Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions

Abstract

“Owning My Masters” is a digital archive of original rap music and spoken word poetry. This hip-hop album is a critical-theoretical reflection on personhood vis-à-vis Black bodies and Black lives. Rather than theorizing about hip-hop, the project “does” this work through the genre of hip-hop. This archive argues for attentiveness to historical and contemporary social justice issues, particularly Blackness as it pertains to embodied and disembodied voice and performance, through hip-hop lyrics and spoken-word poetry. Carson contends that “while the study of hip-hop has helped push through boundaries posed by many academic conventions, the performance of some of its cultural products tend to exist on the margins of what is considered “proper” scholarly engagement in the disciplines in which it is studied, which works to reproduce certain forms of – and assumptions about – knowledge production regarding hip-hop.”