CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY

Claremont, CA

Battling Imperialism: Revolutionary Hip Hop in the Americas

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Claremont Graduate University in

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partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
Cultural Studies
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by
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Jenell Rae Navarro

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2011
 UMI Number: 3466979

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 Copyright by

Jenell Rae Navarro

2011

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 APPROVAL OF THE REVIEW COMMITTEE

This dissertation has been duly read, reviewed, and critiqued by the Committee
listed below, which hereby approves the manuscript of Jenell Rae Navarro as
fulfilling the scope and quality requirements for meriting the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in Cultural Studies.

Eve Oishi, Chair

Claremont Graduate University
Associate Professor of Cultural Studies

Linda Perkins

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Claremont Graduate University
Associate Professor of Applied Women’s Studies & Education
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Chris Guzaitis
Scripps College
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Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies

Matthew Delmont
Scripps College
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Assistant Professor of American Studies

Claremont Graduate University

2011
 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Battling Imperialism: Revolutionary Hip Hop in the Americas

by

Jenell Rae Navarro

Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies

Claremont Graduate University, 2011

Professor Eve Oishi, Chair

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In Battling Imperialism: Revolutionary Hip Hop in the Americas I
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examine how revolutionary hip hop in the Americas works as a transnational

movement of cultural, national, and insurgent expression. I use the term

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revolutionary hip hop to point to hip hop music and culture that explicitly works

to implement social and structural change. This is also music that utilizes the four
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elements of hip hop in order to disseminate political messages about diverse

struggles for equality. I argue that transnational movement(s) of revolutionary hip

hop and culture constantly emerge anew denying any assertion of cultural and

national absolutism because as hip hop travels it is often adapted to fit a particular

geopolitical context where national history, struggles of the present, and

possibilities of differentiated futures work to challenge cultural imperialism. I

extend this argument by showing how a range of different revolutionary hip hop

productions—productions that speak to the everyday realities of the people—

incite longings for social and political change because they are formed at the
temporal and spatial convergences of the nation. I specifically trace the

transnational routes of revolutionary hip hop that traverse Cuba, Venezuela, and

Indigenous communities in the United States and how these forms of hip hop

produce critiques regarding the production and consumption of U.S. cultural

imperialism in addition to addressing issues of national citizenship and national

politics. Moreover, I situate the complexities of revolutionary hip hop productions

within a feminist context that interrogates the possibilities for these productions to

challenge heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism; and, I propose that

these cultural formations should not be understood as a privileged hegemonic

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model of resistance. Instead, I understand these revolutionary hip hop
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productions as varied forms of resistance fraught with layers of history and

contingent struggle by wrestling with two driving questions: How do we form

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transnational communities of resistance without reproducing cultural hegemony?

And, while hip hop seems to translate as a viable medium of resistance across the
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Americas, why do many of the revolutionary hip hop productions that resist

imperialism, racism, and economic inequity, often still rely on the reproduction of

misogyny?
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the support of many
colleagues, friends, and family. I would like to extend a very warm thank you to
my committee members Eve Oishi, Linda Perkins, Chris Guzaitis, and Matthew
Delmont for their guidance throughout the project and their excitement about the
topic of revolutionary hip hop. I am also indebted to the Transdisciplinary Studies
Program at Claremont Graduate University for awarding me a dissertation
fellowship to write and research this project during the 2010-2011 academic year
along with the Cultural Studies department at Claremont Graduate University who
continuously provided funding throughout my tenure as a doctoral student.
Moreover, I am grateful to Leigh Gilmore for providing me with an unmatched
model of academic rigor and feminist consciousness.

Many friends have also contributed to this work through their support of my
academic life including Polly Baranco, Inger Brinck, Adriana Di Bartolo, Wilfred
Doucette, Natalia Fior, Robin Garcia (especially for all her help in Venezuela in

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2009), Mary Nguyen Langjahr, Bob Langjahr, and Kimberly Robertson. In
addition, I am continually inspired by the members of the Southern California
Native Feminist Reading Group who encourage me through their work and
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political pulse.

Finally, my deepest thanks are reserved for my partner José Navarro who has
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spent endless hours helping and supporting me with this project. Thank you for
motivating me with your unconditional love and radical politics. And, to my
newborn daughter, Nayeli Carmen Navarro, I thank you for being so very
cooperative in the womb while your mama wrote this dissertation!
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 DEDICATION

To José and Nayeli you are mi familia y mi vida.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………iii

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………...iv

Introduction………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One: Canto Para La Justicia: Revolutionary Hip Hop in Cuba……........21

Chapter Two: Hip Hop Protesta: Revolutionary Hip Hop in Venezuela…….......79

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Chapter Three: Unsettling Rhymes: Indigenous Hip Hop in the United States..135

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Conclusion: Notes on Creative Comparative Colonialisms………………….....178
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Works Cited……………………………………………………………………..187
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 Introduction

“Vamos venezolano latinoamericano “Venezuelans, Latin Americans, let’s go!

Seamos bandera de una nueva idea Let’s be a flag for a new idea;
Unamos nuestra metas en una sola tarea Let’s unite our goals to a single task.

No te quedes callado ante la injusticia Do not be silent before injustice.

No apoyes al ladrón que con sus maquinas Don’t support the thief who, with his
auspicia la guerra por dinero machines, aids in the war for money,
Intoxicado de codicia, who is intoxicated by greed.

No vendas nuestro trópico, Don’t sell off our tropic.

No abandones las filas” Don’t abandon the ranks.”

- Excerpt from “En Favor de la Paz” by Dame Pa’ Matala

“Late into the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are witnesses to, indeed participants in, a more
profound sense of global connection and a more acute experience of national and regional division than

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world history has perhaps ever presented. Accelerated migrations of goods and peoples proceed alongside
the execution of regional and imperial wars and deepened international and intranational inequalities. These
are the paradoxes of globalization and empire at our front door, at every world citizen’s front door.”
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– Heidi Tinsman and Sandhya Shukla, Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame

Since the early development of hip hop culture in New York in the 1970’s, this
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musical form and its culture of resistance have been utilized to critically address

questions of national citizenship and national boundaries. While hip hop has emerged
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into varying transnational forms, many that are indeed tightly aligned with the

naturalization of capitalist values, there are also significant hip hop developments

committed to social justice struggles. Battling Imperialism: Revolutionary Hip Hop in the

Americas hinges on the latter developments, which I refer to as revolutionary hip hop.

Revolutionary hip hop as a category names those hip hop practices of music and culture

whose purpose is to incite and implement social, cultural, and structural change. I argue

that as revolutionary hip hop travels within and across national boundaries as a

transnational form, it disrupts the logic of U.S. empire and the naturalization of

capitalism in three key ways: 1) it displaces the primacy of the U.S. as the producer of

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power and culture in the Americas; 2) it interrupts commodity capitalism by circulating

through informal economies; and, 3) it repositions artists as political agents and cultural

laborers.

Revolutionary hip hop also takes many forms. Any of its particular incarnations

that travel within a transnational cultural circuit emerge from a specific geopolitical

context and rework the material of national history, present-day struggles, and the

possibilities of differentiated futures in order to challenge cultural imperialism and

cultural genocide. As a result, revolutionary hip hop often effectively resists assertions of

cultural and national absolutism. A range of different revolutionary hip hop productions

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speak to the everyday realities of a people and incite longings for social and political
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change because they are often formed within significant nation-building moments like

political revolutions. In fact, some of the cultural laborers that produce revolutionary hip
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hop are, or have been, literally involved in revolutionary national processes, and others

are revolutionary in so far as they seek to implement radical change toward equality.
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Moreover, revolutionary hip hop circulates the non-dominant nation-building histories

from which it emerges and through this circulation disseminates a potent and shareable

critique of U.S. cultural imperialism. As such, my project shares with Feminist Studies,

Critical Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies of the Americas an interest in cultural

productions that challenge heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and

colonialism/imperialism. Significantly, however, revolutionary hip hop in my study is not

promoted as a privileged hegemonic model of resistance but rather is historicized as a

dynamic form of resistance fraught with layers of history and contingent struggle.

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 Through my research undertaken in Cuba, Venezuela, and across Indigenous

communities in the United States during 2009-2011, I have been able to identify how hip

hop circulates in communities of resistance that are responding to U.S. empire while

simultaneously interrogating the challenges of reproducing cultural hegemony therein. In

this way, hip hop is not solely a musical form but also exists as a cultural form.

Throughout this project I frame culture akin to the definition outlined by Lisa Lowe and

David Lloyd. They assert culture is: “a terrain in which politics, culture, and the

economic form an inseparable dynamic” (1). Furthermore, they suggest this

understanding of culture highlights alternatives to capitalism that are generated

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worldwide, and they are specifically not interested in “identifying what lies ‘outside’
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capitalism, but in what rises historically, in contestation, and ‘in difference’ to it” (2). I

find this definition useful because revolutionary hip hop music and culture has proved to
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be incredibly rich with political alternatives to the indivisible dominating and coercive

structures of both capitalism and colonialism/imperialism. Moreover, to explicate culture

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as a dynamic political, cultural, and economic formation points to the necessity for

revolutionary hip hop to remain adaptable for various communities in multiple contexts.

This latter assertion underscores the significance of political production and knowledge

formation made specific in such cultural arrangements noting as Josh Kun does with

respect to Latino hip hop that, “hip-hop is a music of and by Latinos, music they make as

well as consume, music they customize and reinvent according to their own rules and

styles” (743).

In Battling Imperialism I propose that, as Tinsman and Shukla state above,

globalization and empire are the paradoxical, yet prominent, tactics of inequality and

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domination that we face in the twenty-first century since both are often employed to

further violence, domination, and genocide often masked in the rhetoric of “democracy”

and “freedom.” However, the reaches of tyranny and repression are always met with

varying voices and practices of productive resistance, reasserting the Foucauldian notion

that power and resistance are constitutive. As a way to map the resistive vein of hip hop

then, I trace the transnational routes of revolutionary hip hop that traverse Cuba,

Venezuela, and Indigenous communities in the United States. The revolutionary

productions of transnational hip hop I examine have the potential to produce critiques

regarding the production and consumption of U.S. cultural imperialism in addition to

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addressing issues of national citizenship and national politics. These productions also
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work as disturbances to racism and heteropatriarchy in the national imaginary as they

level critiques of land and citizenship rights. The revolutionary hip hop productions
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within the transnational circuit I examine have varying frames for understanding

multivalent issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation, and as a result, they
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produce new logics to engage in transnational struggles against empire-building in the

Americas.

The locations of Cuba, Venezuela, and Indigenous communities in the United

States are assembled within a logic of connectivity rather than a circuit of universality or

authenticity. While I will look at these specific locations, I do recognize the limits

intertwined in any politics of location and attempt to grapple with these limits by

emphasizing the nuanced identities and epistemologies produced within various forms of

revolutionary hip hop. In order to do this I heavily rely upon transnational feminist

theorists like Jacqui Alexander, Inderpal Grewal, and Caren Kaplan, along with

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postcolonial scholars like Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha to establish this framework. As

a result, I situate the complexities of revolutionary hip hop productions within a context

of feminism(s) that interrogates the possibilities for these productions to challenge

heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism; and, as such, I focus on the political

and imaginative potential of revolutionary hip hop told through multiple and competing

narratives. I do this by framing these musical and cultural productions through a

sociohistorical scope that accounts for the practices of domination in the various colonial

records examined, as well as the histories of resistance movements in these particular

locales, which points to the critical present moment where empire has yet to end. I make

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this point to suggest as Jacqui Alexander does that, “empire requires sacrifice—the
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sacrifice of consent…perhaps empire never ended, that psychic and material will to

conquer and appropriate…what we can say for sure is that empire makes all innocence
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impossible” (3-4). Alexander argues that it is these very acts of coercion and domination

that force us “to genuflect at the altar of alterity and separation, the altar of the secular
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gods of postmodernism, experienced as hypernationalism and empire” (5). Toward a

similar critique of empire, I assemble one small archive of resistive artistic practices to

empire that may work to move past alienation and establish complex voices for collective

self-determination.

In order to unravel these complexities, I look at revolutionary hip hop produced

by Latin American and Indigenous cultural laborers that narrate memories of conquest

and histories of colonization. This music simultaneously points to the variations of

historical and current forms of cultural imperialism. I explicate how these cultural

productions bring history and affect together in nuanced ways in order to contest the

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ongoing colonial legacies of trauma and loss by situating music and community within

anti-imperial struggles. This positioning is analogous to what Native feminist scholar

Dian Million refers to as “felt theory,” a theory that provides an affective analysis to “a

more complex telling” about the way we “feel our histories” (54). Moreover, the

theoretical roots of this project are grounded in this Native feminist analytic. Not only

does this analytic critically challenge various colonial legacies and residues in

relationship to affect as seen in Million’s work, but it also establishes a imperative

constitutive critique of heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and white supremacy that

other theoretical frameworks have yet to simultaneously engage. Many of these recent

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Native feminist scholarly developments have been published in two different special
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journal issues; a special 2009 issue of Wicazo Sa Review edited by Mishuana R. Goeman

and Jennifer Nez Denetdale titled “Native Feminisms: Legacies, Interventions, and
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Indigenous Sovereignties” and a special 2008 issue of American Quarterly edited by

Andrea Smith and J. Kehaulani Kauanui from a forum titled “Native Feminisms without
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Apology.” Most significantly, this analytic is crucial to Battling Imperialism because it

moves beyond the feminist project of centering women’s voices, or in this case,

Indigenous women’s voices, to challenge the larger project of nation-building and to do

so by imaging what it might mean for all people to live with unrestricted sovereignty.

This theoretical framework then forces us to wrestle with the various dominations

produced by colonialism and imperialism and to generate new understandings of the

process of decolonization, which is also a gendered process. Not only does this

framework make central the various practices and attempts of decolonization, but it also

works to strategize and create new meanings of sovereignty as alternatives to the nation

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and nation-state. It is also in these efforts towards the development of innovative

sovereignties that a Native feminist analytic provides a productive critique and re-

building of the world we would like to live in not seen in other theoretical frameworks. In

addition, Native feminisms are multiple in various approaches to transforming

sovereignties in order to create a liberatory present and future across the globe.

With this framework in mind, I situate revolutionary hip hop as music and culture

that utilizes particular histories as a strategy to combat colonialism/imperialism, rather

than a historical mode of nostalgic inquiry. Specifically, this coupling of history and

revolutionary hip hop seeks to concretize sovereignty for all people rather than generate

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freedom for some at the expense of others. The productions I examine in Battling
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Imperialism illustrate the complexities that surround any politics of hybridity or

authenticity, showing, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have adeptly argued that,
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“Western culture is not pure, [and] is not the origin or destination of everything” (7). In

fact, many of the interviews I have conducted, and thus the narratives I include and center
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in this project, are marked by the creation of one’s own origin story. Therefore, in the

following chapters, the multi-valence of the narratives works to nuance and complicate

any argument for an absolute genesis with respect to cultural productions. With this

foundation, I attempt to imagine the political possibilities of revolutionary hip hop and

detail what effects these movements have already realized.

An Overview of Hip Hop Studies

The study of hip hop music and hip hop culture is a relatively new scholarly

endeavor. Since the 1980’s journalistic and academic writings have been published and

used to establish this emerging body of work. While the 1980’s primarily produced

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journalistic work with few key academic texts like the 1984 publication of David Toop’s

Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop, the 1990’s and 2000’s generated

numerous critical works on hip hop culture that analyzed the history, politics, and

aesthetics of hip hop. Questions of academic validity arose during the early onset of hip

hop scholarship but, as a result of interdisciplinary formations such as Cultural Studies,

hip hop like popular culture in general became widely recognized as a prominent site for

intellectual analysis. Moreover, the establishment of the Hiphop Archive, for example,

first institutionalized at Stanford University and now housed at the W.E.B. Du Bois

Institute of Harvard University, points to the solid position of Hip Hop Studies in the

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academy. After three decades of hip hop, the epistemic scope of Hip Hop Studies has
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deepened with the publication of seminal works such as Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap

Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Murray Forman and Marc
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Anthony Neal’s That’s The Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004), Jeff Chang’s

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005), and Adam
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Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (2009). These texts and countless

others chronicle the history of hip hop culture as emergent from the Bronx in the 1970’s

and understand it as a response to the dehumanizing effects of deindustrialization in

which most whites left urban areas, city officials closed down housing blocks,

governmental social programs were cut, and unemployment rates dramatically increased.

In fact, because of these harsh realities, hip hop developed as a musical genre and culture

tied to resistance and social justice, and many of these aforementioned published works

speak to the politicization of the early hip hop movement and, then, effectively critique

its later commercialization.

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 While the majority of the scholarship on hip hop music situates the genre solely as

an African American cultural form, scholars like Juan Flores, Sujatha Fernandes, and

Robin D.G. Kelley assert that hip hop has always exemplified a transnational

phenomenon by utilizing rhythmic arrangements from Africa, Latin America and the

Caribbean. Because of these contentions, due to the ever increasing awareness of

globalization, there are also hip hop texts that speak to the global presence of the genre

such as Dipannita Basu and Sidney Lemelle’s The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the

Globalization of Black Popular Culture (2006), Tony Mitchell’s Global Noise: Rap and

Hip Hop Outside of the USA (2001), and Samy Alim’s Global Linguistic Flows (2009).

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Nevertheless, very few works focus on the significant impact and political force of hip
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hop in Latin America and the adaptation of hip hop music in this region as a tool for

resistance to imperialism. Furthermore, there are no texts that consider the transnational
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route of hip hop within the U.S. landscape. Because of this, I trace this route by mapping

hip hop circuits across the literal borders of Native American nations and reservations
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where hip hop is also used as a tool against imperialism and continued conquest. And,

more importantly, I assemble these productions in relationship to those of Latin America

in order to address the regional/hemispheric presence of anti-imperial revolutionary hip

hop throughout the Americas.

Scholars like Josh Kun, in his article “What Is an MC If He Can’t Rap to Banda?”

have considered what it might mean for hip hop to travel to México and back to Los

Angeles and manifest a hip hop-banda fusion that speaks to immigration, citizenship, and

socioeconomic circuits of Los Angeles. But, while this work adeptly traces the sound

migrations of hip hop music and the cultural fusions of such travel, it fails to address the

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politics of gender and sexuality. In fact, the specific musical production that Kun

centralizes in this particular article is, “No Hay Manera” by Akwid, which depicts

women cock-fighting in the music video. Therefore, this transnational musical

scholarship could certainly be developed further with a feminist lens. It is also important

to note here that the particular focus of feminism and hip hop has been limited to the

work of hip hop scholars like Tricia Rose, Janell Hobson, and Gwendolyn Pough, and

these academic formations are often referred to as “hip hop feminism.” In addition, while

the pairing of hip hop and feminism seems improbable, these scholars place the two in

conversation in order to create social rupture that intervenes in the pairing of hip hop and

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misogyny. This scholarship on hip hop feminism, nevertheless, does not employ the lens
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of transnationality or share a critique of coloniality. Therefore, I aim to bring together the

scholarship on transnational music and Transnational Studies with that of hip hop
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feminism and Postcolonial Studies in order to establish a distinct lens of analysis for

revolutionary hip hop music in the Americas.

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Methodology

The methodology of Battling Imperialism is ordered by a multivalent Cultural

Studies approach that incorporates fieldwork, theoretical analysis, historical

contextualization, and literary analysis (of musical lyrics). In regards to the fieldwork, I

have interviewed hip hop artists who produce music for critical dialogue on nationalism,

citizenship, and struggles for equality; and, hip hop artists who participate in social

justice struggles and advocate for systemic change within institutions of government,

education, healthcare, and culture. I have also conducted interviews with individuals from

state subsidized hip hop organizations in Cuba and Venezuela. I interviewed Indigenous

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hip hop artists to show the ways in which hip hop travels across racial constructions and

national borders within the United States, and to point to the ways hip hop works as an

instrument to challenge U.S. settler colonialism and white supremacy while

simultaneously engaging in transnational Indigenous politics. I have purposefully only

interviewed artists or groups that participate in and promote revolutionary and conscious

hip hop because this project hinges around artistic critiques of empire and the way in

which art itself functions as a powerful analytic to interrogate the violence and

domination of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism. This is not to suggest

much could not be gained by studying certain musical configurations of hip hop that do

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overtly participate in capitalism and misogyny because much of that work has surfaced in
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Hip Hop Studies and has been quite productive. Rather, I center these revolutionary

discursive texts to underscore how anti-imperial art formations are in conversation with
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one another as they respond to various injustices in their specific contexts. Significantly,

in this project I conduct these interviews to center the work of conscious hip hop
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communities in Cuba, Venezuela, and Indigenous communities in the U.S. I have

intentionally detailed how these cultural productions influence the immediate

communities from which they emerge as a tactic to challenge traditional modes of

ethnographic research, which far too often has attempted to make communities of color

more “knowable” to researchers. Distinct from these practices, I attempt to situate this

fieldwork similar to the position of Andrea Smith in her book Native Americans and the

Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (2008). Here, Smith asserts

a method of “intellectual ethnography” where fieldwork is conducted with participants in

order to “identify resistance struggles within Native communities that will be helpful in

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promoting Native sovereignty struggles in particular and social justice in general” (xxiii).

Related to this assertion, I understand my interviews as intellectual dialogues about

revolutionary hip hop and as potentialities for this music and culture to implement social

justice for the communities who make revolutionary hip hop. In this way, it is Afro-

Cubans, Afro-Venezuelans, Indigenous Venezuelans, and Indigenous participants in the

U.S. who theorize their own realities and political involvement in revolutionary hip hop

music and culture. I have also chosen to incorporate multiple forms of these texts such as

lyrics, visual texts from music videos, film, and interviews with artists to present a more

detailed scope of revolutionary hip hop music and culture. Often times a message in a

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music video seemed more direct than the song alone or an interview with an artist really
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aided in understanding the context of song lyrics, so I chose to present more than just

lyrics or just my interviews to account for the productivity of analyzing various texts
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side-by-side. This method also proved more useful to asserting art as a powerful anti-

imperial analytic because through the sonic, visual, and discursive forms I have been able
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to better trace the expressive resistances of revolutionary hip hop culture.

In Battling Imperialism then the fieldwork and text based theory work in concert

to produce a strong theoretical analysis and I start from at least two significant assertions:

First, the nation is not a fixed site that eventually will produce a truth if we only keep

talking about it. Rather, and quite differently, the threads woven together to form the idea

of the nation may only be identified as contradiction, rupture, and question. As in a recent

article from the American Quarterly titled “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,”

Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J.T. Way situate the meaning of transnationalism

by saying, “the nation is an ideology applied to a territory, its people, and its economic

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and social institutions that extends far beyond the naming of a piece of land. It is, in

short, another primary way of signifying relationships of power” (637). Conceptualizing

the nation as ideology does not deny the existence of a demarcated plot of land contained

by actual borders where wars take place and the ground swells with struggle. Rather, the

nation as ideology works to remind us, as Gloria Anzaldúa suggested in her seminal work

Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), that material change cannot take place unless

ideological shifts happen first. In this way, the question of the nation in this project aims

to underscore the political valence and correlations of power bound to the nation as

ideology and as material.

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In addition, nationalisms throughout the chapters are presented with complexity
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and multiplicity. I understand from David Lloyd that nationalisms can be situated against

the state and it is within this frame that I begin my discussions of revolutionary
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nationalisms in both Cuba and Venezuela. Moreover, in chapter three I grapple with the

multifarious formations of Indigenous nationalisms in the United States where often

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times tribal nations replicate the configurations of the abusive nation-state model, at other

times they radically defy it, and some present a hybrid mixture of both. Throughout the

project I also trace nationalisms against a politics of recognition. The importance of this

particular point has been well theorized by Glen S. Coulthard who has troubled the notion

of national subjectivity and reciprocity by critiquing a politics of recognition that seems

to only reproduce the structures of colonial power (439). As a result, I do not position

Afro-Latino/a and Indigenous hip hop laborers in a struggle to be nationally recognized.

Instead, I argue that these cultural laborers utilize art as an analytic to critically

interrogate the material, corporeal, and psychological effects of colonialism and

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imperialism in their various national contexts as a way to resist state interpellation as

what Coulthard calls “subjects of empire”. Furthermore, I map revolutionary hip hop

throughout these three locales to present a transnational model that aims to remove the

United States from the center of analysis by asserting a hemispheric paradigm. The

hemispheric paradigm I employ places Afro-Latino/a and Indigenous cultures in

relationship with one another through their productions of anti-imperial hip hop. My

theoretical goal here is to study the relationships of resistance built throughout the

Americas in the form of art, rather than rely on the model of resistance that is only

created in opposition to those in power (such as the colonizer/colonized model). This

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model, as adeptly theorized by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih in Minor
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Transnationalism, suggests that much can be gained through an analysis of relational

discourses between minor cultures rather than only presenting minor cultures as mediated
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by the major (2). Even more importantly, this model presents one practice of

decoloniality as it interferes with the colonial legacies of “divide and conquer” that have
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“historically pitted different ethnic groups against each other” (2).

Second, as Subaltern, Postcolonial, and Queer Studies have contended, empire,

race, and sexuality can only be analyzed constitutively. Therefore, I refer to the

colonial/imperial projects that pillaged Latin American countries and Indigenous

communities within the United States, along with nuanced accounts of resistance that still

take place today in hip hop communities. Contained in these multivalent moments are the

imbrications of empire/race/sexuality that often produce further entanglement and

uncertainty. However, these multiple narratives also inform nation-building and cultural

production opening the horizon for counter-intuitive readings. Therefore, the multivalent

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narratives I account for in the following chapters are what I call narratives of productive

contradiction and I use this term to denote the complex layers practiced in many

revolutionary hip hop productions. For example, in both Cuba and Venezuela many

artists, while remaining soundly committed to their respective national revolutions,

produce hip hop to critique/contest injustices they experience in the revolutionary

process. Significantly, these multivalent narratives also provide a method to analyze both

the shared and distinct experiences of colonialism and imperialism throughout the

Americas and the practices of resistance built to intervene in those uneven structures of

power. I argue throughout this project that these seemingly contradictory interlocutions

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are productive, and necessary, in the goal toward a liberatory present and future.

An Outline of Chapters
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Chapter one provides a detailed critique of cultural production and empire by
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analyzing the contributions of Cuban revolutionary hip hop to an ongoing critique of U.S.

imperialism. I trace the development of hip hop in Cuba as a cultural form that was
PR

recognized on the Island as “originating” in the U.S. and then reproduced to promote the

revolutionary goals of the nation as both a support of Cuban nationalism and an

indictment on U.S. empire—this is the context presented in the body of existing

scholarship on Cuban hip hop. As a result, I engage with scholars like Sujatha Fernandes

and Geoff Baker to draw out in greater depth the relationship between hip hop cultural

productions and nationalism. Specifically, I present a more current state of this

relationship than the existing scholarship since the connections between hip hop and the

state have shifted. For example, in the 1990’s Fidel Castro declared that rap was the

“vanguard of the revolution,” and, in 1999, Cuba’s Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto,

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