H. Samy Alim

Jeff Chang

Casey Wong

"Moving through over a dozen cities across four continents, Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures represents a cutting-edge, field-defining moment in Hip Hop Studies. As we approach 50 years of hip hop cultural history, and 30 years of hip hop scholarship, hip hop continues to be one of the most profound and transformative social, cultural, and political movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In this book, H. Samy Alim, Jeff Chang, and Casey Philip Wong invite us to engage dialogically with some of the world's most innovative and provocative Hip Hop artists and intellectuals as they collectively rethink the relationships between Hip Hop knowledges, pedagogies, and futures. Rooting hip hop in Black freedom culture, this state-of-the-art collection presents a globally diverse group of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Arab, European, North African and South Asian artists, activists, and thinkers who view hip hop as a means to move freedom forward for all of us. Contributors do so by taking stock of the politics of hip hop culture at this critical juncture of renewed racial justice movements in the US and globally (Chuck D, Rakim, and Talib Kweli); resisting oppressive policing and reimagining community safety, healing, and growth in US urban centers like New York (Bryonn Bain), Pittsburgh (Jasiri X), Chicago (Kuumba Lynx), Atlanta and "the New South" (Bettina Love, Regina Bradley, and Mark Anthony Neal), and the San Francisco Bay Area (Mark Gonzales, A-lan Holt, Michelle Lee and the Mural Music and Arts Project); and recovering traditional, Indigenous knowledges and ways of being in the world at the same time that they create new ones (Dream Warriors). Leading thinkers take seriously the act of forging new languages for new articulations of Black/feminist/queer/disabled futures within and beyond Hip Hop (Joan Morgan, Brittney Cooper, Treva Lindsey, Kaila Aida Story, Esther Armah, Leroy F. Moore, Jr. and Stephanie Keeney Parks); theorizing pedagogies that sustain the voices and visions of our youth in our collective movements towards freedom (Marc Lamont Hill, Christopher Emdin and the GZA, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Django Paris, and Maisha Winn); creating independent institutions within the white settler capitalist context of a "post"-apartheid South Africa (Prophets of da City's Shaheen Ariefdien and Black Noise's Emile YX?); envisioning life beyond "occupation" and the crushing (neo)colonial geopolitics of Palestine (DAM) and Syria (Omar Offendum); and organizing against suffocating, neoliberal austerity measures while fighting for a world free of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and political repression (La Llama Rap Colectivo in Spain). This volume is a testament to hip hop's power in that it functions as an art "form/forum," as James G. Spady wrote thirty years ago, and as such, it stands positioned to offer us new futures and new ways to imagine freedoms. This book, this forum, was birthed within the broader context of nearly a decade of interaction with some of the world's leading thinkers on freedom"--

Casey Wong

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