ABOUT HIP HOP DIASPORA
Evoking the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2023-2024 Program for the Arts’ Absence theme, this first edition of Hip-Hop Diaspora will offer a multicampus space to debate two main thematic questions: What spiritual, self-reflexive, and political practices inform hip-hop knowledge production endeavours beyond the US? And how might these elements be preserved in hip-hop archiving efforts and their relations to the digital humanities?
PARTNERS
Afrosonic Innovation Lab
Habana Hiphop
North Side Hip Hop
Hip-Hop Education Center
WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM?
The creation of this event follows conversations with Kamari Clarke, Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies and Mark V. Campbell, Assistant Professor at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, at UofT Scarborough and founder of the Northside Hip-Hop Archive; both are faculty members at the University of Toronto and fellows of the Jackman Humanities Institute. Our work, vision and initiative to launch Hip-Hop Diaspora are also inspired by the work of Martha Diaz, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer at the Hip-Hop Education Center.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Rapping, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti are hip-hop’s four core elements. Practitioners and scholars recognize knowledge as hip-hop’s fifth element, as a non- aesthetic religio-philosophical element, and as activism, pedagogy and freedom practice. However, accounts of hip-hop knowledge production practices in Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe and their turns to decolonial memory-making, curatorial, non-institutional archiving and the affordances these offer to the field of digital humanities remain understudied. The emergence of digital and physical hip-hop archives amplifies the need to preserve this undercurrent, non-mainstream element.
SYMPOSIUM OBJECTIVES
This year will focus on how global hip-hop voices collective marginalities through decolonial historiographic efforts and forges lasting people-to-people relations that echo economies of Black teaching beyond US borders. Our objectives are to examine the following:
– Discursive intersections between diaspora studies, hip-hop archives and the digital humanities.
– Non-institutional hip-hop archives contributions to the critical digital humanities.
– How global knowledge production practices inform our understanding of hip-hop culture’s
diaspora and transnational spaces in Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe.
– Epistemic tensions in institutional digitization and discoverability processes vis-à-vis local hip-hop knowledge production methods.
OBJECTIVES IMPLEMENTATIONS
This first edition of the Hip-Hop Diaspora will be the platform to launch of the book Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production, a volume Mark Campbell and Murray Forman edited for Intellect Books. The launch of the book will be accompanied by keynotes and panel presentations that will bring together hip-hop pioneers, practitioners, scholars, local and international community actors and key industry participants.
Following hip-hop’s multidisciplinary nature, the Hip- Hop Diaspora will be a collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-campus, in-person event integrating the Afrosonic Innovations Lab-UTSC, UofT’s Faculty of Music, the Center for Caribbean Studies, the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, Toronto’s Northside Hip-Hop Archive, the Hip-Hop Education Center, the AGO and Habana Hip-Hop Archive.
CO - SPONSORS
Jackman Humanities Institute
University of Toronto
Faculty of Music
University of Toronto
Centre for Caribbean Studies
University of Toronto
Art Gallery of Ontario
Loop Sessions Toronto
Started in 2019, Loop Sessions Toronto is a music producer organization focused on sampling/vinyl culture and music education through workshops, artist interviews, and live events. They have worked with a diverse list of Canadian talent such as Shad, Michie Mee, Moka Only, TOBi, Rich Kidd, Skratch Bastid and Demuir to name a few, and have collaborated with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, The Music Gallery, and the Bentway. They are supported by the Toronto Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts
Critical Digital Humanities Initiative
University of Toronto
The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) is a tri-campus research initiative that bridges the humanities’ emphasis on power and culture with the tools and analysis of digital technology to forge a new, generative paradigm of digital humanities scholarship. The CDHI has been funded by the University of Toronto’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI) Program in December 2020 for 3 years (Jan 2021-April 30, 2024)
Roland
Music lightens and enriches our hearts and serves as a universal communication tool, and Roland and BOSS electronic musical instruments have been mainstays among the world’s leading music creators for generations. Leveraging the vast expertise our company has cultivated since our founding in 1972, we remain committed to bringing even greater innovation to the music and entertainment markets and creating a world of thrill and excitement where everyone can enjoy music more freely and easily. Roland and BOSS have been integral in the history of samplers and sampling innovation, with the long-standing SP series having been adopted by hip hop communities as a staple of production and live performance. The communities and the artists that emerged from beat culture have helped shape the evolution of new SP instruments over the years, including the latest – the acclaimed SP-404MKII.