Descrizione del progetto
Studio globale studia la diffusione dell’hip hop
L’hip hop è nato negli anni Settanta come musica popolare creata dagli afroamericani dei quartieri poveri di New York. Anche se si tratta di una musica afroamericana altamente localizzata, si è tradotta facilmente in comunità e contesti lontani in tutto il mondo. La domanda è: perché? Il progetto CIPHER, finanziato dall’UE, indagherà la questione conducendo il primo studio al mondo incentrato sulla cultura e sulla musica hip hop. CIPHER, quale progetto di mappatura delle conoscenze, raccoglierà attraverso il crowdsourcing le espressioni della conoscenza locale dell’hip hop su Internet e quindi invierà ricercatori in tutto il mondo per dare seguito a tali espressioni, lavorando con artisti e appassionati locali. Il consiglio consultivo di CIPHER è globale, poiché vi partecipano studiosi specializzati in hip hop provenienti dagli Stati Uniti ma anche dall’Africa, dall’Asia e dall’Europa.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantIstituzione ospitante
T12 YN60 Cork
Irlanda