230173 Hip Hop, Gender & Race in the Classroom (S) (WiSe 2025/2026)

In this seminar, we will engage in Hip Hop, one of the most popular and disputed forms of US American music and art that many of our students are familiar with and interested in. Emerging in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx in the late 1970s during the Reagan administration to protest social cuts, Hip Hop started as a subcultural and strongly politicized communal practice in form of block parties including DJing, MCing, Breakdance, and Graffiti. With its increasing commercialization, Hip Hop has developed into numerous forms, so-called “gangsta rap” being one of the most marketable and disputed ones. Simultaneously, Hip Hop has moved to many places, often maintaining its function as a protest form and a platform for youth of color, e.g. to Germany since the 1990s (Advanced Chemistry) most recently in Cuba or Senegal. The seminar explores the genealogy of Hip Hop and its different strands from its early Bronx days on to the impact of Hip Hop artists in recent election campaigns. Further, major theoretical approaches to Hip Hop will be addressed. Based on Patricia Hill Collins’ claim that Hip Hop can serve for communicating feminist topics to communities otherwise little engaged in such politics, we will focus particularly on the gendered images produced in Hip Hop and on the female, feminist and queer protagonists in the genre as well as its racialized politics. Further drawing on Fatima El-Tayeb’s framing of Hip Hop as a ‘Diasporic lingua franca’ for migrant voices, we will elaborate of the use of Hip Hop in the classroom and the genre as an educational tool that many students can relate to across differences. Against this backdrop, we will discuss a number of exemplary artists in classroom discussions, group work, and activities developed by students

Bibliography

Primary materials (song lyrics, videos, texts) that we will work with will be provided on the Moodle platform or in individual sessions.

Recommended Readings:

– El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 (excerpts).
– HERdj. “My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth About Women and Hip Hop.” YouTube, 7 Mar. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8856AHe1RFw.
– Hall, Start. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity. Community, Culture, Difference ed. by Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 222-237.
– Hill Collins, Patricia. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
– Rabaka, Reiland. The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.
– Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop - and Why It Matters. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008 (excerpts).
– Damberg, Henning. Mappe 10: Ghetto Brother. Unterrichtsbausteine für den Englischunterricht. Sek I & II. Reihe: Wissen um globale Verflechtungen. Bielefeld: kipu, 2020. ISBN: 978-3-946507-21-5.
– González Izaguirre, Cruz Armando et.al. Mappe 9: Hip Hop und Gender. Feministische Perspektiven für die außerschulische und schulische Bildungsarbeit. DaF & Außerschulische politische Bildung. Bielefeld: kipu., 2020, ISBN: 978-3-946507-19-2