Customer Reviews

Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I would really like to like this book. I am having a lot of trouble doing so. It seems problematic that the author defines and appears to teach hip-hop as "authentic Black space" - isn't this essentializing - perhaps leaving out for example, Jamaican Americans and Latino Americans? So many of the examples provided seemed masculinist and essentializing, and yet the author refers to "otherness" so frequently that one would have higher hopes for his inquiry with students. As a reader and fellow educator, I had trouble with Professor Lamont Hill's rather heartless critique of his colleague (in hip-hop curriculum building) as someone who was "not an effective classroom teacher." Hill went on to divulge a story in which other teachers laughed at his idea of collaborating with this colleague, but for some reason Hill went forward with the project. I was then also curious as to why his collaborator was not a co-author. This would seem to warrant some explanation, particularly given that the author is an anthropologist. Hill goes on to posit this collaborator as a sort of Foucaultian "voyeur." What about the authors own voyeurism across cultures and genders - or while addressing topics he chose for this curriculum, such as abortion? As a female, I was especially troubled by the ways in which the author allows male students to speak for themselves via lengthy block quotes as disembodied authorial voices, while Hill himself gives female students fragmented voice along with somewhat objectifying descriptions of their person, their clothing, even their tattoos. There are gender and racial politics here that I wish were addressed more thoroughly.

Hill's book is a honest description of his efforts to use hip-hop with high school students to get them more engaged with their educations. Hill reveals the challenges of this approach, even for someone like himself who is familiar with hip-hop music. I appreciated Hill's honesty and think that many high school teachers could benefit from the book.