Descripción del proyecto
Un estudio mundial para investigar la difusión del hip hop
El hip hop nació en la década de los setenta como una variante de la música popular desarrollada por los afroamericanos que vivían en la ciudad de Nueva York. A pesar de ser una forma enormemente localizada de música afroamericana, se ha adaptado a comunidades y contextos muy variados en todo el mundo. Cabe preguntarse por qué. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos CIPHER lo investigará mediante el primer estudio sobre la música y la cultura del hip hop a escala mundial. CIPHER, un proyecto de registro de conocimientos, recopilará expresiones del conocimiento local del hip hop en internet y enviará investigadores por todo el mundo para realizar un seguimiento de dichas expresiones en colaboración con artistas y aficionados. El comité asesor de CIPHER es mundial y cuenta con académicos especializados en hip hop de los Estados Unidos, África, Asia y Europa.
Objetivo
CIPHER will launch the global research initiative, Hip Hop Interpellation, pilot a new semantic digital/ethnographic web methodology, and codify the emergent discipline of global hip hop studies. It addresses the central question: why has this highly localized and authenticizing African American music translated so easily to far-flung communities and contexts around the globe? Through this specific question the project attempts to understand the foundational and broadly transferable question: how are globalization and localization related? To answer these questions CIPHER posits the Hip Hop Interpellation thesis, that hip hop spreads not as a copy of an African American original, but, through its performance of knowledge, emerges as an always already constituent part of local knowledge and practice. The theorization thus moves beyond the “hailing practices” described by Althusser’s theory of interpellation—the discursive webs that coerce ideological incorporation—to describing an interpolation that locates other histories within and through hip hop’s performed knowledges.
CIPHER’s semantic web methodology tests this thesis, tracking how hip hop memes—slogans, anthems, and icons—are simultaneously produced by people and produce people. This research clears the conceptual impasse of structural “cultural imperialism” vs. agentic “cultural appropriation” debates and instrumentalizes the methodological distance between ethnographic specificity and big data generality. It does so by creating a feedback loop between digital humanities methods (crowd sourcing, semantic tagging, computational stylometry) and ethnographic fieldwork techniques (interviews, musical analysis, participant observation). The result will be an iterative map of Hip Hop Interpellation/Interpolation created by stakeholders that is transformational of our understanding of culture and/as cultural production and transferable to pressing questions about globalization and l’exception culturelle.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitución de acogida
T12 YN60 Cork
Irlanda