ABSTRACT
This chapter shows organic and 'road' intellectuals as they mount a public, critical examination of hip hop culture and rap music in the cause of recovering an authentic racial and cultural consciousness. It explores how the pedagogic process of inducing 'family' and educing 'youth', centred upon racial subjects and their cultural expression, both enacts and petitions for a hip hop counter-public sphere. Hip hop culture demonstrably has roots in, and continues to display, key features of historic black American vernacular cultural forms traceable in many of their particulars to African life prior to the Atlantic slave-trade. But Afrocentric pedagogic treatments of hip hop history like this go far beyond careful archaeological excavation work and genealogies of hip hop's cultural ancestry and pre-history, or examination of survivals. In exchanges between speakers and audience members the trope of the hip hop family also depended upon a topography of inside and outside, of initiate and non-initiate.
