Hip Hop, Race, and Citizenship in Japan, France, and the United States

Chuck D of Public Enemy, lead emcee of one of the most critically-acclaimed and politically conscious groups in Hip Hop history, will speak at "Hip Hop, Race, and Citizenship in Japan, France, and the United States," a multimedia scholar-artist panel to take place this Thursday, April 28 from 7-9 p.m. in Cubberley Auditorium at Stanford University.

The panel, presented by the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, will discuss the complex relationships between Hip Hop Culture, race, citizenship, and immigration in a variety of sociopolitical contexts. Other panelists include Gaye Theresa Johnson, Dawn-Elissa Fischer, and Samir Meghelli. Johnson is an assistant professor of Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of the forthcoming, The Future Has a Past: Politics, Music and Memory in Afro-Chicano Los Angeles. Fischer, assistant professor in Africana Studies at San Francisco State University, has worked on a number of different community-based campaigns using Hip Hop to address issues of voter disenfranchisement, gender based violence, literacy and the digital divide. Samir Meghelli is a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and co-author of The Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness.

The event will also feature a live DJ from Egypt, DJ Emancipacion; a Q&A forum; post-event reception; and an opportunity to engage the artists and scholars.

The panel is part of a spring series presented by the Institute for Diversity in the Arts titled, Global Flows: The Globalization of Hip Hop Art, Culture, and Politics. The series is a two-unit Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity course that consists of film screenings, dialogues, and performances that examine and engage Hip Hop Cultures and artists from around the world. It explores diverse scenes and artists, from the formation of new musical genres such as “hiplife” in Ghana, to the impact of the first Hip Hop concert in Morocco, to comparative investigations of race and citizenship in Japan, Cuba, Palestine, France, and the United States (including Black, Mexican and Arab-Americans).

The series also features performances on Friday, April 29 by groundbreaking Hip Hop theatre artists, the Human Writes Project; "Brooklyn Beats To Beirut Streets," which features artists from Mexico, Palestine, and Syria; and a live Hip Hop concert in the CoHo on campus with the critically-acclaimed Blitz the Ambassador and his live band (Ghana).

The "Global Flows" series is generously supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE), Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts (SiCA), the Riddell Fund, School of Humanities & Sciences, School of Education, the Center for African Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, Departments of Anthropology, Music, English, Art & Art HIstory, Linguistics, Comparative Literature, Undergraduate Program in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, American Studies, African and African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Native American Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Please contact Assoc. Prof. H. Samy Alim, IDA Faculty Director,  for more information at halim@stanford.edu,  h.samy.alim@gmail.com, or 650.491.4442.