Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production

By Mark V. Campbell and Murray Forman

This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects, including methods of accumulation, curation, preservation, and digitization and critically analyzes institutional power, community engagement, urban economics, public access, and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values.

The collection of essays are divided into four sections; Doing the Knowledge, Challenging Archival Forms, Beyond the Nation and Institutional Alignments: Interviews and Reflections. The book covers a range of official, unofficial, DIY and community archives and collections and features chapters by scholar practitioners, educators and curators.

A wide swath of hip-hop culture is featured in the book, including a focus on dance, graffiti, clothing, and battle rap. The range of authors and their topics span countries in Asia, Europe, the Caribbean and North America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Sep 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781789388442

Mark V. Campbell

Mark V. Campbell is a DJ, scholar and curator. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations, hip hop archives and notions of the human. He is assistant professor of music and culture and director of the Afrosonic Innovation Lab at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Contact: University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, ON m1c 1A4, Canada.

Book preview

SECTION 1

DOING THE KNOWLEDGE

1

The Hip Hop Archive and the High School Student: Symbiotic Knowledge Disruption

Kulsoom Anwer Shaikh

The hip hop archive engages secondary school students to think critically about doing knowledge. Documenting marginalized voices via archiving disrupts mainstream knowledge production and offers alternatives to traditional curriculum texts. Students who come from racially and socio-economically marginalized locations are personally implicated in this disruption. In examining student writing that responds to archival exhibits and artifacts that have little discourse around them, young people enter into a participatory relationship with knowledge—they not only take it in, they contribute to a moment of knowledge-making—fleeting, but even more important because it is ephemeral. What does their epistemological implication do to the student experience of learning? This fruitful contact has implications for what and how the curriculum is delivered, particularly to racialized students who are marginalized by the status quo power relations that create race-based inequities in the Canadian education system. Students who are sidelined by systemic and institutionalized oppressions rewrite, even briefly, their relationships to learning if they are engaged in the remix praxis that informs the archiving of Canadian hip hop (Campbell 2018). A remix praxis disrupts, reorders, and defies conventional power structures and relationships to make space for those on the margins.

The poetry of hip hop, its social justice consciousness, its grassroots beginnings, and its endless innovation has meant that there is rich precedent for its use in the classroom (Hill 2009; Siedel 2011; San Vincente et al. 2014; Petchauer 2015; Emdin and Adjapong 2018). Hip hop speaks both to racialized students’ realities and to the power of language and ideas. Since its inception, hip hop has been the soundtrack of our moment in history. The battle to decolonize English (and other) curricula rages, as mostly White educators continue to dominate the teaching ranks even though the students that they stand in front of are so racially diverse. Many educators still cling to the canon, to texts with all White characters, to inspiring novels like To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee 1960) that feature Black characters as objects to be saved by White heroes, despite long-standing calls to choose texts reflecting student identities (Cai 2002; Bickmore et al. 2017). Books by racialized authors are making some headway into classrooms and things are slowly changing—but shoulder to shoulder with young adult novels by Jason Reynolds and Brenda Woods and literature for senior students like Americanah (Ngozi Adichie 2013), What We All Long For (Brand 2005), and Brother (Chariandy 2017), hip hop must take its place in the classroom. Just like these texts, hip hop offers students a diversity of human experiences, but articulated in the languages of popular youth culture, sacrificing neither nuance nor complexity. At this moment in hip hop culture, when 2018 Pulitzer prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar's lyrics are decoded in university classrooms and archives are built to enshrine its history, the high school classroom cannot remain immune to its impact.

What must be avoided is the shallow use of hip hop as a pandering technique to engage students for whom we do not put in the work to understand. I recall being a young teacher at a professional development seminar for English educators, where one department head suggested hip hop to make Shakespeare relevant to young people and then proceeded to freestyle simple rhymes in the sing-song rhythms that are most often reproduced when non-hip hop listeners imitate its sound. Many of the educators in that long-ago banquet hall nodded at his creativity. No wonder the kids hesitate when we try to use hip hop as text. I do not think we should be reading the sixteenth-century plays in mainstream English classrooms, but even more so, we should not be using hip hop as a tool to teach these Eurocentric texts. Using rap as a hook to engage students in what constitutes the real subject matter of the English classroom is an act of rank cultural appropriation (and poor pedagogy). In a CBC radio interview with Garvia Bailey, Mark V. Campbell, founder of the Northside Hip Hop Archive (2013) says:

Hip hop is a culture and a living art form […] If you're immersed in a culture, it pervades all aspects of your life. It's about the way that you dress, it's about the way that you talk, it's about the way that you approach situations—how you think about yourself existing in the world.

Pedagogical engagement with hip hop does not require the teacher to be an expert or a head, but it does require humility and respect for its complexity and knowledge of its dimensions. The role hip hop plays in youth identities and culture, particularly those that are racialized (though, it is important to note, not all racialized youth listen to hip hop) must also be considered. A student of mine, after listening to an audio text of Campbell's radio interview, in a lesson about hip hop history from the Northside Hip Hop Archive's education resources, responds:

Of course, hip hop is a culture, and culture is also defined as a way of life of a group of a people, therefore if culture is a way of life then it is clear that people who listen to hip hop learn about the world and life through hip hop music. For example, about 70 percent of [School Name] boys are interested in hip hop. The first day I started [School Name], the principal introduced me to some three [sic] boys so that they will show me some things I needed to know in the school. After they asked my name the next thing they asked was do you listen to Drake, Travis. I was also new to the country, so I didn't know any of the hip hop artistes [sic] they mentioned. From that day I also started listening to hip hop music just to fit in to the culture.

The first way that peers tried to engage this student, a recent immigrant from Ghana, was to use hip hop as a way to connect, to know him, and to let him know about them. Hip hop becomes both lingua franca and identity. A Latinx student writes about the same CBC interview, quoting Campbell:

I learned about the world through hip-hop, not necessarily through what I was learning in school or what was in my textbook. This quote speaks to me as it connects me to a time of pain, a pain that was present in my life. Schools haven't taught me crucial skills in order to survive outside of school. Schools have never implemented a way to help students learn skills like relationship value, financial gain, mental health, and how to deal with failure, etc. Hip hop in my case was Rap. I love to listen to rap because a line can have so much meaning and, in many cases, these words are a build-up of pain being expressed vocally. I have seen artists go through the situations I found myself in and reflected in the environment I lived in throughout my life.

Emdin calls hip hop the [l]anguage and culture of the unrepresented and this student's criticism of school's inability to teach him life skills and hip hop's articulation of pain that mirrors his own speak to all three of these concepts (2018: 103). Hill draws on critical race theory's counter storytelling which seeks to move the experiences of marginalized people to the centre of public discourse to inform his choice to use hip hop literacy to make student and artist experiences the focus of his literature course (2009: 18). Ladson-Billings (2009) characterizes Hill's work as evidence that the achievement gaps that students (especially Black and Brown students) experience may be more accurately characterized as cultural gaps—between them and their teachers (and larger society) (Ladson-Billings cited in Hill 2009: ix). While many teachers may cling to canonized texts with vaunted literary merit, students see hip hop as more worthy of their attention and study, its depth and complexity, both literary and thematic, having much to offer them.

Campbell points out that the origins of hip-hop culture were largely innovations of Black and Brown youth living on the margins of American society and so the hip hop archive has the potential to become a democratized site of knowledge production—if it makes it a priority (2021: 497–98). As understandings of the archive have changed from the mid nineteenth-century's vision of a neutral and objective collection of record, it has been recognized that archivists wield power, specifically the

power to make records of certain events and ideas and not of others, power to name, label, and order records to meet business, government, or personal needs, power to preserve the record, power to mediate the record, power over access, power over individual rights and freedoms, over collective memory and national identity," even if they resist acknowledging it.

(Schwartz and Cook 2002: 8)

The archive as a repository for what is remembered determines identity on a societal level because who we are is underwritten by what we remember. Schwartz and Cook describe archives as active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed (2002: 1). On its homepage, Northside Hip Hop Archive is described as a living archive, which means we are always in the process of digitizing, cataloguing and engaging communities across the country (2020a: n.pag.).

This engagement with the community is the key to what Campbell calls diffus[ing] the institutional power embedded within traditional archives (2018: 74). The communities that are implicated here include not only DJs, emcees, B-boys/girls, graffiti artists, photographers, academics, and the Canadian public but also specifically high school students whose diverse engagements with the archive are a powerful iteration of democratized knowledge production and a gesture to hip hop's foundations in the creativity of racialized youth for whom mainstream society, schooling, and its spaces are so often alienating. Informed by De Kosnik's notion of the rogue archive, one that is digital, amateur, rule-flouting/ignoring, Campbell suggests that rogue archives remix, reinscribe, and actively participat[e] in meaning-making activities that shape the archive's content (2018: 71). He argues that the remixing that characterizes DJ praxis prevents the hip hop archive from becoming a removed, immobile source of history; instead, the remix can become a praxis by which we redesign the methods and tools that reproduce Western life's limited and dehumanizing definitions of ‘Man’ that violently circumscribe the lives of those deemed as ‘others’ (Campbell 2021: 498).

The racialized learner, particularly the Black learner, in the institution of schooling is limited, dehumanized, and Othered by structures that stream, label, and criminalize, ensuring that achievement and success remain outliers for Black students. In their report, Towards Race Equity in Education: The Schooling of Black Students in the Greater Toronto Area, James and Turner find that in the Toronto District School Board, 81 percent of White students (and 80 percent of other racialized students) are enrolled in university-bound course pathways, contrasted to only 53 percent of Black students. Black students are more likely to be suspended and expelled, less likely to graduate, and to be labeled as having special education needs—with the exception of the Gifted label, which is most often ascribed to White students. Startlingly, 42 percent of all Black students have been suspended at least once by the time they have left high school, while White and other racialized groups are suspended at a rate of only 18 percent (James and Turner 2017).

In consultations with Black parents and students, James and Turner find participants were critical of equity initiatives that do not directly target anti-Black racism like the Ontario Ministry of Education's Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (James and Turner 2017: 45). As the data reveals, other racialized groups do not suffer from the same issues of streaming and suspension. Black parents and students cited curriculum as central to supporting Black student achievement, and its current focus on European success rather than being relevant to their own cultural worlds was connected to the alienation of the Black learner (James and Turner 2017: 55). Black students do not see themselves in the curriculum and this contributes to an estranged relationship to school-disseminated knowledge that is systemically curated to exclude them. The Ontario school system is not an archive, but Mbembe's concept of the archive as not a piece of data, but a status is useful to criticism of this system (2002: 20). He considers the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others (Mbembe 2002: 20). The lack of inclusion and diversity in the curriculum is a denial of Black student identity and belonging, a refusal to give it status within the hallowed halls of what is deemed legitimate learning.

Student engagement with the archive

In November 2017, I accompanied a Grade 12 English class to Northside Hip Hop Archive's (NSHHA) One Hundred and Fifty Futures of Hip Hop in Canada conference at Toronto's Drake Hotel (no relation to the Toronto hip hop artist Drake). I had worked with NSHHA as a curriculum developer who created lessons for high school teachers to use with students, but this was an event for academics and practitioners. Even so, NSHHA worked to include high school students, honoring its mandate to engage communities. Students were intrigued about attending a university conference—university was imminent for many of them but conferences were out of their experience and felt intimidating. At the same time, they were worried that they would be bored. The hip hop theme was engaging but most students were more familiar with American hip hop than that native to their own country. Prior to attending, the archive sent Nehal El-Hadi, a writer, social researcher, and media producer, to work with students in class to prepare them to interview hip hop pioneers at the conference. Not only were students going to attend, but they were also going to contribute to the conference's knowledge-making and sharing activities.

El-Hadi showed the English class seminal Canadian hip hop videos like Michie Mee's Jamaican Funk (1991), Tara Chase's The Northside (2001), Kardinall Offishall's BaKardi Slang (2001), and The Anthem (2010), almost all of which they had not seen previously. Many of the students were hip hop fans, but all were born in the year 2000 and had little exposure to the foundational years of Canadian hip hop. They were deeply engaged by BaKardi Slang because that song addresses the cultural divide between the popular language of the Caribbean-influenced Toronto music scene and that of American hip hop. These students, living in perhaps the most multicultural neighborhood in Toronto, an immigrant reception center with a strong Caribbean presence, were immediately implicated as consumers of American hip hop and diametrically, as residents of the exact T-dot (a localized term for Toronto) that Offishall is talking about. When he raps: Ya'll think we all Jamaican, when nuff man are Trinis / Bajans, Grenadians and a whole heap of Haitians / Guyanese and all of the West Indies combined, (Kardinal Offishall 2001), he might as well be enumerating the demographics of their school. Walcott (2003) argues that when Kardinall Offishall references the cold that characterizes the T-dot and Canada, he counters the idea that Black Canadians cannot belong to this northern nation, skewering the story of a Great White North.

Students were excited by the discussion of how hip hop, language, and place were tied together through the practice of repping the neighborhoods and cultural milieus one comes from. They made connections to their own lived experiences as residents of a storied and often stigmatized Toronto neighborhood, and as immigrants or the children of immigrants. They debated whether Drake, Canada's biggest hip-hop celebrity, had a right to use Jamaican patois/patwa as if it were his own. Students explored the different layers of authenticity, as they could relate both to Caribbean identity and also to that ubiquitous, largely second-generation Toronto identity that has perhaps cavalierly claimed so much Jamaican vernacular as its own. Offishall (2001) points out: We don't say, ‘You know what I'm sayin?’ T-dot says, ‘Yuh dun know.’ As he lays down the American phrase used to relate the listener to the speaker by requesting a confirmation of understanding, he contrasts it to a Jamaican alternative that erases the questioning dimension. To be of the T-dot is to dun know and students were captivated by their own inclusion in that knowing.

In the conference handbook, NSHHA explains that One Hundred and Fifty Futures of Hip Hop in Canada acknowledge[d] the decades of creative labour necessary to build hip hop culture in Canada and invited attendees to envision new futures for this sphere (2017: 7). The students who attended were slated to interview hip hop pioneers but also found themselves participating in panel discussions with industry experts, artists, and academics. As one panel discussed Critical pedagogy: Learning and teaching hip hop inside and outside of institutions, focusing primarily on the university setting and the social, political, and ethical implications of hip hop pedagogy, my students listened quietly. As space for questions and interventions was opened, two students spoke about what hip hop meant to them as young people and how they resented that it had no place in secondary school. Their thoughts were welcomed by panelists. I could see on their faces what it meant to them to be able to speak in the new and potentially alienating atmosphere of an academic conference. The warm engagement of panelists resulted in more contributions from more students. Research with students by Dunleavy and Milton found a set of three criteria for improving student engagement: (1) Learn from and with each other and people in their community, (2) Connect with experts and expertise, and (3) Have more opportunities for dialogue and conversation (2009: 10, cited in Taylor and Parsons 2011: 8). NSHHA's One Hundred and Fifty Futures conference created space for all of these things, as a conference about, and part of hip hop.

It was hip hop's insubordination to form that allowed students to both enter and act in that space (Walcott 2010: 245, cited in Campbell 2018: 69). Seeing people on the panels who were not just academics but emcees and B-boys helped them to find their own place there as hip hop's infiltration emboldened them. Hip hop's mandate has always been to give voice to the voiceless and to make space for the marginalized. This process came alive at a conference that aim[ed] to build a body of knowledge to equip future generations to build infrastructure and sustainable cultural mechanisms to keep hip hop culture fresh North of the 49th parallel (NSHHA 2017: 7).

The conference themes were dig, build, rep. These students became co-constructors in this knowledge-making project, structured by digging, building, and repping. They connected to panel discussions that featured people who had relationships with schooling and school that mirrored their own challenges. One student wrote afterward: What resonated with me the most was the conversation about how music is looked down upon in a school environment. This was a conversation initiated by students and extended by panelists. At this moment, this student's own divergence from the school's understanding of the place of music in the institution was substantiated and co-constructed by access to expert knowledge beyond that of her teachers.

In the afternoon session, students had the opportunity to interview rappers Michie Mee, Eekwol, Keysha Freshh, and Motion, alongside veteran DJs L'Oqenz and D.T.S., all architects of Canadian hip hop, in a session called My definition is this: Conversations on Canadian hip hop, identity and place. The title alludes to the Dream Warriors’ track, My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style (1990). The students were aware that the Dream Warriors, an iconic hip hop duo, are from their own neighborhood.

Small student groups spent time interviewing and talking with these hip hop pioneers. During El-Hadi's visit to their classroom, she also facilitated their work on developing questions that considered the interviewees’ experiences as Canadian artists. Students’ interviews were recorded so that they could be posted online as part of a growing archive of oral histories of Canadian hip hop legends (El-Hadi 2017: n.pag.). In this way, students again became not just passive recipients of historical learning but engaged with its production. Campbell posits a remix praxis that might change the practice of archiving, by a loosening of knowledge (Gates, cited in Campbell 2021). Campbell argues for A remix praxis that decidedly seeks to redistribute existing formations of power, rearrange social hierarchies and otherwise interrupt aspects of the status quo, is a justice-oriented praxis (2021: 489).

When Campbell describes the work of the hip hop archive as taking seriously and valuing those deemed as on the margins of dominant discourse or those systematically disempowered by social institutions, his words may be applied to the archive's engagement with the high school student, particularly the racialized, low-income students who are so often systematically disempowered by social institutions like their school system (Campbell 2021). When the archive made space for high school students to participate in a panel populated by academic and hip hop practitioners, it reordered formations of power that position students as receivers of knowledge, never creators. The inclusion of high school students in knowledge production also disrupted conventional conference activities and proceedings. Dunleavy and Milton are critical of the most passive role of learners in schooling where points of engagement end as students receive (and practice) skills and knowledge defined predominantly by the traditional academic curriculum, and they advocate instead for "[a]uthentic intellectual engagement [that] requires a deeper reciprocity in the teaching-learning relationship where students’ engagement begins as they actively construct their learning in partnership with teachers (2009: 14). Students must contribute their own ideas to building new knowledge" (Dunleavy and Milton 2009: 14). The participatory, democratized knowledge-making in the activities of the hip hop archive honors both teachers (who may be emcees or B-boys) and students as intellectual actors.

In May 2019, a group of my Grade 12 English students visited the Toronto Reference Library to view the NSHHA's exhibition For the Record: An Idea of the North. Students viewed a story map of the city, Elicser Elliot's The Rise of Hip Hop in the 6ix, that asked visitors to share memories of hip hop experiences in Toronto on slips of paper and affix them to their locations. They viewed photographs of DJs, emcees, B-boys, and record shops; listened to early hip hop radio shows on cassette tapes; and examined hip hop magazines, event posters, and record labels. The juxtaposition of an iconic Toronto library and the city's hip hop origin story was not lost on the students, who were intrigued by an exhibition that documented a history they felt both connected to and distanced from, by age, time, and knowledge.

The exhibition's entry into a gallery in a landmark library space was simultaneously a nod to hip hop's growing cultural influence and its aesthetic significance. Hip hop's growth outside every mainstream structure means that its engagement with museums, galleries, libraries, and archives must necessarily impact those structures. Some of that impact comes from the racialized young people who came to view an exhibition that reflected their own interests and identities in ways they might not have predicted. The library's own collection of archival materials that documented the rise of Toronto's hip hop culture consisted of only two magazines and some photographs featuring B-boys and B-girls. NSHHA's entry into Toronto Reference Library allowed students to learn about a culture absent from its stacks, only glancingly archived through an occasional donation.

After touring For the Record, students wrote about a display of their choice. One student, a dancer, wrote about the series of Black and White Toronto Star photographs depicting B-boys and B-girls in motion. She observed: We see students putting their own flair on old school dance moves, expressing themselves and getting attention from viewers. They use the strong beat of the record to pop and lock and execute quick footwork in order to entertain those around them. She goes on to consider the sociocultural and demographic dimensions of the images:

This portrays the inclusion and the coming together of many cultures in order to enjoy something they all have in common, dance. At this time, there were a lot of people immigrating to Canada from places like the Caribbean and moving to a new environment is scary. Some were excluded from their peers because the way they grew up was different. Dance is a way to push through that barrier and create a comfortable platform for all.

She remarks upon how the Internet era has changed music consumption and acknowledges, We never think of the history of the songs or the artist from earlier times that allowed a certain genre of music to flourish globally. At this moment, this 17-year-old student echoes Campbell who points out that [h]ip hop archives are inherently political as they capture (at best) the ways in which black and racialized early architects of hip hop in their local cities built the culture's now global appeal (2021: 492). NSHHA's efforts to provide a visual presence to the forgotten names and underrepresented Toronto based artists whose achievements are not easily found on the internet (Campbell 2021: 495) builds a relationship between the multiracial adolescent dancers popping and locking in the foyer of their high school and the Black high school student and dancer who feels connected to them over 30 years later:

This piece was a favourite because it caught my eye as soon as I saw it. I was interested in the reason why they included a group of photographs filled with teenagers dancing […] Another thing that stood out to me was the fact that the students were coming from schools that I know about.

In considering the reason why they included photos of teenagers dancing, this student demonstrates awareness of how the archive is a product of a judgement, of processes of discrimination and selection (Mbembe 2002: 20). The counter-narrative lies in the student's wonder at the inclusion of a photo she feels referenced by, in its depiction of people her age, some sharing her race and ethnicity, engaged in one of her passions, in a school setting she recognizes. Campbell describes a remix praxis that opposes the traditions of the Euro-enlightenment that determine archival practices with the subjective, experiential act of DJing. He posits that a remix praxis, which infuses the archive and its exhibitions, uses methods of grasping the ephemeral non-reproducible knowledge which in turn, creat[es] new relationships to knowledge production and dissemination in the digital, it is a subjectivity that diverges from a linear hierarchical logic embedded in ideas of the archive (Campbell 2021: 497).

The student's appreciation of the past reifies all of this—hers is a subjective, experience-based response made possible by the disruptive judgment that digs up and finds a series of photos of teen break-dancers a piece of valuable, if ephemeral knowledge.

Campbell discusses the significance of the archival practice of digging that locates a community radio station flyer that he calls some of the earliest soft infrastructural pieces of Toronto's burgeoning turntablist scene in the mid-1990s (2018: 73). The learning embedded in florescent 8.5 × 11 paper scanned and enshrined in the archive is tied to all the gestures the flyer makes toward the DJ, the immigrant reception area in which it takes place, the small but influential university-based radio station, as well as the larger Canadian turntablism scene. Campbell calls the sourcing of artifacts from less obvious contributors than the emcees, producers, and executives that might be the face of this industry and time period, digging. The second of the three concepts from hip hop culture that inform this digital hip hop archive is building which can be either industry-related or culture-related but involves critical dialogue and, at times, analysis and is a way of developing infrastructure, a mutually beneficial project, or as a way of building relationships, often through dialogue (Campbell 2018: 72).

In a lesson from NSHHA's curriculum resources (2020b), fifteen lessons designed to have high school students engage with the digital archive, a Grade 10 class is asked to examine a series of posters that cultivated and promoted hip hop events in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s. The lesson is guided by official curriculum expectations that aim to have students consider Canadian sociocultural trends and developments of the recent past and consider how arts and popular culture have been shaped by a particular community or grassroots industry. Students respond to questions about how they find out about social and cultural events, like concerts, dances, family occasions, and parties. They discuss their responses and how effective these promotional tools are, locating themselves in the project of contemporary social and cultural connection and setting up a context for contrast with earlier times. As they explore the artifacts, students are asked to consider: Are poster promotions still relevant? Where do you see posters? Do you read them? What kinds of information do they offer the reader? Do they work? How has social media changed promotions? (NSHHA 2020b).

Although students acknowledge the migration of most communications to social media platforms, they reflect on posters’ enduring relevance:

I'm on the student council, and we use posters as one of our ways to promote our events, so of course I see them around the school. Posters are almost everywhere in the city, I see them in bus shelters, utility poles, community centers, the mall and etc. I read them sometimes, or just take a glance as I walk by, they show information regarding events, jobs, missing pets/people, and other things that may be relevant to the community.

Most students admit to reading posters, despite their throwback aura. One student notes the economic transformation of the hip hop scene:

Back then, the music industry wasn't worth as much as it is today, and posters were the most affordable way of advertising. Today's industry is worth billions and advertising on television and social media has become the up to date approach of promoting.

The concept of building comes into play when students reflect on whether it is important to consider a mere poster from a bygone era. Students do not see the artifact as illegitimate or unimportant: "We need to remember how things used to be because the past is our foundation, all structures need a strong, layered foundation, and the choices we make now is [sic] because of our past."

Teaching and learning: The remix

In 2010, when NSHHA was born, I took a class for the first time, though certainly not the last, to a hip hop history exhibition. NSHHA's first, fledgling exhibition was at the Toronto Free Gallery, an influential but tiny space, now permanently closed. My students crowded into the small space and examined the exhibits that lined its walls, telling a story of Canadian hip hop. Their own presence in the gallery is also part of that story. The young people who crowded into school gyms, community centers, and block parties, who popped, locked, remixed, and rapped their way into Canadian history all those years ago would be proud to see the next generation participating in efforts to preserve their contributions. In fact, I have seen that pride in-person as pioneers and architects have built and connected with students.

Over the years, the galleries hosting the hip hop archive got bigger and so in 2018, I found myself taking students to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection to view the exhibition ...Everything Remains Raw: Photographing Toronto's Hip Hop Culture from Analogue to Digital. This famed Canadian art gallery, best known for its showcasing of the art of the Group of Seven, that quintessentially Canadian group of landscape artists, is a common destination of local schools, but the institution's foray into hip hop was a first. The Globe and Mail remarked on the meeting of a purveyor of Canadiana and the hip hop archive:

The spray of a Krylon can, [the gallery] argues, is every bit as Canadian as the hues of Algonquin granite. [Group of Seven artist] Tom Thomson couldn't windmill. But if the McMichael is serious about telling contemporary Canadian stories, it'll learn to.

(Hampton 2018: n.pag.)

The gallery's website shares Campbell's explanation of the reference to rawness in the exhibition title: an unsanitized speaking of truth to power—hip hop culture refuses institutional control and thrives outside of formal settings which are too often used to dictate importance (McMichael Canadian Art Collection 2018: n.pag.). Yet hip hop is not immune to the status that comes with the institutional gaze, the formal platform. Certainly, its inclusion makes a statement to students accustomed to schooling's institutional exclusion of what resonates with them. The hip hop archive's entry into the gallery serves to reorder and remix institutional status quo. So too does the hip hop archive's focus on relationship building change the passive and hierarchical dynamic between student and learning?

A color photograph of a hallway with ceiling lighting and two large colorful graffiti-style murals on each side. In the center is a photograph of a man holding a microphone.

FIGURE 1.1: Entrance view to ...Everything Remains Raw: Photographing Toronto's Hip-Hop Culture from Analogue to Digital exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Photo by Alex Cousins.

The hip hop archive's ability to connect to the student is a vital component of what makes it a site of learning and knowledge production. Student writings that reflect on archival artifacts and events form aspects of the remix praxis of the hip hop archive, which digs to honor the unremembered, builds to engage communities, and, of course, reps Canadian hip hop history. Student engagement is both participatory and constructivist as it creates moments of knowledge that speak to racially marginalized learners’ identities, interests, and positions.

The subaltern nature of the hip hop archive is what makes its engagement with students symbiotic. The democratization of knowledge-making is an activity brought to life by both the hip hop archive and student learner. As the hip hop archive develops and grows, its prioritization of community building and student connection honors hip hop's signature disruptive ways, resisting the traditional archive's potential for detached elitism and replacing it with a commitment to inclusion—attention to hip hop's enduring support of the underrepresented.

As the education world strives to leave traditional, teacher-centered models of schooling that entrench exclusionary, Eurocentric texts and instead make progress toward teaching-learning formations that empower and engage all students, there is much to be learned from how NSHHA utilizes remix as a tool to make the archive a relevant and democratized space of knowledge creation. Looking back on ten years of student engagement with the archive, what emerges is the richness of the artistic, historical, and cultural exchange taking place.

In educational systems that continue to exclude and ignore student voices, histories, and identities even as they also shut out authentic, real-world connections, the role of the hip hop archive is clear. Teaching from the archive can invigorate the curriculum by truly engaging learners as co-producers of knowledge. Students, in turn, bring life to the archive. This cultural and educational mutualism is what doing knowledge should be.

REFERENCES

Bickmore, Steven T., Xu, Yunying and Infante Sheridan, Myra (2017), Where are the people of color?: Representation of cultural diversity in the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and advocating for diverse books in a non-post racial society, Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, 16:1, pp. 38–54.

Brand, Dionne (2005), What We All Long For, New York: St. Martin's Press.

Cai, Mingshui (2002), Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults: Reflections on Critical Issues, Westport: Greenwood.

Campbell, Mark V. (2013), interviewed by G. Bailey, Big City, Small World, CBC Radio, Toronto, n.dat.

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2

Hip Hop as a Practical and Methodological Issue: Libraries in Russia

Sergey Ivanov

Introduction

This chapter provides a critical overview and analysis of different methods of preservation, storage, archiving, and usage of hip hop materials in Russia's libraries. It also analyzes how hip hop-related media function methodologically within curricular material among students and practitioners interested in urban cultures. Pertaining specifically to methodologies, it is important to note that the methods of hip hop research, hip hop pedagogy and education, and artistic practices each vary. From an academic perspective, ethnographic fieldwork involving participant observation presents an effective method of hip hop research while hip hop culture itself offers a number of valuable concepts, such as flow, cipher, or freestyle that can also be considered as internally practicable methods through which to study hip hop. Some scholars may utilize these varied approaches simultaneously, despite the difficulties in drawing lines between permissibility, usefulness, or relevance that may complicate the issue.

At the time of this writing, I have worked for six years (since 2016) in Russia's State Library for Young Adults, organizing regular hip hop-oriented events and forming a hip hop club within the library. My work as a public activist, head of the library department, and a performing artist provides a solid foundation that reinforces my credentials in multiple dimensions and provides a unique vantage on the connections between hip hop art practices and the library's archival initiatives.

In Russia, there are almost no official hip hop museums or organizations focused on preserving texts or artifacts and the wide range of media related to this cultural form. The few cases of such archival activities are aligned with some common state organizations, or they occur within private collections that are unstructured and sometimes inaccessible to the public. Therefore, this paper, utilizing the associative method,¹ will address public libraries as a site of hip hop culture, offering a policy framework and analysis for research and archiving.

Knowledge production

It is appropriate to acknowledge that all activities regarding archiving and the usage of cultural texts within educational environments can be defined through the concept of knowledge. Knowledge is considered a core element of hip hop culture as declared by pioneering DJ and founder of hip hop's Universal Zulu Nation, Afrika Bambaataa, who has long nurtured the belief that knowledge constitutes the essential fifth element alongside hip hop's traditional four elements (DJin’, MCin’, B-boyin’, and Graffiti). The issue of hip hop-infused knowledge was later defined by KRS-One on the 2001 recording, Hip Hop Knowledge, as an attitude, it is an awareness, it is a way to view the world. On