ABSTRACT
Th is book has attempted to navigate between these three quotes, expressing three diff erent yet interrelated areas: desire, métissage, and pedagogy. Our hope was to put together some good tracks (i.e., chapters) that are intertextually talking to and building upon each other. Brother Alim began this CD (i.e., book) with,
I think, a really strong, clear, and comprehensive prologue. I will attempt now to write an epilogue. To do so, I will frame the book around three questions: (1) What does it mean to localize Hip Hop culturally, linguistically, agentively, and representationally? Th at is, what meanings do we make from the Aboriginal Australian Wire MC’s contention that, “Hip Hop is a part of Aboriginal culture, I think it has always been”? (cited in Pennycook and Mitchell, this volume); (2) What does it mean to aff ectively desire, engage, translate, appropriate, and claim Hip Hop as one’s own? Th at is, similar to Bakari Kitwana’s question, “Why do White, Brown, African, Asian, Aboriginal, South American and European kids love Hip-Hop?”; (3) From an educational and pedagogical perspective, so what that kids globally love Hip Hop? Socrates once said, the most banal is the most diffi cult. Th e last question, for me, is the most diffi cult and hence I will spend more time in answering it. I will give each question equal attention, but most of the moral panic against Hip Hop in the United States (cf. Peterson, Esbensen, Taylor, & Freng, 2007) and globally (Mitchell, 2001), for me, stems from seeing Hip Hop as useless verbal violence that has nothing to do with pedagogy and education. I will discuss a pedagogical framework in response to this moral panic to show, much like Newman and Alim in this volume, that Hip Hop is a “null curriculum” (Eisner, 1979). Th is is an inventive, boundary breaking, boundary pushing, which may best be referred to as Creative Margin Curriculum that is deeply related to students’ lives, and which students use as a site of learning and identity formation, but is not considered a necessary site for pedagogical engagement.
