Forum: Religion, Renovation, Rap & Hip Hop

Authors

  • Joseph Hill University of Alberta
  • Jeanette S. Jouili University of Pittsburgh
  • Kendra Salois American University
  • Wind Dell Woods
  • Joshua Edelman

Abstract

Performance, Religion and Spirituality’s second forum turns our focus to the ways in which rap and hip hop—as well as the hybrid musical and performance forms which draw on them— have, in recent decades, become important means of asserting, performing, and negotiating religious identity and practice. These forms have spread far beyond their origin in the African American community, and now are forces within the religious and cultural life of nations around the world. They represent both inroads of a globally recognized brand with commercial power and a critical assertion of local and ndividual identities. As well as simply being a great deal of fun, they can serve as a challenge to social structures, including those grounded in religion, and can offer up a form of personal and ironic form of critique that other forms cannot. For this forum, we have brought together four scholars of global hip hop to discuss the critical, political and aesthetic potential the form holds for contemporary religious life worldwide. I asked each scholar to begin with a short position statement on their own research and the relevance of hip hop for religion in the context of their particular research field (Senegal, Morocco, the UK, and the US). The five of us then read each other’s contributions and met (via videoconferencing) to discuss and debate what we had read. The resulting conversation, lightly edited for clarity, is included here. All PRS forums are intended as an invitation for further dialogue, and here the subject matter makes that invitation all the more urgent. The editors welcome letters to the editor in response to this forum. Letters can be sent to j.edelman@mmu.ac.uk.

Author Biographies

Joseph Hill, University of Alberta

Joseph Hill is an associate professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. His research focuses on Islam—especially Sufi Islam—in West Africa and elsewhere, and explores the performance of religious authority, forms of knowledge and experience, gender, and religious expressive performance (such as chant and music). Hill’s research has primarily focused on the Fayḍa Tijāniyya, a Sufi movement that originated in Senegal and has followers around the world. He is particularly interested in how new or adapted performances of religious authority succeed or fail in establishing themselves as embodying a timeless tradition. For example, his 2018 book Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal shows how women have come to exercise religious leadership in new ways through quietly working conventionally feminine practices into performances of authority. His recent research looks at how hip hop/rap music has come to be accepted in Senegal as a legitimate form of religious expression, even while other performance genres have found less acceptance.

Jeanette S. Jouili, University of Pittsburgh

Jeanette S. Jouili is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching interests include Islam in Europe, secularism, pluralism, popular culture, moral and aesthetic practices, and gender. She is author of Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford, 2015), has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals (such as Feminist Review, Muslim World, French Culture, Politics and Society, and Anthropology Quarterly). Currently, she is working on her second book project: Islam on Stage: British Muslim Culture in the Age of Counterterrorism.

Kendra Salois, American University

Kendra Salois is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in the intersections of popular musics, transnational markets, and national belonging. Her research interests include Afro-diasporic popular musics in the Middle East and North Africa, North African popular musics, trans-Saharan musical connections, music and diplomacy, citizenship, labor, and neoliberalism. Her research has been funded by the International Institute for Education, the American Institute for Maghrebi Studies, and the West African Research Association. Her work appears in Anthropological Quarterly, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of World Popular Music, and the edited volumes Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (2014) and Islam and Popular Culture (2016). Her book project, Values That Pay, asks how Moroccan hip hop communities perform their vision of an ethical nation while simultaneously co-producing the authoritarian state. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts at American University in Washington, DC.

Wind Dell Woods

Wind Dell Woods (MFA/PhD) is a playwright, scholar, and educator. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from Arizona State University. As an artist-scholar, his work explores the topics of race, gender, identity, community, and memory. He is influenced by hip hop music/culture, as well as ancient and modern mythology. Woods's dissertation, Pleading the Fifth Element: Disaesthetics and Hip Hop as Black Study, engages in a meta-critique of the critical and creative discourse in the fields of Hip Hop Studies and Hip Hop Theater. Woods disrupts the traditional tendency to freeze hip hop as an object. Rather, he reemploys Hip Hop as a method of study with the capacity to layer, sample, and (re)mix theories and analyses into a meta-critical cypher, a type of hip hop praxis. Woods’s other research interests are in the fields of critical theory, narratology, Blackness and performance, and the Black radical tradition.

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Published

2019-03-23

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Forum

License

The copyright belongs to the authors and PRS.