the religious rhetoric and style of Hip-Hop knowledge productions or books written by Hip Hop artists, and a visual ethnography of the dance culture of Krumping where the body is examined as a site of significance through aesthetics, style, taste, and dispositions. Very often these interrogations challenge the category of religion in new ways and leave us asking what counts as religion and what is left out. Altogether, Miller does a lot in this book, much of which we did not get to discuss in detail. In our conversation we discussed authorial authority, social constructionism, youth religious participation, the Black Church, KRS One, morality, intentionality and habitus, complex subjectivity, postmodernism, classification, and many other interesting things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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