Hip‐hop Imaginaries: a Genealogy of the Present

Abstract

In this article, I track the emergence of Hip-hop imaginaries in the enunciatory present, focusing on three disparate scenes: democratic change in Bolivia, cultural resistance in Hawaii, and the foundations of Hip-hop that emerged from New York City. I position Hip-hop as a mode of cultural expression that gives resistant form to marginalized existences abjected from dominant society through political and economic exclusion. I trace the origins of Hip-hop in New York in order to show how the idea of existential resistance provides a useful interpretive framework in which to theorize the relationships between cultural resistance and political change. I utilize this framework by looking at Hip-hop in two disparate locations, first analyzing the music of Hawaiian Hip-hop group Sudden Rush and contextualizing it within the contemporary Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement. Second, Bolivia’s newly emergent Hip-hop scene amidst a turbulent culture of political protest provides a useful contrast to that of Hawaii’s. In the end, I argue that Hip-hop imaginaries in Hawaii and Bolivia demonstrate inter-related strategies of national and cultural decolonization which carry distinct political implications.