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‘We demand justice. We just getting started’: the constitutive rhetoric of 1Hood Media's hip-hop activism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2015

Chenjerai Kumanyika
Chenjerai Kumanyika*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication Studies, Clemson University, 401 Strode Tower, Clemson, South Carolina 29634U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The hip-hop activism of Pittsburgh's 1Hood Media has been a key element of the success of several contemporary social justice campaigns, such as the 2010 Justice For Jordan Miles police brutality case. After offering some background on 1Hood Media and a discussion of constitutive rhetoric, this study offers a close reading of 1Hood's rhetorical appeal, focusing on the ways in which the audience is constituted as both collective and individual subjects whose participation in the narrative is essential to its closure. 1Hood Media's texts focus on a diverse range of victims of injustice who suffer at the hands of police brutality and murder, and other forms of systemic oppression. The villains in these narratives are institutional forces, such as racist police forces, or corrupt Wall Street banks. By focusing on music, lyrical and visual features of 1Hood's cultural products, this study contributes to studies of popular music, hip-hop, rhetoric and cultural politics.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , October 2015 , pp. 432 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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